Newspaper Page Text
2
“Thou shalt do no murder.” —Ex. 20:13.
HIS commandment relates to the de
struction of human life. And in dis
cussing it we wish to look at the mys
tery of life, the sacredness of life, and
the commandment not to destroy life.
Perhaps the most baffling enigma in the
world is the origin of life. The scien
tist with his chemicals and microscopes
endeavors to solve it.
T
Robert G. Ingersoll boasted that it was solved
by the protoplasmic theory—that everything came
from an original protoplasm; no God was needed,
because by a process of evolution all things came
from this original life germ. A minister once asked
the privilege of submitting a question to the dis
tinguished lecturer. The request was granted and
this question was put: “Tell your audience, Mr.
Ingersoll, if you please, where you got the proto
plasm with which to begin creation.” Os course,
there was no answer to that question, for its answer
was God, and to acknowledge Him would have been
the defeat of the infidel propagandist.
What is that subtle, vital force which the micro
scope itself cannot discover? It is the problem
with which the keenest eyes and strongest intellects
have been struggling for all time. And, after we
have tried all our chemicals, our microscopes, and
everything else, we are forced back to the old ar
chives of humanity and there we find: “Jehovah
God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and
man became a living soul.”
A man said to me some time ago, “Do you be
lieve the story of the creation of life as given in
Genesis?” I said, “I do.” He said, “I thank
fate I was. born with’ more sense than that.” I
said to him, “My friend, the most rational thing
in the world is to believe the account in GenesG
concerning the creation of life, for you will agree
with me that it is the only account that pretends
to offer any solution at all that has fn it a sem
blance of sense.”
So I maintain that the rationalist is the man who
believes the Bible, for surely no man looking from
effect back to cause can accept the scientific theory
of evolution unless it accounts for its original germ
of life by Almighty God.
SACREDNESS OF LIFE.
God made man also in His own likeness. How
sacred, therefore, is this body! It is the temple
in which dwells the Hol 5* Ghost. Well may it be
said, “The true shechinah is man. To touch him
means to touch heaven itself.” How careful we
should be not to mar this magnificent wofk of God.
This brings us to the consideration of our com
mandment proper, “Thou shalt not kill,” or
“shalt do no murder.” Let us here consider the
different forms of murder.
First, direct murder, murder in the first degree,
murder premeditated, murder with malice of fore
thought. Direct murder may be committed in dif
ferent ways, suddenly by the use of a bullet, a
knife, or some other weapon, by a slow, gradual
process, such as is sometimes done by arsenic and
other drugs. I have known murder committed which
covered over a period of months. It makes no dif
ference how murder is committed, the thing we
want to strike here is that phase of life destruction
which is premeditate d.
INFANTICIDE.
Take, for instance, a popular crime of today,
known as infanticide. Here I know I have to speak
delicately, for it is an exceedingly delicate sub
ject; and yet the very delicacy of the situation
makes it the more important. We find it not only
prevailing in heathen lands and among barbarians,
but here in our own civilized and Christian coun
try. It is, in my judgment, one of the greatest
T/fE SIXTH COMMANDMENT
Tabernacle Sermon by Reb. Len G. Broughton, *D. D.
• Steuographically reported for The Golden Age.—Copyright applied for
The Golden Age for October 22, 1908.
crimes we have to face. I speak of this advisedly.
I speak both as a physician and as a preacher. I
know something of its extent and I wish to stamp
the awfulness of the crime upon every heart in this
presence. Prenatal, as well as postnatal, murder
is practiced to an awful extent, I am sorry to say,
in what are called the upper classes of society.
Shame upon us! God look in pity on the spectacle!
Millions and millions of murderers stand before
him charged with this offense who are never
frowned upon by society. Hear me, the unborn in
fant is also a person, and foeticide is direct mur
der.
MANSLAUGHTER.
This is a distinction made by law. It is the result
of sudden passion. Two men get in a fight. Or a
man is slandered and, for the time, loses control
of himself, draws a pistol from his pocket and
shoots his slanderer dead. A policeman is guilty
of manslaughter when he takes from his pocket a
pistol and shoots a fleeing criminal. I do not be
lieve the police ought to be allowed to shoot except
for the protection of life. There is no more reason
why a policeman should shoot down a man, unless
in self-defense, than there is for me to do the same
thing.
War is manslaughter. Say what we please, God
is against man-made wars. In the Old Testament
He ordered wars. But the New Testament emphat
ically is against war. I know He often turns it into
glory for Himself, but primarily Christ is against
■war.
James Russell Lowell’s great satire on war has
never been answered by a man who accepts the
teaching of the New Testament:
“Ez fer war, I call it murder,
There you have it, plain and flat;
I don’t want to go no forder
Than my Testament fer that.
God hez sed so plump an’ fairly.
It’s ez long ez it is broad,
An’ you’ve gut to git up airly
Es you want to take in God.
“’Tain’t your eppylettes an’ feathers
Make the thing a grain more right:
’Taint affollerin’ your bell-wethers
Will excuse ye in His sight.
Es you take a sword and dror it,
An’ go stick a felller thru,
Guv’ment ain’t to answer for it,
God’ll send the bill to you.”
The suicide is also guilty of this phase of murder.
And here I would speak very gently, for I am
sure many a suicide is committed from insanity,
permanent or temporary. Nevertheless, we cannot
be overly sympathetic here, for so-called insanity is
the result of moral madness more frequently than
anything else, and the sufferer is to blame. M hen
a suicide takes his life in his right mind, he is as
certain for hell as the devil himself.
The time has come when we need to speak on this
line. The tendency to suicide among the ancients,
as for example, Demosthenes, Hannibal, Anthony,
Cleopatra. Brutus, Cato and others who fell by their
own hands, rather than undergo any form of de
feat, is getting too common. It is of the devil.
Even a pagan could say:
“When all the blandishments of life are gone
The cowud sneaks to death, the brave live on.”
THE LYNCHING CRAZE.
But I would not pass from manslaughter with
out stopping to consider lynching. I believe be
fore God this is one of the most terrible and brutal
crimes of our present civilization; especially is this
true-of the South. I have stood squarely against
lynching and lynchers ever since I began to lift my
voice in public. I stand so today. 1 brand every
man who takes part in lynching, for whatever cause,
as a cowardly assassin, a villain himself, who, ac
cording to the law, deserves the hangman’s gallows.
It is not in any sense a question to be settled by
the nature of the crime for which men are lynched.
People say to me sometimes, “What would you do
if so and so were true?” I answer at once, “It is
not a question as to what I would do, but a ques
tion as to what is right.” I believe in law and
order.
I believe the greatest question that beats in the
American heart today, outside of Jesus Christ, is
that of law and order. Shall the majesty of the law
be defended, or shall red-shirters, lynchers and
other infuriated mobs take unto themselves the
authority to make and unmake law; to punish, or
set free as they see fit? Such is lynching.
INDIRECT MURDER.
We come now to speak of some forms of indirect
murder. The Mosaic law made provision for such
murderers. When the children of Israel crossed
over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, God di
rected Moses to establish cities of refuge in which
those who were guilty of taking life unwittingly
were to be lodged and deprived of their liberties for
an indefinite length of time.
Many a man settles with himself for this kind
of murder.
Some time ago I heard of a man near this city
■who ate twelve hard-boiled eggs at night, and as the
result was a corpse in less than twenty-four hours.
A negro in this city a few summers ago ate three
watermelons in one afternoon and drank three
glasses of Decatur street booze and died before
midnight.
Take the drinking man. How many drinkers
think of having to stand and answer to the charge
of murder at the judgment bar of God? Yet it is
true. Hundreds and thousands of them go up be
fore God every day.
Forms of dress result in murder. How many
mothers think of having to answer to the charge
of murder because of the way they have bound the
waists of their daughters with whalebone and steel ?
It is a strange thing to me how mothers think God
knew what He was about when He made a boy —if
he is out of shape he is to remain so; but with a
girl He was seriously mistaken and their help is
needed to correct His mistakes in her physical crea
tion. You mothers pity the poor Chinese woman for
binding her feet. What do 'you think of yourselves
binding your waists, where are contained the vital
organs of the body? I know you say you do not
do it —I never saw one that did —but there is not a
doctor in this world who cannot give the lie to such
denials. If the future generation of women is to
be judged by the present, the world will have a
pitiable spectacle of helplessness. I tell you, this
mad rush in social dissipation on the part of our
women not only in dress, but in a thousand other
ways, has got to stop or else our homes are to be
converted into hospitals.
I asked a Boston shoe manufacturer this ques
tion: “Why don’t your New England women wear
these hideous, high, narrow shoe heels that you sell
down South?” His reply was this: “Our New
England women think too much of their health and
future happiness.” Our women are coming to ruin
in this way. They are getting so that they walk
like kangaroos, to say nothing of their destruction
to life.
GREED AND GOUGE.
Then there is the murder that comes as the
result of greed —laborers, men and women who are
forced to feed the greedy coffers of heartless and
avaricious employers by serving them on starvation
wages, Take the average shop girl in our great
(Continued on Page 4.)
