Editorial – Without Knowing It

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

Those are words spoken approximately 95 years ago by Woodrow Wilson when he realized what he had helped to bring about in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve banking system. When those words were spoken it was apparently too late for the government to take control of the money. Ellen White spoke just a few years before this about the “centralizing of wealth and power; the vast combinations for the enriching of the few at the expense of the many.” Education, 228. She also said that men would try in vain to put business operations on a more secure basis. (See Testimonies, vol. 9, 13.)

But there is something far more distressing than the problems that the world is having because of selfish and unwise monetary practices. Looking down to the end of the millennium, the prophet wrote, concerning the lost, “It is now evident to all that the wages of sin is not noble independence and eternal life, but slavery, ruin, and death. The wicked see what they have forfeited by their life of rebellion. The far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory was despised when offered them; but how desirable it now appears. ‘All this,’ cries the lost soul, ‘I might have had; but I chose to put these things far from me. Oh, strange infatuation! I have exchanged peace, happiness, and honor, for wretchedness, infamy, and despair.’ All see that their exclusion from Heaven is just. In their lives they declared, We will not have this Jesus to reign over us.” Spirit of Prophecy, vol. 4, 483, 484. Do not let the devil beguile you out of your eternal inheritance so that you are unwittingly lost.