The Social Volcano by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 24, 1915

The Social Volcano

By C. M. S.

WE consider it nothing strange that the forces of nature, among which the motions of a certain antagonism have been operating for many centuries, should occasionally burst the crust of this world and scatter devastation and death broadcast. That is a material volcano. In it is demonstrated the antagonistic operation of natural forces, blind forces, shunted off the main line of the Creator’s purpose as the outworking of the anarchy of sin, which has affected the material as well as the social system.

Satan claims the sovereignty of this world; but his system is founded upon self-service, jealousy, and hatred. Every calamity that has befallen the race and the world which it inhabits has come as a result of accepting Satan’s program instead of God’s. When Satan defied the government of God in heaven and set himself against it and established himself in this earth, he set at defiance God’s government in material as well as social and spiritual things. From that day there has been trouble in the temporal and material affairs of this world as well as in the social and spiritual affairs. Calamity has followed on calamity, disaster on disaster, and famine, pestilence. and death have been close on the heels of the human family through all the centuries that have passed. Mountains have blown their heads off and overwhelmed the people. Earthquakes have shaken down the dwellings of the rich and the poor, and buried the inmates in the ruins. Fires, floods, and tornadoes have swept over the world and left desolation, ruin, and death in their path. These demonstrate antagonism in the domain of material nature—the laws of nature to a certain extent counterworked by another power that has been given scope to demonstrate itself.

For years scientists have noted a marked tendency toward the increase of those occurrences which demonstrate this condition of antagonism among the laws of nature. Earthquakes are more numerous, the earth’s crust more “nervous” and treacherous, symptoms of an impending terrestrial calamity.

Exactly the same condition has been noted in the social system. The social fabric has also become more “nervous,” more treacherous: The formation of organizations antagonistic to each other and threatening each other, and occasionally clashing with each other and declaring each other’s extinction, is symptomatic of the same dangerous condition in the social world that we have observed in the material world. This clashing of interests has shown no abatement in its insistent aggressiveness. The interests of one organization have clashed with those of another, and the compromises effected between them have been the compromises of expediency, and all know them to be but makeshifts and temporary in their tenure.

What we have seen among organizations within the nations we have seen growing with equal aggressiveness and insistence between the greater organizations—the nations of the world. They assumed monstrous burdens to keep other nations from breaking down their national boundaries and spoiling them of their possessions; and while arming for their own defense, they have made themselves dreaded by others, who have likewise armed for defense, and have thus passed on the spirit of dread and distrust and aggressive defense.

These were the smoldering fires, the subterranean rumblings, that forewarned of the volcanic outbreak so soon to be. The strain upon the social earth crust became greater than the resisting strength of the material, and the crash has come; the social volcanic mountains have blown their heads into the air, and destruction and death are raining down upon the people. This is the greatest social outbreak the world has ever seen. Every international upheaval of the past has made this one more certain, more deadly in its workings, and more provocative of that bitterness which will yet fling the whole world into one field of carnage.

This crash has set the “peace propagandists” at work more eagerly than ever before. We admire the spirit which actuates them—that is, their desire to see peace reign in this world, to see the afflictions of war stayed, and the flow of blood stanched. But God has given us no ground of hope that peace will ever reign here until the work of the gospel has been consummated, and every vestige of sin has been burned out of this world by the renovating fires of the last great day. Much as we oppose war and deplore the spirit of hatred which nerves men to incite nation against nation, we feel that it is worse than a waste of time to prophesy the age of peace this side the second coming of Christ. It raises hopes which will never be fulfilled, and encourages men to trust in human means of achieving peace, when there is no peace for those outside of Christ.

We find no scripture which warrants us in believing that mankind will grow better and better, more careful of one another’s rights, more tender of one another’s feelings. On the other hand, we are positively instructed that “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.” The greatest deception that will come to this world will be that which will be found in a false peace movement. A human arrangement will undoubtedly be perfected which will cause the majority of Christendom to feel that now the victory of peace is complete, that the battle against war has been fought and won, and that the kingdom of righteousness has at last been ushered in. And then the crash will come. A world satisfied and at ease and resting in the confidence of peace accomplished, will become a world disappointed and distressed, and terrified at the fearful reality of a world engulfed in the horrors of most bitter warfare. The awfulness of the present war is tempered somewhat by the fact that some of the nations are still neutral; that there is comparative peace in a portion of the world; that there are states which can act as mediators between the warring nations; but when the greater war is on, the wounds of civilization cannot be mollified even to that extent. The present social volcano is sufficiently terrorizing the world; but when every nation is drinking its cup of distress, the people will realize the bitterness of the deception bound up in the present peace propaganda.

In a world war is demonstrated the final result of the principles of Satan’s rule applied to the dealings of man with man. That social volcano was germinant in Satan’s conquest in Eden as truly as

was ever the oak tree germinant in the acorn from which it sprang. The Christian’s comfort and assurance are not in plans of human devising, but in the sure Word of God, that lamp of the Christian’s pathway which shines brighter and brighter as the journey nears its end. “For we are become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end.” Heb. 3:14. Peter closes his admonition thus: “Knowing these things beforehand, beware lest, being carried away with the error of the wicked, ye fall from your own steadfastness.” 2 Peter 3:17. With every evil device of Satan working in our day, we have need of this inspired admonition. While the spirit of war is from beneath, and the spirit of peace is from above, let us not be deceived by a false peace, and so hurled into the maelstrom of earth’s final and most bitter disappointment. C. M. S.