What Next?

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 25, 1868

Men’s hearts were to fail them for looking after those things that are coming upon the earth. They are looking, and raising this inquiry.

The following is the leading editorial article in the Minneapolis Tribune, Dec. 29, 1867; and expresses the pervading feeling in the civilized world at the present time:

“Our dispatches yesterday brought us accounts of a shipwreck and the loss of four hundred lives. Scarce a day passes but the telegraph or the mail bring their chapters of accidents, murder, and every description of crime; of wars and rumors of wars; of revolutions, plots and conspiracies; of famine and desolation; and in the physical world of mighty upheavings of which language fails to furnish an adequate description. The elements seem to vie with each other as to which can do the most violence or lash itself to greatest fury.—and in the rivalry of earth, air, water and fire, the old earth is racked and shaken until it seems as if it would be torn from its moorings in the heavens and hurled incontinently through space. Nor do these fearful disturbances among the forces of nature stop with inanimate matter. They permeate the dominion of man, and are exciting peoples and individuals to eccentric courses. Even the inventions of science—the elemental forces which men have tamed and applied to their use, partaking of the irregularity of the times, break beyond the bounds set for their action, plunge madly from the control of governing causes, and bring ruin, death and destruction upon those of whom they were wont to be their tractable servants. *”

Let not the reader suppose that we are endeavoring to excite undue alarm. The facts to which we allude are patent to all careful readers of the daily papers. Others besides us have noticed the universal prevalence—the deluge, we might say—of accident and crime. One of our exchanges in a distant part of the country tells us that the telegraph wires bend under a weight of woe; that the old earth quivers with throbs of agony from the center to the pole; cities are shaken down, countries are engulfed, fair domains are overflowed with red-hot lava; wife is arrayed against husband, mother against child, son against father; a hecatomb is sacrificed on one railway, half as many on another, and on still another the width of a hair stands between a thousand and sudden death; that in social life newspapers are smutched all over with reports of divorce and separation trials, of infidelity and disgrace, of gigantic crimes undertaken, half accomplished or completed.

This is a fearful record. Verily these be strange times, and in reflecting upon them, the eternal why? stares us in the face. Why are these things thus? What do they portend? What is to come next? Really, we do n’t know, and we question if anybody else does! It may be the voice of Providence, speaking in tones of prophetic warning to the guilty inhabitants of earth. At any rate, we deem it prudent to repeat our advice given a short time ago, that all take heed to the error of their ways, and prepare themselves to ride securely amid the wreck of a ruined world when the seven vials of wrath shall be poured out, and there shall be voices, and thunders, and lightnings, and a great earthquake; when the islands and mountains shall disappear, and the last great hail storm shall fall out of the heavens upon men.”