Notes on Important Eras of Fulfilling Prophecy
By W. A. S.
The Hand of God in History — No. 27
Notes on Important Eras of Fulfilling Prophecy
Providential Agencies for a Quick Work in Evangelizing the World
The steam railway came on apace with the steamship. While Fulton was completing his “Clermont,” he was also studying the steam-railway problem. A letter sent him by Chancellor Livingston reads so curiously now that it may well be given here as a memorial of times that shortly preceded this last generation:— DEAR SIR: I did not until yesterday receive yours of the twenty-fifth of February. Whether it has loitered on the way, I am at a loss to say. I had before read your very ingenious propositions as to the railway communication. I fear, however, upon mature reflection, that they will be liable to objections, and ultimately more expensive than a canal. They must be doubled, so as to prevent the danger of two such heavy bodies meeting. The walls upon which they are placed must be at least four feet below the surface and three feet above, and must be clamped with iron, and, even then, they would hardly sustain so heavy a weight as you propose, running at four miles an hour on wheels. As to wood, it would not last a week; they must be covered with iron, and that, too, very thick and strong. The means of stopping these carriages without a heavy shock, and of preventing them from running into each other (for there would be so many on the road at once) would be very difficult, and in case of accidental or necessary stops to take wood, water, and the like, many accidents would happen. The carriage for condensing water would be very troublesome. Upon the whole, I fear the expense would be much greater than that of a canal, without being so convenient. What men whose minds were awakening to the future possibilities had sometimes to suffer is difficult to realize now:— Henry Meigs, a member of the New York Legislature in 1817, a young man of fine talents, lost his influence, ruined his prospects, and came to be regarded as a proper subject for a strait-jacket because he expressed his belief that steam-carriages would be operated successfully on land.—C. F. Carter, “When Railroads Were New,” page 8. It was in 1825 that George Stephenson, of England, the pioneer of steam railways, was allowed to drive his first locomotive over the Stockton-Darlington coal-and-mineral tramway line, “with a signalman on horseback in advance.” That same locomotive is still to be seen on a platform in the Darlington station, rude and out of date, but a mechanism that revolutionized human locomotion over the earth. In 1829 Stephenson’s “Rocket” was built, the first high-speed locomotive, and next year the short Liverpool-Manchester line showed that the era of steam-railway passenger traffic was really at hand. M’Carthy says in his history:— The London and Birmingham Railway was opened through its whole length in 1838. The Liverpool and Preston line was opened the same year. The Liverpool and Birmingham had been opened the year before; the London and Croydon was opened the year after. The act for the transmission of mails by railways was passed in 1838. In the same year it was noted as an unparalleled, and to many an almost incredible, triumph of human energy and science over time and space, that a locomotive had been able to travel at a speed of thirty-seven miles an hour. June 18, 1842, the Railway Times, of England, recorded: “Her Majesty made her first railway trip on Monday last.” In 1843 Louis Philippe, king of France, proposed to take his family by rail from Paris to Rouen, on their journey to his summer château at Bizy, some distance beyond Rouen. But we are told:— The council of ministers, on being acquainted with His Majesty’s project, held a sitting, and came to the conclusion that this mode of traveling by railway was not sufficiently secure to admit of its being used by the king, and consequently His Majesty went to Bizy with post-horses.—W. M. Acworth, “Railways of England,” page 19. In the United States, which has witnessed so great a development of railway traffic, the first experiments with steam locomotives were made in 1829. In that year even the horse railway was a marvel. We read in Griffith’s “Annals of Baltimore,” published in 1833:—10 December 14 (1829), thirty-seven persons were drawn by one horse, in a car planned by Mr. Ross Winans, of New Jersey, on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, at a rate of about ten miles per hour, or as fast as the horse could trot or gallop; which was done in the presence, and to the astonishment, of a multitude of spectators, who, not having witnessed such an exhibition, could scarcely realize the effect. The Baltimore and Ohio was worked by horse-power until 1832. Now the change to steam was fast taking hold. Time could no longer wait. Strange, is it not, to read of New England, in 1842:— Dorchester, Mass., in a town meeting assembled in 1842, instructed its representatives in the legislature to “use their utmost endeavors to prevent, if possible, so great a calamity to our town as must be the location of any railroad through it.”—“When Railroads Were New,” page 11. The New York Herald, reviewing the beginnings of systematic railway development in America, says:— Cornelius Vanderbilt opened a railway office on Manhattan Island in 1844, and that was the beginning of the railway methods that have grown into such enormous proportions on the island to-day, with ninety-six railway corporations and all of their direct and indirect interests represented here. All of this means the interests of 280,000 miles of railway track, which cost $19,000,000,000, carrying 1,000,000,000 passengers and 1,700,000,000 tons of freight annually.—Jan. 22, 1911. The mileage mentioned is more than sufficient to girdle the globe ten times over; and think of the systems in all the continents, linking together city and country, and states and provinces. And note how the successful development of these wonder-working facilities dates from the time of 1844,—just before and after,—when the hour came that was to see the message of the “everlasting gospel” carried quickly to all nations, warning the world of the approaching end. We read of the beginnings of Scotland’s railways:— The coal-fields of Dalkeith were brought into communication with the capital [Edinburgh] by means of a railway, which continued to be drawn by horses until 1845.—Scottish Geog. Magazine, June, 1910. The times just following were the years of railway extension on the continent of Europe and in America. The iron trail was soon pushing along to open unbroken wildernesses to civilization and settlement. In 1862 Congress authorized the Union Pacific extension. May 10, 1869, at the head of Great Salt Lake, the line from California met the line from the Mississippi Valley. The last tie was laid—of laurel wood, silver-banded. The last spikes were driven, a golden one from California, one of silver from Nevada, and another of gold, silver, and iron, from Arizona; and, standing by the two locomotives facing one another, the workers saluted the first transcontinental railway running from ocean to ocean. Bret Harte, the poet of the old-time West, put into words the message of the two engines standing there:— “Pilots touching, head to head,
Facing in the single track,
Half a world behind each back.” The one from the East said:—
“Listen! Where the Atlantic beats
Shores of snow and summer heats;
Where the Indian autumn skies
Paint the woods with wampum dyes,
I have chased the flying sun.” The one from the West replied:—
“. . . I bring the East to you;
All the Orient, all Cathay,
Find through me the shortest way;
And the sun you follow here
Rises in my hemisphere.” Now the iron rails span the continents of Europe and Asia, and very soon the Cape to Cairo system will meet in the heart of the Dark Continent, with side lines running out to open all the great divisions of Africa’s territory. South American lines are crossing wildernesses and piercing mountain chains again and again. By steamship and steam railway almost any part of the world is more accessible to-day than remote parts of a single province were two generations ago. Where the narrow Isthmus of Suez blocked the way from sea to sea, the Suez Canal opened a new highway to the Orient; and now the Panama Canal comes to join the Atlantic and Pacific, shortening distances by thousands of miles in a single journey. Not so many years ago Jules Verne wrote a book, “Round the World in Eighty Days,” the point of his tale depending on exaggeration, and the impossibility of so rapid a journey. The romance of the early days of this generation is surpassed by the facts of the present. A Paris despatch of Aug. 26, 1911, said:— Andre Jaeger-Schmidt completed his round-the-world dash in the office of Excelsior, the newspaper he represents, at two minutes, nineteen and two-fifths seconds after nine o’clock this morning, setting a record for globe-circling of 39 days, 19 hours, 43 minutes, 37 4-5 seconds.—Washington Times. What is the meaning of this change in the history of human locomotion and world travel? It is a sudden development . Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the scientist, says:— From the earliest historic, and even in prehistoric times, till the construction of our great railways in the second quarter of the present century [the nineteenth], there had been absolutely no change in the methods of human locomotion.—“The Wonderful Century,” page 7. Why, in that second quarter of the nineteenth century, should this change break abruptly upon the world?—In that same second quarter of the century the time of the prophecy came, when, as the prophet saw in vision, the message of the everlasting gospel was to be carried swiftly to every nation and tongue and people. Up to within a few years of the coming of the judgment hour, in 1844, men were traveling about the world just as Abraham did, or as men traveled in the days of ancient Babylon. For nearly six thousand years that was the history of man. But the time was drawing near when the closing gospel message was to be carried swiftly to all the world—and suddenly the whole history of man changed, so far as methods of swift locomotion are concerned. There came the steamship, the steam railway, the application of electricity to locomotion, and all the facilities that this generation has for swift communication with all the earth. It is the hand of God. This is the generation, according to the sure word of prophecy, in which the work of evangelizing all nations is to be done; and to this generation has come these material factors for hastening the work to completion. Truly, it is the marvelous working of God’s direct providence. When Israel went out of Egypt, the Lord opened the Red Sea before them. Where there was no way, the living God “made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over.” When the generation came in which the “everlasting gospel” was to be carried to every nation and tongue and people as a preparation for the coming of the Lord in power and glory, it was not sufficient that a way be provided through merely one little arm of a sea. The living God, the same who wrought in the ancient days, made a pathway over all the seas. “He hath made the deep as dry,
He hath smote for us a pathway
to the ends of all the earth.” It is the hand of the living God. The world is full of material evidences of the providential workings of the Lord of hosts in our day, preparing the way for the fulfilment of all that the “sure word of prophecy” has spoken concerning the finishing of the gospel work in the earth. W. A. S.