Providential Agencies for a Quick Work in Evangelizing the World
(Concluded)
ALONG with the new means for rapid transit over land and sea, came also the modern postal system, and the harnessing of the electric current for the quick transmission of news, both agencies that act a mighty part in bringing the world together and spreading increasing light and knowledge over the earth to-day.
The postal system is so ordinary a part of our life that we scarcely give a thought to the fact that it is really a very modern thing; for Rowland Hill of England, the originator of the cheap system of postage, died only in the seventies. Harriet Martineau tells the following story of the manner in which Mr. Hill was led to give attention to the improvement of the postal system:—
Coleridge, when a young man, was walking through the lake district, when he one day saw the postman deliver a letter to a woman at a cottage door. The woman turned it over and examined it, and then returned it, saying she could not pay the postage, which was a shilling. Hearing that the letter was from her brother, Coleridge paid the postage in spite of the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As soon as the postman was out of sight, she showed Coleridge how his money had been wasted, as far as she was concerned. The sheet was blank. There was an agreement between her brother and herself that as long as all went well with him, he should send a blank sheet in this way once a quarter; and she thus had tidings of him without expense of postage. Most persons would have remembered this incident as a curious story to tell; but there was one mind which wakened up at once to a sense of the significance of the fact. It struck8Mr. Rowland Hill that there must be something wrong in a system which drove a brother and sister to cheating in order to gratify their desire to hear of each other’s welfare.—“History of Our Own Times,” page 10.
Rowland Hill’s plan of postal reform was taken up by the British government in 1839, and between that date and 1843 the modern system was well established in Great Britain. It quickly spread to other lands, and in 1874 the Universal Postal Union was formed. This agency, which has come to this generation, is a wonderful factor, not only in the world’s life and business contact, but in the world’s evangelization. Not a mail-ship sails the sea that is not carrying from some source books or other publications to help spread the light of truth abroad. The prompt communication with the fields enables all the missionary and Bible societies to direct a work that would seem impossible without the universal postal system, whose circuits run over remote foot-paths in Africa and Asia, and by sledge routes into the scattered winter settlements along the Arctic Sea.
Well we know that it was no mere accidental coincidence that minds in different lands were set working simultaneously on the problem of the electric telegraph. It was in those years of the advent awakening that agencies for a quick work were springing into successful operation. M’Carthy says:—
It is a somewhat curious coincidence that in the year [1837] when Professor Wheatstone and Mr. Cooke took out their first patent “for improvements in giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by means of electric currents transmitted through metallic circuit,” Professor Morse, the American electrician, applied to Congress for aid in the construction and carrying on of a small electric telegraph to convey messages a short distance, and made the application without success. In the following year he [Cooke] came to this country to obtain a patent for his invention; but he was refused. He had come too late. Our own countrymen were beforehand with him.—“History of Our Own Times,” page 9.
Wheatstone said of the night of July 25, 1837, when his short line from Euston to Camden Town (North London) carried its first message:—
Never did I feel such a tumultuous sensation before, as when all alone in the still room I heard the needles click; and as I spelled the words, I felt all the magnitude of the invention now proved to be practicable beyond cavil or dispute.—W. F. Jeans, “Lives of the Electricians,” page 144.
Samuel F. B. Morse’s system was the one more generally adopted, and his name stands more than any other for the new order. Speaking of the coming of the electric telegraph, Sir Robert Inglis, as president of the British Association, in 1847, said:—
The system is daily extending. It was, however, in the United States of America that it was first adopted on a great scale, by Professor Morse, in 1844, and it is there that it is now already developing most extensively.—Id., page 285.
Morse had demonstrated his invention on a toy scale in the New York University, in 1835. But the winter of 1843 found him working with Congress to secure passage of a bill for a long-distance trial of the new method. He met general opposition and ridicule; but just as he was ready to give up, his bill got through; and in May, 1844, his line from Baltimore to Washington carried its first message, a text of Scripture:—
Mr. Morse always felt that the new agency was in the order of special providence. Speaking at a banquet given him in New York, Dec. 31, 1868, he said:—
If not a sparrow falls to the ground without a definite purpose in the plans of Infinite Wisdom, can the creation of an instrument so vitally affecting the interests of the whole human race have an origin less humble than the Father of every good and perfect gift? I am sure I have the sympathy of such an assembly as is here gathered together, if in all humility, and in the sincerity of a grateful heart, I use the words of Inspiration in ascribing honor and praise to him to whom first of all and most of all it is preeminently due. “Not unto us, not unto us, but to God be all the glory”—not, What hath man, but, “What hath God wrought!”—Id., page 315.
Now the network of wires covers the continents; and over “the great gray level plains of ooze,” as Kipling says, “the shell-buried cables creep” from land to land beneath all the seas,—
“Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the light of the sun.
Hush! men talk to-day o’er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new word runs between, whispering, ‘Let us be one.’”
It is a wonderful thing. Information is flashed from one end of the earth to the other; and all the world watches for news of the daily happenings whenever a crisis arises in the most remote quarter of the earth. It is a daily factor in the work of hastening the evangelization of the world in this generation. And when did it come into being?—In the days just before the opening of the judgment-hour era. In fact, a decisive step in the successful development was that long-distance message in May, 1844. Verily, “What hath God wrought!”
As the final crisis comes pressing nearer and nearer, the good news of the coming Saviour and the signs of his approach are heralded as by the wings of the lightnings from land to land. Events in the nations that have a significance in the fulfilment of prophecy are made known through the press in all the world. For the first time in history, this generation is watching occurrences in all lands from day to day as the history is made. Is it not because events to-day are leading directly to the second coming of Christ and the end of the world?
One incident may be cited as suggesting the possibilities of this agency as a witness-carrier for the truth. A young Seventh-day Adventist in a European country was answering before a court for his loyalty to God’s Sabbath. The account of the trial—the Scriptural reasons he gave for the faith that was in him, and the sentence of the court—was sent out by news agencies and reproduced in the newspapers of Europe, Asia, North America, and South America. The young man’s answer for Christ before the court was really made before an audience of millions. The Lord has many ways of working; and in his providence new agencies have come into existence in this generation to hasten the witness of the coming kingdom to all nations.
Now comes yet another marvel—wireless telegraphy. Marconi signaled his first message from the Old World to the New, from England to Newfoundland, in 1901. Now the British empire has a round-the-world system of wireless telegraphy. Washington’s new wireless tower speaks to Key West, and Panama, and San Francisco. A ship in danger at sea sends out into the ether the sputtering signal, “S O S,” and within a radius of two hundred miles or more every ship prepares to rush to the rescue.
These are days of marvels. And all these facilities are agencies not only for spreading general light and knowledge, but are pressed directly into service as factors in the world’s evangelization.
Last of all, as a contribution to new modes of transit, come now the air-ship and the aeroplane, flying in the heavens. Most studied for their possibilities in war, they may yet have a part to act in hastening on the “gospel of peace.” Our brethren in one European country—where full liberty of public religious worship is denied to Protestants—were led to think of the air-ship as a possible evangelizing agency, when a prince of the royal-house took with him in his air-ship a package of invitation cards announcing the topics of a series of Adventist lectures on fulfilling prophecy, dropping the cards as he sailed over two countries.9
Space does not permit even the mention of many other developments of this “time of the end” that are factors in hastening the spread of light and knowledge and bringing all peoples of the earth within sound of the gospel message.
The living God is able to bring into service every power and every agency in the universe for the finishing of the gospel work in this closing hour of his judgment.
W. A. S.