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THE MICHIGAN FIRES

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 10, 1881

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 7, No. 42.

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THE MICHIGAN FIRES.

By Editor

WE publish in this paper a brief account of the fires in Northern Michigan, copied from the Detroit Free Press. It will give the reader some idea of the terrors of that great calamity. But no language can give any just idea of its magnitude, and of the horrors of all its details. This is only equaled by the fires of ten years ago, when Northern Michigan, Northern Wisconsin, and Chicago suffered so severely.
Having visited some of the districts devastated in 1871, and heard from the lips of the sufferers and witnesses of that terrible visitation some account of the action of the fire, we can better appreciate the account given of this. It is not possible to eradicate from the minds of those who passed through those scenes the idea that there was something supernatural in the event. And as we listened to their recitals we felt that it was not difficult to accept their idea as reasonable.
One thing has deeply impressed those who have taken time to consider the nature of the calamities of late years: their magnitude and the appalling loss of life. Perils and tribulations are on every hand, and people are not willing to consider the lesson which Providence is pressing upon their attention. An accident with the loss of hundreds of lives is forgotten in a day, and as a consequence human life is fast becoming a matter of little worth. Life is taken with a recklessness that is nothing less than shocking. One must be careful how he speaks to a boy on the streets now-a-days or he will find a revolver drawn upon him.
We believe we are in the last days, and these are among their perils, and but forerunners of the plagues which are soon to come upon the earth. What a warning is being given to all believers in the fulfillment of the prophecies which refer to these events. Let us “watch and be sober,” and by obedience to the “present truth,” prepare for those things which are coming upon all the world.