p. 250 | Untitled article by Cumming

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, October 1, 1867.

Tokens of the End.

By Cumming

We shall find nothing that can occur in the shape of material phenomena, however unprecedented or extraordinary, which men will not explain away. I have no doubt that many of the cotemporaries of Noah, while they saw him building the ark, derided his folly, and described Noah and his project in the Charivaris and caricatures of the day, as an antediluvian lunatic, while they contemptuously smiled at the stupid old man who dreamed that any force we are acquainted with could raise the ocean from its oozy bed, and cause it to overflow hill and valley, and leave not a living thing over the face of the whole earth. Up to that very morning when the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the windows of heaven poured down water, the philosophers and the astronomers-royal of the age demonstrated with mathematical accuracy that a universal flood was a physical impossibility, and that Noah was, beyond all dispute, a fool and a fanatic, whose requests to the people to enter into the ark ought to be treated with the contempt such counsels deserved. When phenomena shall overtake this world that shall be the divinely-appointed pioneers of the great and final convulsion, demonstrations in leading articles, and letters, and essays, will appear thick as dead leaves in November, showing that all is explicable from electricity, or the polarization of light, or other natural law, and that it is very wrong in Christian ministers to disturb weak nerves, and alarm timid minds; pleading, also, as they did of old, “All things continue as they were from the beginning until now;” not knowing that thousands of signs are pre-signifying the exhaustion of an age in which we play so momentous a part, and the approach of a glorious dispensation, in which I trust and pray that we shall be found heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ.—Cumming.