THE EARTHQUAKE | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 3, 1868

THE EARTHQUAKE.

ALONG a coast, three thousand miles in length, the light of day was serenely shining, when suddenly a motion of the solid earth was felt, a darkening of the heavens seen, and a strange, dismal sound heard by millions. The waves of the sea rushed to meet those of the land, and thirty thousand people were dead. Terror whitened the faces of unnumbered survivors, in whose ears were ringing the cries of distress which rose from the lips of the dying.

It seems to us that one lesson of such a catastrophe is the final conflagration of this planet, which shall usher in the judgment of all its inhabitants, since Adam looked upon the Eden he lost by his sin. How plainly it reveals the treasured means of the world's destruction! Who can say that, according to fixed natural laws, these are not preparing “nature's funeral pile,” just as, on a comparatively small scale, they shook down cities, and buried their inhabitants? In God's own time, the trumpet of the Archangel will sound the signal; the “heavens pass away with a great noise, and the elements melt with fervent heat; and there shall be no more sea.”

Then what cries of alarm and wild despair will rise above the tottering mountains and rending rocks, refusing to hide the disloyal and lost from the face of the Lamb, whose finished work of redemption made its theatre no longer of any more worth than the scaffolding of a finished and glorious temple, taken down to be burned for fuel.—Am. Messenger.