Review of 1869 | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 18, 1870

Review of 1869.

From the New Year's address of the Champlain (N. Y.) Journal, we clip the following instructive paragraphs, relative to the events of 1869.

Of casualties and disasters there have been an unusual number the whole world over, very destructive of human life. During the fall season our ears were stunned with reports of a constellation of successive calamities. The hail storms, gales, rain and wind storms, too, have been wide-spread and ruinous, perhaps never more so. The atmosphere has at times been most fearfully and strangely convulsed, and the world of science has watched the irregularities in the

realm of nature with intense interest. A hurricane swept the whole New England coast Sep. 8, by which no less than fifty-seven churches were either wholly or partly demolished, while a Massachusetts clergyman computes that in the great rain storm of Oct. 4 and 5, water enough fell, over the six Eastern States, alone, to make a river twenty feet deep, with perpendicular shores one hundred rods apart, and give this mighty stream a length of 6,500 miles. The earth as well as the air has been exceedingly restless. The earthquake forces still manifest great activity, and only Monday last, the severest ever known in California and Nevada, shook old earth, destroyed property, and sent dismay to the hearts of the people in that region of country. We register during the year no less than seven great earthquakes, which, though not so terribly severe as those which overtook the nations in 1868, were yet in all cases destructive of life and property on a large scale. The convulsions of this kind for the three years past reach the extraordinary number of twenty-four, while the yearly occurrence of great earthquakes registered previous to 1867, was only one each year. The occurrence of so many of the first class in so short a time is without a parallel in the periods covered by history.

The approach of a periodical, electric storm, emanating from the sun, may have something to do in causing these meteorological and seismic convulsions. This luminary has during the past season been covered with very many spots, and the instruments of observers detect unusual disturbance in the sun's atmosphere or disk. The telescope and spectroscope have been used intently to scan its face. Its surface is observed to be in a violently-excited condition, and it is at present an object of close study and of some alarm. What these perturbations in the natural world denote, or how they are caused, science has failed thus far to satisfactorily explain. Professor E. Loomis, of Yale celebrity, has recently expressed the opinion that the earth's safety is in jeopardy from the destructive elements within and about it. The solution of the question of the destiny of our globe is, in the opening of 1870, a problem for study in the schools.

The vast anti-christian organizations are tottering to their final fall. The gospel is published under every sun. A monster world's Council, composed of a thousand high Romish officials, is in session at the Eternal City, and important changes are evidently at hand in the condition of the Papal See. What these changes are, we leave to the student of the prophetic word to determine.