The World’s Great War

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Aug 27, 1914

The World’s Great War

PERHAPS no war has ever occurred in the course of human history that has demonstrated so unmistakably the spirit which is taking possession of the nations of men as the conflict now being waged in Europe. It came so suddenly and unexpectedly that the larger part of the civilized world was involved before the situation was sensed. Speaking of this, the editor of the Washington Evening Star says:—

“So swiftly has this situation developed that the world can hardly appreciate its possibilities, cannot grasp its magnitude. Probably not even the people of Europe today are conscious of the tremendous forces that have been loosed for destruction. It involves no tax upon the mind to conceive a state of war between two countries, but a war involving directly four of the greatest and most powerful nations in the earth, with smaller ones as allies, is in its potentialities virtually incomprehensible, as an unmeasurable catastrophe.”

This situation did not develop without a cause. Speaking of the agencies which have brought the great nations of Europe into the field of open warfare, the editor of the Washington (D. C.) Times states:—

“Europe has been building for this calamity for decades. It has urged, with every addition of an army corps or a battleship to national armaments, that these were the safeguards of peace rather than the instruments of war. Of course, they were never anything of the kind. The very existence of such military establishments, the spectacle of vast forces constantly under arms, the tramp of armies, the martial atmosphere, have all been daily and hourly incitements to the warlike spirit that now flames over all Europe.

“The very fact of these stupendous preparations has served to prepare the minds of the people for the thing that, viewing these establishments, they could not but consider inevitable. Considering it inevitable, feeling constantly heavier and heavier the burdens that preparedness imposed, they chafed for the test and the issue. The hour for these had come.”

This conflict, as has been stated before, is not the battle of Armageddon referred to in the Bible, but it is one of a series of conflicts fast hastening the world on to that event. It is a signboard showing the road which the nations of men are traveling. Armageddon is the conflict at the end of the journey. And the end of the journey is rapidly nearing. Soon Christ will take the scepter and reign. Soon the night of earth’s darkness and discord, sin and sorrow, will come to an end, and the glorious morning of heaven’s day be ushered in. How this thought thrills our hearts, and nerves us for all life’s battles. Hasten blest morn!