THE WORLD MOVES | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 25, 1878

THE WORLD MOVES.

Such is the heading which the Advance attaches to a short editorial in its issue of July 18, 1878. The late treaty of Berlin having guaranteed religious toleration throughout Turkish territory, the Advance takes occasion to utter a shout of “peace and safety,” and to make a thrust at Adventists, as unjust as it is bitter. It says:—

“The full text of the Berlin treaty has been published and telegraphed to the world. If Second Adventists choose to insist that the world is ‘growing worse and worse,’ they must be allowed to cherish their private interpretation, and, if it relieves the outlook in their private view, they can name it the ‘blessed hope;’ but he possesses a different vision from most intelligent Christians, who can read the terms of this continental compact with its five or six times repeated and most explicit affirmations of the principles of complete religious toleration, and not see that the world is moving toward better things.”

It strikes us as nothing very remarkable that Christian nations, having at their mercy the semi-barbaric Turkish power, should compel it to grant toleration to its Christian subjects. And he who can see in this enough to overbalance the fearful increase of crime in the most enlightened nations of the earth, the epidemic of debauchery, thefts, robberies, defalcations, and murders, the labor troubles, the tramp evils, the threatening aspect of socialism and communism, the wholesale famines in different parts of the world, in company with which must be found suffering and crime and ruin, the breaking down of all the moral safeguards of society, etc., etc., must indeed have a “different vision” and a different kind of “intelligence” from that which the world is wont to honor under that name.

This is the foolish part of the statement made by the Advance; the wicked part is that in which it takes up the Christian’s “blessed hope,” smirches it with falsehood, and then holds it up to ridicule. The world is growing better or worse accordingly as the moral condition and moral actions of its inhabitants, or the controlling portions thereof, are improving or declining. And the Advance well knows that no Adventist makes the predicted “abounding of iniquity” which we now behold, Matt. 24:12, or the “growing worse and worse of evil men and seducers” now everywhere visible, 2 Tim. 3:13, to be the “blessed hope.” Why, then, does it so represent it?

But the Advance does not half whistle itself into a belief of its own assertions on this point. In regard to the ultimate beneficial results to be derived from the doings of the Congress, it is as undecided as a loose sail flapping in the wind. In the very same paper from which we make the foregoing quotation, it speaks in different articles about the lion’s share which has fallen to England being a little “tough for digestion,” and more than intimates that the “end” sought by England does not “justify the means” by which she has sought it, and that a “most dangerous element” lurks in her foreign policy which has culminated in the occupation of Cyprus and the protectorate of Asiatic Turkey. Nevertheless the Advance regards it as such a glorious evidence that the world is “moving toward better things,” and that the “blessed hope” of the Adventists is not soon to be realized, that it hails it with joy.