p. 106 | The Coming Doom

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 20, 1870

The Coming Doom.

[By request we give the following extract from the Coming Earthquake, by D. T. Taylor, pages 77–81.—ED.]

“The elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”—2 Pet. 3:10.

What will one day occur right in the face and eyes of a sneering philosophy, which declares it cannot be, is ably set forth, not only in the tendencies already copiously given, but also in an able article on “The Relations of Geology and Theology,” by Prof. R. D. Hitchcock, who has recently said, “The earth contains within itself the agencies necessary to its dissolution by fire. Its crust is supposed to be several hundred miles thick, while the interior is in a state of fusion like lava. The three hundred active volcanoes on the crust are the breathing-holes of the internal fire. At present, counteracting agencies prevent this lava from bursting forth. But let the order be issued for its liberation, and these vents will belch forth fire and desolation. The works of man, in which we take so much pride, may be crumbled in a moment by the concussion of the crust. Liberated gases may combine explosively with the oxygen in the air, so that the heavens should pass away with a great noise.”

“And there are grounds of belief,” said the late Prof. George Shepherd, in one of his published sermons on Matthew 24:37–39, “that this great coming with fire is indeed not far before us. We have the same word for this greater coming with fire. And we have the fire; a world with all its caverns and bowels filled full of it; and it rages and presses against and shakes the crust on which we now stand, and it snorts out at all the openings in columns that reach to the clouds, and quantities that whelm vast tracts with the molten ruins. The whole world may disbelieve it—this uttered thing of God will be.”

Long ago did the unerring voice of prophecy solemnly announce the conflagration and last mighty convulsion of our globe; (1) by the bursting forth of its elementary forces and internal fires, and (2), by the ignition of its aerial gases. And we are told in plain words who kindled the fire, and when, and where, and why, it was kindled. These scriptures are already quoted. It is the work of a sin-avenging Deity, whose mighty angels wait to bring the last throb, and blow up the last flames, ere this sad earth, again as at the first, “shall all be Paradise.” Nevertheless, worldly-wise and persistently evil men love to deceive and be deceived concerning the approach of such a fearful day.

The unscriptural, “igneous theory” of creation, originating in the dreamy brain of the German chemist Leibnitz, in 1680, now scarcely two hundred years old, a theory which well nigh sets aside the Creator, and one which ignores the birth of our world by water, as not only attested by Moses, but confirmed by all the highest profane writers and historians; a theory which declares that the granite rocks could only be formed by fire, and consequently the earth was born of fire, and has been for countless ages gradually cooling, and hence its crust where man dwells is getting thicker and thicker, and so earthquakes, age after age, are occurring more and more seldom; this mere theory, which was never received by all, and is doubted and disproved by the most eminent scientists; this theory on which so many false hopes rest, is entirely at fault and upset.

First, by the well-known fact recorded by Humboldt; viz., “That the decrease of the mean heat of the globe during a period of two thousand years has not, therefore, taking the extremest limits, diminished as much as one three-hundredth part of a degree of Fahrenheit,” which, considering the uncertain data from which even this calculation is arrived at, and the fact that it would show the earth to have cooled but the one-hundredth part of a degree in six thousand years, amounts simply to just nothing:

Second, by the researches and experiments of modern chemists, who have discovered, says Dr. Robert Patterson, that “granite is an aqueous formation, formed by the overlaying, sedimentary rock,” and which goes to confirm the truth of the Mosaic doctrine of the birth of the world of water; and

Third, by the evidence herein presented, exhibiting

the fact that for centuries past, and more especially since the present one came in, both slight shocks and great earthquakes are more and more frequent, which would seem to show greater activity of the unseen forces, and an increasing thinness of the earth’s surrounding crust.

Why, then, will mortals be blinded to coming events, which must inevitably take place? Why lull the world to sleep with dreams of security and future aggrandizement, when in one awful and unlooked-for moment, the great globe may be shattered with a universal and resistless earthquake bolt, and amid the wailing and tumult, amid the vanishing of the heavens, and the roar of the reverberating trump of doom, the Judge of all the earth appear in the clouds? Alas! who will live when God doeth this? And with this array of evidence, this mass of scientific and scriptural fact before us, how can popular writers deceive both themselves and others, by arguing the impossibility of a great earthquake’s ever occurring in our own country, and the absence of all danger to New York, Paris, and London? The facts and admissions put forth by these writers themselves overthrow their own conclusions. Who, that knows the eccentricity of the earthquake’s path, or remembers the suddenness of the destruction of the great and proud city of Lisbon, where no convulsion of importance had occurred for over a century and a half, or has read of the great earthquake in New England in 1755, and that in the great valley of the West in 1811, both of which agitated more or less the whole country east of the Rocky Mountains, or is made acquainted with the fact that a great chain of extinct volcanoes stretches from New Jersey to Montreal, or that reflects how suddenly the coming mighty earthquake will convulse the entire globe, can ever be deceived by this insane and senseless cry of “Peace and safety”?