A Year of Wonders by Wm. Penniman

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 24, 1872

A Year of Wonders.

By Wm. Penniman

“The press and the people everywhere seem to have thoroughly arrived at the conviction that the present is a year of wonders, and the wonders being of a natural order—not supernatural—it has been aptly termed the phenomenal year. The extraordinary play of the elements is various, and taking the world over, it runs through the whole gamut of natural phenomena. There was no need in introducing such a fiction as Plantamour’s comet to heighten the interest of the grand performance going on all around us every day and night. The realities are sufficient to rivet the attention, and are well worthy of the comment they have excited in every quarter of the earth. Of course people ask what is the matter with our celestial and terrestrial systems? They want to know the reasons for it all, and it will not do for seers, and philosophers, and geologists, and astronomers, to stand back and acknowledge their ignorance. Among them they are expected to unravel all these mysteries, perform impossibilities, and work miracles. If they do not march promptly up to the scratch of curiosity they may as well throw up the sponge and

acknowledge defeat without striking a blow for truth. Many of them do, and this fact may be added to the other phenomena. The English, scientific, and literary press, are particularly active in endeavoring to account for much that is strange in the heavens and irregular in the earth. They are all at it. Their inquisitions are very learned and plausible and worthy of as serious consideration as any theories are. The London Spectator traces the trouble to a change in the constitution of the sun. Tacchini, an Italian astronomer, has told us that our central orb is just now overcharged by a superabundance of magnesium, causing an unusual intensity of heat.

“Then the newspapers ask how about the volcanic eruptions, earth-shakings, thunderstorms and boreal lights which have made the year so remarkable and our season so notable? The tropics seem to be moving up the globe and threaten to annihilate the temperate zone. Our temperature and our storms have a decidedly tropical flavor and dash. The lightning is its own peculiar 1872 lightning, unlike any other brand of the article with which we have been acquainted. It is more forked, more continuous, has a deeper tone, and is of a different color! Altogether, the lightning is not eminently satisfactory. It has done more striking than is comfortable, and seems to be lying around loose. In a little storm-burst which we had on Tuesday night last, it showed a disposition to get out of the earth, and made innumerable stairs, like Jacob’s ladder, to the clouds, and traveled up them like nothing else except a streak of lightning. The cloud seemed to come over just in the right time to restore an equilibrium and balance celestial and terrestrial accounts. If it had delayed a day or two longer, we would have had more electricity and other fiery fluids in the earth than would have been healthy for us, or it. We are apparently all right for a few days, but what will come next?”

“Meteoric stones have been banging about considerably in various quarters. They are the real article—moon stones, dead planets or the cores of worlds that have been thrown away. All such useless trash seems to come to us through the fields of illimitable space, forgetful that we have enough rubbish already. Here are some of the wonders of the year, and they look rather formidable when summed up: An eruption of Vesuvius, the most terrific in eighteen hundred years, an earthquake that swallowed up Antioch; a drouth and famine in Persia; pestilence in Buenos Ayres; one of the Philippine islands completely swamped and sunk; tremblings and quakings of the earth on both sides of the North American continent. Then the universal and unusually hot weather, and whirlwinds and thunderstorms, and the aforesaid meteoric stones, are also among the wonders. Near Boston, a man who had nothing else to do, timed the lightning, and counted 331 distinct discharges of lightning in seven minutes, each causing a distinct thunder blast, and all the while the moon looked on so greatly magnified by haze and vapor as to make the appearance of half the sky on fire. People are amusing themselves counting the storms in all quarters, and the accounts of damage by them form a staple article of news. The oldest inhabitant everywhere is unanimous in the assertion that he never saw anything like it, and agrees that 1872 is a year of wonders.”

The above, from the St. Louis Republican of Aug. 29, is remarkable, and shows the workings of the human mind in regard to the wonderful phenomena of this year. How prone is man to refuse to see the hand of God in the terrible water inundations, in the thunder, in the terrific lightning, in the hurricane storm, in the whirlwind, in the crashing meteoric stones, in the mighty earthquakes, and in the volcanic heavings of the earth. Then again the same is true in pestilence, drouth, and famine, and in many other scourges which God is sending upon the earth.

In vain may the philosophers and the infidel array the “oppositions of science falsely so called” against the word of God, and attempt to account for all of these wonders on the principle of natural causes. Admitting that they are not all wonders of a supernatural order, is it any the less true that many of them are not signs of the times, and of the coming of the Son of God on the great white cloud to reap the harvest of the earth?

Philosophers may attribute the great heat and the many sun-strokes of this year to a “change in the constitution of the sun:” but if they would study their Bibles more it would cause them to think of the time when “power is given unto him to scorch men with fire.” Rev. 16: 8. Now it is heat; then it will be fire. God, in his great goodness and mercy, has been giving the world signs upon signs, and wonders upon wonders, for over 1800 years, all of them more or less betokening the second coming of Christ; and yet the infidel may attempt to account for all of these on the principle of natural causes. Man is so slow to see the hand of God, and to acknowledge his judgments in the earth, that I have thought that in the seven last plagues they would not at first admit them; and that it will not be until the pouring out of the last vial, when the great hailstones of God’s wrath will fall upon the wicked, that they will fully acknowledge his hand. Wm. Penniman.