Modern Improvements a Sign of the Times by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 3, 1871

Modern Improvements a Sign of the Times.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

“BUT thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” Dan. 12:4.

The time of the end was to begin with the ending of the 1260 years of papal supremacy. Compare Dan. 12:5–10, with 7:25. These years ended in 1798. A marked increase of knowledge should then take place in this time of the end. Has this been so since 1798? If so, it is another good evidence that we are near the final end. “Knowledge shall be increased,”—God has said it, and it will be so when the time of the end does arrive. This is a plain prophecy. Has it come to pass? Really, no answer is needed, as everybody knows that not only a marked, but astonishing, advancement has been made in all kinds of knowledge, science, and inventions, since 1798. Everybody notices it; everybody talks about it; yet few seem to know what it means,—that it is a sign of the end, that God has said so. The most necessary and useful articles, as well as the ornamental, from cellar to garret, in the barn, on the farm, in the highways,—everywhere, have been invented since 1798.

There is a list of the most important ones. Study it well, and think what we could now do without them. Banish all these, set us back 72 years, and it would seem that the world had suddenly stopped! Yet for nearly 6000 years, men lived without any of these. And then, as it were, they were all hatched out at one brood! Had they come along gradually, covering a long period of time, it would have been no wonder. But all at once they come thick and fast, so that nothing hardly is now restrained from men that they can not do. Is not the hand of God in all this?

The following I have gleaned from the New American Cyclopedia, under their respective heads, showing when each was invented and first applied:

1798. Gas, to light a manufacturing house in Birmingham, England. 1800. Cast-iron plough, first used in America, in N. Y. City. 1802. Steamboat, by Robert Fulton. 1803. Steel pen, by Mr. Wise, England. 1811. Steam printing press, printed the London Times. 1823. Gold pen, John P. Hawkins, America. 1825. Railroad cars. 1825. Furnace, for heating houses, Prof. Johnson, Philadelphia. 1829. Lucifer match, John Walker, England. 1833. Reaper and mower, Obed Hussey, Cincinnati, Ohio. 1837. Telegraph, Prof. Morse. 1839. Photography, Daguerre, France. 1846. First complete sewing-machine, Elias Howe, Jr. 1851. Submarine cable.

This list might be extended almost indefinitely, besides the great improvements made on things before partially invented. It seems wonderful that the world went on for nearly 6000 years without any of these things, to us now almost indispensable. Of late, machinery has been invented, which, in its work, seems almost superhuman. The Phrenological Journal, for Dec., 1870, says of the American Watch Manufacturers: “There are those (machines) which will take a shaving off a hair, or slice up steel like an apple; those which will drill holes invisible to the naked eye; registers which will measure the ten-thousandth part of an inch; screw cutters which will turn out perfect screws so small that, on white paper, they appear like tiny dots.”

“Knowledge shall be increased” in the time of the end, says the Lord. Has it not come? Yet with all this, men are not becoming better, but rather worse, more proud, vain, corrupt, and infidel. Let us prepare for the end.

D. M. CANRIGHT.