A Destructive Year

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 10, 1871

A Destructive Year.

THE Detroit Post in enumerating the events of the past year says: Another event, which, from its very importance, requires no elaborate treatment, is the meeting of the Ecumenical Council and the decree of infallibility which it promulgated in July. It is one of those transactions in history which cannot be limited to any annual statement, but which spread far and wide, before their limits can be described or defined. It is enough to say, that since the pope was voted to be the infallible ruler of the world, and the vicegerent of the Almighty, he has lost every foot of his temporal possessions; the concordats which bound his interests to the civil governments of Austria and France have been severed; and the Pontifical Sovereignty now rests, as it ought, upon the spiritual and moral government of the Head of the Church.

Having thus reviewed the events which nobody has forgotten, let us briefly glance at those of less prominence, and which perhaps characterize the year quite as much as those we have been considering, because, humanly speaking, they have been completed, and may be laid away in the archives of memory as of no further use except to the historian and antiquary.

Man and nature have combined to mark it as a year of great destruction. The inharmonies of both have contrived to set the whole earth reeling with clash and conflict. Mexico and California have been upheaved by earthquakes. China, and Thibet, and Italy, have been tossed about like waves of the sea by the convulsions beneath, and many lives were destroyed in both of those countries during the month of October alone. The storms upon the Indian Ocean have been of such unusual violence as to severely injure the “Eastern trade” of England. The wrecks that have strewn the British coast testify to an extraordinary year of disaster in those stormy seas. The Gulf of Mexico was ravaged only two months ago with two terrible storms which destroyed scores of vessels and hundreds of human lives. Twice have Cuba and adjacent islands been prostrated with hurricanes destroying more than a thousand lives and many million dollars’ worth of property. In addition to the ordinary fires, which we presume do not differ in number or in the extent of the loss, from those which occurred in other years, there were fierce conflagrations, destroying a third of the city of Constantinople, consuming vast tracts of forest in Canada and New York, and seizing upon human victims as sacrifices to the god whom the Persians worship.

On sea and land the recklessness and ignorance of men or their weakness in presence of Nature when aroused and angry, have furnished the average number, we presume, of railroad casualties, of shipwrecks, and explosions. But there were four maritime disasters demanding special remembrance; the loss of the United States naval steamer Oneida in Japanese waters, sunk by the British steamer Bombay, in January; that of the City of Boston, wrecked early in the year; of the British iron-clad Captain, which went down off Cape Finisterre on the 7th of September, with five hundred persons on board of her, who were all lost; and of the Cambria, wrecked off the coast of Ireland on the 19th of October. In these four vessels more than one thousand people perished.

When we add to the destruction wrought by nature the loss which human nature has inflicted, in Cuba, in South America, and in the pleasant land of France, it is hardly extravagant to say that the property thus swept out of existence will scarcely be replaced by the labor of the world for the next ten years. The Chinese have massacred the Christians in China, and the Christians have massacred the Chinese in California.