Appalling Calamities by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 19, 1872

Appalling Calamities.

By Editor

Just after last week's Review had gone to press, the telegraph brought the news of the most appalling calamity that has befallen the country since the Chicago fire of thirteen months ago, and one of the same nature. This time it was Boston, not Chicago, in flames. We need not give particulars of this great conflagration, as they have been already for days so fully before the country. Two hundred acres of land literally packed with the loftiest and costliest buildings in the country, were swept and cleared by the flames. Ninety millions and upwards of property destroyed. The business of Boston seriously crippled in three great lines of industry. The flames skipping from roof to roof, and the engines not powerful enough to reach them. No adequate number of horses to be had on account of the horse distemper, to remove property. A gale sweeping over the fated city, and yet the flames making rapid progress directly against the wind, according to the Boston Journal. These are some of the features of this calamity. The fire commenced at 7:30 on the evening of Nov. 9, and raged till the afternoon of the following day. Chicago, the victim of the calamity of last year, was the first to send aid to the Boston sufferers. There is already a great rise in woolen and leather goods, on account of the immense quantity of such goods destroyed by the fire.

The other calamity now afflicting the country, the horse distemper, though passing very generally from its first stage, where it earliest appeared, is not to any great degree alleviated as to its results. It runs into other and more fatal diseases. Multitudes of horses are disabled and dying, and the disease is still spreading, threatening as one paper says to become universal. Mules were imported to take the place of horses, and the disease has attacked them. It is also seizing upon the wild beasts of the forest, according to an item which we publish in this paper. In some places we learn that domestic fowl are becoming diseased, and a report comes from Ohio that the milk disease is there largely prevailing among cows, so affecting the milk that sickness inevitably follows its use.

The simple lesson from all these things, as plain as the hand-writing on Belshazzar's palace wall, and as easily read if people would do it in the light of the fore-warnings of God's word, is that God's judgments are abroad in the earth by which he would awake them to righteousness before the coming of the great day. Happy the few who heed the lesson and prepare!