A Mad World | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 11, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 43.

“A Mad World”

Not many weeks ago Mr. Lloyd-George, in the House of Commons, made a strong speech in regard to the serious problem that had arisen through the expenditure of so much money for armaments. The London Daily Mail had a short editorial comment on his speech, in which were these significant sentences:

“Mr. Lloyd-George’s diatribe against armaments is one more reminder, if any were needed, that in the world of to-day force rules as brutally and nakedly as in the world of Charlemagne. The six leading powers of Europe are between them spending some $1,750,000,000 a year on naval and military preparations. And there is no prospect of this sum diminishing, but every prospect of its being increased.”

In speaking of the peace societies and the general conditions in the world, the Mail asks:

“What results have they produced? They influence all governments more or less, but they have not yet succeeded in converting one; and their effect on opinion at large is at present inappreciable.

“So we jog along, heading carelessly for something like bankruptcy, with discontent growing everywhere more pronounced and more bitter, and the masses more conscious of their disabilities and less acquiescent in their fate, and the pent-up unrest releasing itself from time to time in floods of popular disorder which are no sooner driven back than statesmanship takes up once more its Sisyphian task. A mad world, my masters!”

These are not the hysterical utterances of some one who would like to make out conditions as bad as possible, regardless of fact. The editor of the Mail would be glad to have us think that conditions are not so bad as they are; but when he sees the enormous war budgets that are piling higher and higher every year, the facts compel him, as they should compel every one, to say that the world is mad with the spirit of war. Some men may try to minimize it, some may try to make light of it; but there stand the stupendous facts, and they can not be put down.”

And right alongside these stupendous facts, let the clear prophetic utterance also stand out which tells us when the judgment-day is impending and the second coming of Christ is right at hand, that—

“The nations were wroth, and Thy wrath came, and the time of the dead to be judged, and the time to give their reward to Thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and to them that fear Thy name, the small and the great; and to destroy them that destroy the earth.”

This is only one of the many prophecies that foretell these conditions. But observe that the prophecy says that “the nations were wroth.” And leading editors, who would gladly speak in a different vein, are forced by the conditions to say, almost in the very words of the prophet, “A mad world, my masters!”

And this statement by the editor of the Mail is not an isolated utterance of this character; for Sir Edward Grey, England’s great statesman, in addressing the House something over a year ago, on the subject of “the relations of Great Britain and Germany,” said:

“It is really as if, in the atmosphere of the world, there were some mischievous influence at work which troubles and excites every part of it. We are passing, this year, through a period of great excitement; it is so still. Some countries are in revolution, others are at war; and in several countries which are neither in revolution nor at war, there are people who seem to delight in discussing how near they have been, or are, or are likely to be, either to revolution or to war in the past, the present, or the future. Really it is as if the world were indulging in a fit of political alcoholism, and the best that can be done by those of us who are in positions of responsibility is to keep cool and sober.”

Sir Edward feels the pressure of the war spirit so strongly that it seems to him “as if, in the atmosphere of the world, there were some mischievous influence at work which troubles and excites every part of it.” Place by the side of the statesman’s utterance the words of the great prophet of Patmos, written nearly two thousand years ago, as recorded in the twelfth to the fourteenth verses of the sixteenth chapter of Revelation. The prophet foresaw “the spirits of devils, working signs, and going to the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to stir them to the war of the great day of God the almighty.”

The evidence is overwhelming. The great day is approaching with intense rapidity. Joys that are indescribable fill the soul of any one who knows the Master, and who knows that the events of this time are all pointing with unmistakable clearness to the great day of His second advent.