Prepared for the Closing Work by William Ambrose Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Apr 26, 1906

Prepared for the Closing Work

By William Ambrose Spicer

The government Bureau of Statistics has just published a map of the world, showing the routes of railway and steamship communication over all the earth. It bears witness to the fact that suddenly this development has come, mostly within this generation. The Washington Times refers as follows to the showing of the new map:—

Within the lifetime of men and women now living, the world had not a single mile of railway, or a single steamship crossing the ocean. To-day the world has on land five hundred and fifty thousand miles of railway, and on the ocean six million net tons of sail carrying power, and eighteen million net tons of steam carrying power.

The development of railways has been, up to the present time, chiefly centered in the temperate zone, particularly Europe, and the United States, Mexico, and Canada in America, though Japan, in the Orient, and India, in the tropics, are now fairly well supplied with facilities for land transportation. The great trans-Siberian railway is the sole transcontinental line between Europe and the far East, while Australia’s railways are confined chiefly to a line skirting the southern and eastern coasts, and a half dozen short lines tapping the interior.

In Africa the British colonies at the south are fairly well equipped with railways, while the proposed Cape-to-Cairo transcontinental line is making substantial progress from Cairo, its terminus on the north, and Cape Town, its southern terminus, considerably more than one half of the road being now completed and in operation. South America is still without any great railway system, her facilities being confined chiefly to eastern Brazil, northern Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

The youth and middle-aged of to-day can scarcely appreciate the suddenness with which these developments have come about. Here is a quotation from Woodbridge’s Universal Geography, published in Boston in 1833, which emphasizes the changes since that date:—

New England and the greater part of the Middle States are intersected in every direction by roads, which are usually well constructed and in good repair.

The great increase of facilities for transportation, and the opening up of all lands, has clearly come in these days as the preparation of Providence for a quick work in publishing the tidings of the coming King. Dr. Edward Lawrence, in a strong paragraph on “Providence in Missions,” says:—

There was one other force which was needed to fully equip the church for its universal activity, and to draw the nations of the world together into a net, as the peoples of old had been drawn into the Greco-Roman empire. That was the power of steam, which was to

bind the lands together with bands of steel, turn the oceans into a Mediterranean, make the locomotive an emissary of God’s kingdom, and the steamer a moving-star to herald the day. That invention was not ready to begin its task of annihilating space until the dawn of the nineteenth century. But it was ready in time, for not until then was the purified church itself roused to a fidelity grand enough to undertake the work for which God had been preparing this equipment. It was in 1807, while the young men at Williamstown were praying and studying about missions, that Robert Fulton was making the first trip of the “Clermont,” from New York to Albany.

The way has been prepared by which the message of God’s judgment hour shall yet be proclaimed in the ears of all peoples at the same time. It is not to be as in former times, when reforms spread slowly from land to land. All together the nations and tribes of earth are to be called to the bar of truth. “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” W. A. S.