The World as One

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 13, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 19.

THERE have been times in the past when the world was under one swaying scepter. It looks as tho that time would be repeated. The prophets have abundantly predicted it, and the events of the time trend strongly in that direction. The Hon. James Bryce, in a presidential address to the Historical Congress recently voiced something of the same sentiment. He said:

‘Nearly every part of the earth’s surface, except the territories of China and Japan, was either owned or controlled by five or six European races. Eight great powers swayed the political destinies of the globe. Similarly, a few European tongues had overspread all the continents, except Asia, and even there it seemed probable that those few European tongues would before long be learned and used by the educated classes in such wise as to bring those classes into touch with European ideas. . . . Already there were practically only four great religions in the world. Within a century the minor religions might have gone, and possibly only three great faiths would remain, with such accelerated swiftness did change now move. Whatever happened in any part of the globe now had a significance for every other part. Industrial disputes were felt more widely over its surface than those earthquakes in Java which the seismograph recorded at Washington. The money markets were affected simultaneously; the great wave that swung round the world made its last ripples felt in the world’s remotest corner. Finance, even more than politics, had now made the world one community, and finance was more closely interwoven with politics than ever before. World history was tending to become one history, the history no longer of many different races of mankind, occasionally affecting one another’s fortunes, but the history of mankind as a whole, the fortunes of each branch henceforth bound up with those of the others.’

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

In times past, in Babylon, in pagan Rome, in papal Rome, this unification worked against God and His truth. It worked for centralization and oppression. The Scriptures of prophecy indicate that that will be the case in these last days. Mr. Bryce is but outlining, in his forcible description of the trend of the world, just what is told us in the prophecy of the Apocalypse and of Isaiah. In the latter we are told of the great peace confederation that will exalt apostasy to a throne, and in the latter book we are told that the great powers of the world will unite again in restoring the beast power, resulting in apostasy saying, “I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.” Great Babylon — the name of that apostasy — immediately after this, meets her doom, because she “made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.”