THE GREAT EARTHQUAKE by D. T. Taylor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Sep 28, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 38.

THE GREAT EARTHQUAKE.

By D. T. Taylor

BY THE LATE D. T. TAYLOR.

“And when he had opened the sixth seal, there was a great earthquake.”—Rev. 6:12.

A universal crash As if the very ribs of nature broke, And all her dark foundations failed. —Anon.

Are there special signs of our Lord’s advent near at hand? Are there special tokens of the last days? Of what kind are they? Where are we to look for them? The world for more than a century has been witnessing unusual phenomena in nature. Is any of it prophetical? Has nature witnessed for the truth? Does not the Creator speak in the thunder (Ps. 77:18), flash His eye in the lightning, (Job 27:3) and stamp His foot in the earthquake (Isa. 29:6)? Doth not God hold the cyclone in His fist? Prov. 30:4. When a new age opened after the Deluge, was it not preceded by the most terrible convulsion of record? Was not the opening of the Jewish age accompanied by a manifestation of Deity, and with volcanic action, thunder, lightning, and a quaking of the ground? Ex. 19:18. And when Israel went out of bondage in Egypt, did not a nation march to the awful music of darkness, plague, and storm? When Jesus came the first time, was nature silent? Was not the divine presence accompanied by a rare and unparalleled starry wonder, never by science explained (Matt. 2:2), by solar obscuration (Luke 23:45), and by earthquake (Matt. 27:54)?

Can we suppose that His last advent to judge the world and change all things will be preceded and accompanied by a display of wonderful phenomena any less grand, less striking, less awful? On the contrary, are we not warned of the thunder, lightning, and hail (Rev. 16:17–21); a mighty crash as if the ribs of nature broke (2 Peter 3:10), and of the unparalleled coming earthquake “such as was not since men were upon the earth” (Rev. 16:18)? And before this final scene, are we not foretold of earthquakes, pestilence, famines, solar obscurations, lunar marvels, star-falls, roaring seas, national distress, followed by the sign of the Son of Man, who then comes in His glory? Matt. 24:29, etc.; Rev. 6:12. “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but He revealeth His secrets unto His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7); and “those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children” (Deut. 29:29). Jesus and John were prophets. We are not. We do not prophesy. We only repeat their prophecies; we but demonstrate their fulfilment. The material in history with which to do so is most abundant. Let us candidly name and review the striking events occurring in nature, which the Master has foretold as tokens of His near approach. If we do this with a reasonable mind and a heart that looks with affection and desire towards “His appearing,” we shall find our place in this age’s history to be very near the end. Taking up the physical signs we have

named in their scriptural order, we propose first to say something concerning “the great earthquake” of Rev. 6:12. Is this a prophecy of a real quaking of the earth? Is there a seismic convulsion in the past that answers to it? and when and where did it occur?

Will the reader please observe the following:—

1. The thread of figure and symbol appears to be broken at the sixth seal, and save some strong metaphors, we come down the chain of seals to literal events.

2. The earthquake is the first event under the sixth seal. It is catastrophic and ominous.

3. The seals are opened in numerical order. As the earthquake is under the “sixth,” and there are but seven in all, its place is therefore near the end.

4. It occurs in order, soon after a season of martyrdoms, as described under the fifth seal. But not at the end of the season, as we see by the answer to the martyr’s cry. Others were to shed their blood at the altar. The earthquake’s place is therefore not far from the end of the season of great martyrdoms.

5. This time of persecution and martyrdoms without doubt lies between the establishment of the Inquisition, A.D. 1200, and its extinction and the abolition of torture about A.D. 1800.

6. The earthquake occurs just prior to a remarkable solar obscuration—a sackcloth veiling—such as took place at the crucifixion of Christ.

7. It occurs also (and is named in such order) prior to the great star-falls, and not at, but before, the day of God’s wrath.

8. The earthquake is therefore marked and located, phenomenal and premonitory. It fills a special niche in the prophetic chain of six links. It can only have its place in a later link. One earthquake among many is singled out and made prophetic. It is only noticed as an awful fact—no details are given.

9. It is not styled a destructive earthquake, but a “great” one. The Greek megas denotes loud, mighty, large. Webster’s first meaning of “great” is “Large in respect to spatial quantity, solidity, surface, or linear dimensions; of wide extent.” It is as if the seer had written, “I saw an earthquake of marvelously wide extent.” Such is the kind of earthquake we are to look for in the earth’s history. We find it in the last half of the last century. Just such an one occurred near the end of the period of persecution we have named as lying between 1200 and 1800. We now call attention to the so-called earthquake of Lisbon, 1755, which might better be styled, “The earthquake of the world.”

10. This convulsion ranks also as “great” in the classifications of science, which, dividing such under three heads, calls those which convulse the globe, ruin cities, violently agitate the sea, and destroy life, as “first-class” and “great.” Hundreds of destructive earthquakes had previously occurred; one at least in A.D. 526, in which Antioch perished, and a greater destruction of life took place. It was great in destructiveness, but local in extent. The earthquake of 1755 was great in the primary sense of the word, great in the sense of “spatial quantity” of surface shaken. That no greater had ever occurred is evident. Expositors can not fail to notice that nowhere in this or any other prophetic chain running down through the centuries does the pen of Inspiration take special notice of any one earthquake until this one is reached. A new era was dawning. Nature in unison with the groaning church of God uttered a loud groan. It was responsive to the cry of the bloodstained , dying elect, “How long?” The thunder-stamp of the earthquake’s feet revealed God’s approval of the holy martyrs, and His indignation at their enemies.

I detail this mighty throb as follows:—

1. Its center was in the vast Atlantic Ocean, out from the coast of Spain and Portugal. Lisbon was its chief victim, but the wave stayed not for one city—it rolled out and took in continents.

2. No great earthquake had occurred in the Spanish peninsula for a period of one hundred and fifty years. It came without warning on Lisbon. It began with an awful roar of subterranean thunder that appalled all hearts, and with the bursting of electric flames out of the earth.

3. It came Nov. 1, 1755, on the Romish idolatrous festival of All Saints’ Day, when the churches of Lisbon and every other city were crowded with superstitious and ignorant worshipers. Its greatest destructiveness was experienced by the papal world, the authors of the previous martyrdoms.

4. Other parts of Europe were warned by shocks that for several months had been experienced. Strange and unaccountable phenomena were seen in the more northern countries, but no destruction of life occurred there.

5. Preceding and accompanying the great shock, there were halos around the sun by day, and the moon by night; water in wells and rivers would suddenly rise and fall; the land was swept by violent storms; wells of water changed their color; rats and reptiles came forth from their holes in terror; animals appeared to be filled with foreboding; all Spain and Portugal trembled violently. In England the hot well at Bristol became red as blood, and so thick and turbid that the water could not be drunk. Water in a common well turned black as ink, the tide of the river turned up stream, and all England, Ireland, and Scotland were in wonder. Loch Lomond, in Scotland, rose several feet, and then fell again. In Bohemia the warm springs of Teplitz all at once disappeared, and then furiously burst forth, and overflowed the region with water the color of ochre. The inhabitants were “struck with awe.”

6. Lisbon, having a population of 250,000 souls, was in a moment smitten. “Appleton’s Encyclopedia” says, “It is believed that 60,000 persons perished in the space of six minutes.” L. N. Thomas, a student of earthquakes, writes: “The people rushed for safety to a magnificent new quay recently erected. In a moment it sunk with all the people (6,000) beneath the waves. Afterwards the water here was found to be a hundred fathoms deep. The ships that were fastened to the quay also went down, and never rose again.” Vesuvius, then in full eruption, suddenly became quiet. The earth heaved and rolled in great waves like water, with a velocity of nearly 8,000 feet in a second, and then at a rate of 2,000 feet in a second the earth-wave passed over Europe and the seas. In two hours great fires broke out, and at the end of three days Lisbon was reduced to cinders, and the city has, it is said, never recovered from the calamity. The shocks lasted a period of forty days.

7. Ruin sped on, and ran riot. Colombo, Oporto, and Braga were shattered in pieces. St. Ubes, having a population of 20,000, was swallowed up in the sea!—Blackwood’s Magazine. July, 1844. Malaga, in Spain, was mostly destroyed; more than half the island of Madeira was laid waste. Three thousand miles eastward, in the Archipelago, so severe was the shock as to cause the utter demolition of 2,000 houses in Mitylene. Southward, 1,000 miles in distance, the city of Fez, in Morocco, was one-half thrown down, and 10,000 Moors perished.

8. From Lyell we learn that the vast mountains, Arrabida, Estrella, Julio, Marvan, and Cintra, some of the largest in Portugal, were impetuously shaken from their very foundations; some opened at their summits, split, and rent in twain; they threw down avalanches of rocks into the valleys, flames issued from them, and their tops were hidden in smoke or dust. The Alps, the British Islands, the peninsula of Sweden and Norway, the coast of the Baltic, and Germany felt the throb. Iceland, well up against the pole, trembled, while the volcano Kotluggia burst forth into a great eruption. Thus northward, for 6,000 miles, was the globe agitated. For hundreds of miles the coast of Portugal was swept by a tidal wave sixty-five feet in height. Then the wave rolled north to Ireland, and rushed into the harbor of Kinsale, whirling about the ships, and deluging the market places. On a ship forty leagues west of St. Vincent, in the Atlantic, the violent concussion threw men a foot and a half perpendicularly up from the deck! At Antigua, Barbadoes, and Martinique, in the West Indies, full 3,000 miles westward, where the tide usually rises but several feet, it suddenly rose above twenty feet, the water being of an inky blackness! Lyell says that all the great lakes of North America were sensibly agitated, and declares that “in no part of the volcanic region of Southern Europe has so tremendous an earthquake occurred in modern times.”—“Geology,” page 495.

All testify to its vast extent. Thomas writes of it as extending “from Iceland to Maggadon, in Morocco, and from Bohemia to the West Indies.” The “Cyclopedia of History” affirms, “The shock was felt nearly all over Europe, in the north part of Africa, in the Atlantic Ocean, and at the Antilles.” The author styles it, “The most terrible earthquake that ever occurred” (page 639). Blackwood styles it, “The most terrible earthquake on record.” Mungo Ponton characterizes the disturbance as of a “very violent kind,” and felt “over a vast extent of the earth’s surface.”—“History of Earthquakes.” Humboldt (in “Cosmos,” vol. 1) says that a portion of the earth “four times as great as Europe was simultaneously shaken.” Ignatius Donnelly, quoting Humboldt, styles the area covered “VERY GREAT,” while the French authors, Zurcher and Margolle, in “Volcanoes and Earthquakes,” a work of much interest, go beyond Humboldt, and testify, “It was felt over a vast area, said to be greater than four times the size of Europe.”—“Page 177.”

“The earthquake which destroyed Lisbon in the year 1755,” writes W. M. Higgins, Fellow of the Geological Society, “was the most violent that ever occurred in Europe, at least within the record of authentic history.”—“The Earth,” page 308.

“In no part of the volcanic region of southern Europe has so tremendous an earthquake occurred in modern times, as that which began on the first of November, 1755, at Lisbon; the area over which this convulsion extended is very remarkable,” says Sir Charles Lyell.—“Geology,” pages 494, 495.

The earth shook for three years, and before the land became quiet, 200,000 human beings perished. Surely this was what the Seer of Patmos beheld—“a great earthquake.” If we consider that the area of Europe is 3,755,156 square miles, this sum multiplied by four is 15,020,624 square miles, and if, as asserted, the convulsed area of land and sea was greater than four Europes, then 20,000,000

of square miles of our globe experienced the mighty convulsion! We can not well question this estimate. The simultaneous shock for its vast extent has no parallel in earth’s history. Why does it fail literally to fulfil the prophecy? And is not God in the earthquake? Ps. 104:32; Hag. 2:6; Job 9:6.

And so the “great earthquake” passed into history, and is so known and recorded. Occurring at the right time, between the era of the church’s most awful tribulation and the season of special solar and stellar phenomena—transpiring in the right place, on the soil of Europe, which as all students know is the main prophetic field—celebrated in history by the highest scientific authority, of vaster area than any other registered by man—this bolt, as with a cannon’s boom or a bell’s peal, signalized the near ending of the dark and bloody days for the elect of God, and the oncoming of the era of the open Bible, the wide-spread Gospel, and the constellation of signs that herald the return of the Bridegroom. Who can doubt it?