p. 9 | THE SPIRIT OF WAR by Lee S. Wheeler

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 5, 1895

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 21, No. 35.

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THE SPIRIT OF WAR.

By Lee S. Wheeler

“PREPARE war, wake up the mighty men, . . . for the day of the Lord is near.” Joel 3:9-14.

“And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged.” Rev. 11:18.

“And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation.” Dan. 12:1.

Such, it is declared, is to be the condition of the world just preceding the end.

Rapidly within the last few years there has been a simultaneous arming of nations, “as if with a prophetic understanding that a terrible and portentous crisis is at hand.” All the modes of warfare have been changed; the awful forces of nature have been utilized, and terrible explosives brought into action. Every resource has been ransacked to furnish material for the conflict. Since 1860 the demand for arms upon the Krupp Gun Works is said to have necessitated an increase of from 176 to more than 20,000 employees.

The construction of immense navies and the support of rapidly-increasing armies has drained the resources, and brought the nations to the very verge of bankruptcy.

Everywhere an impulse is rallying the military spirit. The daily papers are full of war stories. The career of Napoleon, destined to revive the spirit of his times, is the craze of literature. There is a call for military instruction in the schools.

Even the churches, unable to cope with the strange infatuation so foreign to the Gospel of peace, are filling up with “boys’ brigades,” and drilling their sons in the tactics of war.

Alas! is not this that spirit which should “go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty”? Rev. 16:14.

LEE S. WHEELER.