Fire and Flood by Uriah Smith

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 12, 1871

Fire and Flood.

By Uriah Smith

The earth is becoming paralytic. It is like the poor epileptic who was brought to our Lord to be healed, who ofttimes fell into the fire and oft into the water; with only this difference, that the earth is in fire and water at one and the same time. While our Western States were kiln-dried by long weeks of cloudless sun, and then swept by fiery cyclones and burning tornadoes, which sent balls of fire like bullets through hickory plough-handles, and melted the pennies in men's pockets, and took the life of every living thing within reach of their blasting breath, other parts of the country have been soaked with continuous rains, and damaged with uncommon floods.

And other parts of the world besides our own have been subjected to extremes of this nature. From China the papers bring the following report:—

“ . . . In the north of China there have been inundations of a very destructive character. In New-Chiang 20,000 square miles were submerged, and 1,000 people were drowned. . . . A terrible typhoon visited the region of Macao on the 2d of September, and, besides doing immense damage to property, destroyed 300 lives. . . . U. S. minister Low has returned to Pekin, and the Corean expedition appears to have been given up.”

And now, as if all the caloric in our atmosphere had been expended in the recent preternatural fires, winter has set in with uncommon fierceness and unusually soon. A Detroit Post, of last week, says:—

“The fierceness with which winter has assailed us here is not local. In London, the cold has been so sharp, the air has bitten not only so “shrewdly” and “eagerly,” but so savagely, that seventeen persons perished in one night. In the West, on the other hand, in Utah, the snow is reported to be ten feet deep. Day before yesterday it was only three degrees above zero at Duluth, and thirteen at Marquette, and thirteen in Portland. The poor will suffer many hardships, and the demands upon the benevolent will be more exacting than ever.”

More and more apparent is it becoming that the only hope of nature, or of the race, is in the promised Redeemer. Earth will never be healed of her maladies, till he shall return and set things to rights in this disordered realm. And let the day not be long in coming.

U. S.