p. 82 | The End of the World by Dr. Tait

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 11, 1875

The End of the World.

By Dr. Tait

If the body's death seems to teach the lesson that modesty is becoming to the scientific speculator, what shall we say as to the prospects of that material frame which is beyond ourselves—the general orderly frame of the universe as we see it around us? People would suppose, from the way in which you hear men talk now, that there was not the slightest chance of any great organic change ever coming across the outward world in which we live. No doubt God works by fixed laws. No doubt the world goes on morning and evening, and summer and winter; but what reason have you to suppose that it will so go on to infinity? Have no great catastrophes befallen the world before now? Does not physical science itself speak of these catastrophes? What is there to prevent other catastrophes, produced by the operation of laws of which at present we are very ignorant, coming athwart the globe on which we live, and a complete change taking place in the relations in which things, even in the outward world, stand at present, so that in the scriptural sense of the word there may be an end to the world, as there is certainly to be an end of our earthly life? To be sure, things have gone on for a long time in the same way; but is that any proof that they are to go on in the same way forever?

You arise morning after morning in good health and strength, and seem to say to yourself for a time that this will last forever; but one morning something happens, you cannot explain what; the best physician in the world cannot tell you what; but something has happened that lays you on a bed of sickness, and in two days sends you off to your grave a corpse. Will the experience of the reality of the way in which everything has gone on since you were young, till you have attained maturity, save you from that great mischance? Again, men for centuries had ranged over the mountains in Campagna; they thought that all would go on there, herds and flocks feeding and vineyards growing as they had done for centuries; and suddenly there was a strange sound heard, and a volcano burst forth, and the greatest philosopher of the age came to look at it, and lost his life while he was looking. But neither he nor any of the men who had speculated with him ever expected that these great cities were to be swept to destruction, and their beautiful pastures to become for a time an arid wilderness. I do not say such instances explain or tell us distinctly that such catastrophes will befall the whole globe; but at all events, I think they ought to make us modest, seeing that the wisest know so very small a portion of the laws that regulate God's creation.

Surely, we may not dogmatically assume that such catastrophes are beyond the range of possible or probable events. It is true, I say, things have gone on for a long time, and men may say: “Where is the promise of His coming, for all things continue as they were from the beginning of the world”? But still with Him, with whom one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day, there may be changes maturing of which no philosopher of the present or of any previous age has ever dreamed, which will bring this great catastrophe to the globe, which will answer, on the whole outward creation, to something as great as is our passage from life to death, and what is beyond it. I do not think there is anything fanciful in such an expectation. I believe that a man, of that modest mind which is the characteristic of true science, will hesitate before he pronounces with any assurance that such a change may not come over the world as has been distinctly predicted in the Scriptures.—Dr. Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury.