p. 16 | A BETTER WORLD

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 25, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 43.

A BETTER WORLD.

This is a world of opposites. Men often argue that the old world is getting better in every way, and as frequently the pleasant dream is most rudely dispelled on the morrow. To-day the earth seems firm and solid; to-morrow its bosom may be heaving like the swells of the sea. Yesterday the grass and grain fields surrounding the quiet prairie village were waving in the balmy, peaceful breezes of summer; to-day they are swept by a cyclone, the village is but a ruined heap, and its people homeless or mangled or dead. Last week the busy manufacturing town in the mountain valley was a-whirr with ceaseless activity; this week it is gone, carried away by the resistless mountain torrent, broken from the pent-up reservoir. To-day the ship sails fair over the bounding billows, with every inch of canvas spread; to-morrow she is straining her powers for very existence in the throes of the tempest. This old physical world is subject to moods and tenses. It is a world of opposites, ending in the sadder, minor chords of night and sorrow and pain and loss. But there is a better world. God has foretold it in the very division of the day He has given us. It is first night then day,—the night, the prophecy of this world of sin, with its moral darkness, through which shines the stars of hope; the day which follows, the divine promise of the glad, eternal inheritance of the sons of God, which shall know no wo, sorrow, pain, death, or hope deferred. Reader, live for the better world.