The Atlantic Telegraph Cable
By Editor
Long before receiving this paper our readers will doubtless have heard of the successful laying of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable, connecting Europe with America. We are glad the enterprise has proved successful, inasmuch as we are glad to see these last days filling up their catalogue of wonders. The avidity with which people will seize upon every great event to prop up their vain and delusive notions of a world’s conversion and temporal millennium, is wonderfully shown in this event. Popular theologians are everywhere hailing it as the “great event calculated to hasten the triumphs of civilization and christianity!” and they are everywhere singing doxologies in its praise. But if its moral effect shall be other than to render man self-confident, proud, presumptuous, and defiant of his Maker, it will be different from that of any other great achievement which science and civilization have effected in modern times. By this wonderful achievement the United States is placed in telegraphic communication with thirty-one nations; and the news of Europe instead of waiting the tardy progress of steamers across the Atlantic, as heretofore, will be flashed to our shores with the instantaneousness of lightning. Says Henry Ward Beecher, “I dare scarcely any longer think of what shall be. I am now prepared to believe almost anything. All I ask is that the story shall be big enough!”