PAST CENTURY MARVELOUS CHAPTER XIII. PROPHECY AND MODERN INVENTIONS 92. About 2500 years ago did Daniel foretell the coming of our great modern inventions? BIBLE EVIDENCE. Daniel 12:4 (B. C. 534)-But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. SECULAR EVIDENCE. And in this our day knowledge has been most wonderfully increased. Knowledge of the Scriptures has been increased. We have many agencies now for instruction in the truths of the Bible which were not known a little more than a century ago. "The London Religious Tract Society was organized in 1799, the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804, the American Bible Society in 1816, and the American Tract Society in 1825..... A little more than one hundred years ago there was not a Sunday school in the world, the first one being organized by Robert Raikes, at Gloucester, England, in 1784. Now there are more than 285,000 such schools, with over 28,000,000 officers, teachers, and pupils." Bible Readings for the Home Circle, pp. 237, 238. And knowledge in every other line of human endeavor has signally marked the past century. . . . . All the faculties of the human mind have been sharpened to an amazing degree during the last hundred years. Until a century and a half ago men used about the same means of locomotion as Abraham did when he went from Ur of the Chaldees into the land of promise. They rode upon some beast of burden or were drawn in some crude, primitive_cart. . . . But suddenly there came a change. Human genius awoke and began to produce time- and labor-saving devices in great numbers.... The first steamboat was operated in 1807, the first steam printingpress in 1811, railroad cars in 1825, the reaper and mower in 1833 (the year in which the stars fell), the submarine cable in 1851, the automatic air-brake in 1872, electric railways in 1879, and the steam turbine in 1888. Electrotyping was first used in 1837, chloroform as an anaesthetic in 1847, and radium in 1902. The electric telegraph was invented in 1837, the camera in 1839, the sewing-machine in 1846, the typewriter in 1868, the telephone in 1876, the phonograph in 1877, the modern seismograph in 1880, the linotype in 1885, the wireless 118 WONDERFUL INVENTIONS telegraph in 1895, the moving picture machine in the same year, the monotype in 1896, and the first successful aeroplane in 1903. Just a few years ago automobiles, aeroplanes, and submarines were unknown. Automobiles are as common today as buggies were twentyfive years ago, and regular passenger-carrying aeroplanes are now being built which will carry passengers faster than the fastest railroad train. On July 9, 1916, the first merchant submarine to cross the Atlantic, a vessel carrying seven hundred fifty tons of freight, landed at Baltimore after running a blockade of enemy cruisers. There can be no question but that we have reached the day pointed to by Daniel as "the time of the end." We have truly reached the age of the increase of knowledge. On every hand there are indications that the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. CARLYLE B. HAYNES, The Return of Jesus. "Many shall run to and fro." When your grandmother was living, if she had been suddenly told that you could go from New York City to San Francisco in the time that we can to-day, she would have fainted. When in the days of our fathers they left the East and went out West, they told them good-by as if they never expected to see them again, but what was way out West then is only three days away now. You meet people in jams at the depot and you say to yourself: "Where are all these people going?" I don't know, but they are on their way. How many of you have been in New York City? How many of you in San Francisco? How many of you in Denver? How many of you in Kansas City? How many down South? How many of you up in Canada? See? Many of you have raised your hands on each question. We are going "to and fro," aren't we? Another sign of the end times. PAUL RADER, Pastor, Moody Church, Chicago. The Signs of the Times, p. 15. It was the writer's privilege to recently visit the Rockwell Aviation Field at Coronado Beach, San Diego, Calif. This field was established for war purposes, but it is now being made a permanent training camp and at present there are between four and five hundred machines and about 1,500 men stationed there. One stood in amazement as they saw the large number of machines which are being successfully used today in air travel. Some were aeroplanes and some were seaplanes or hydroplanes. The rapidity with which they could travel through the air or on the water was almost unbelievable, some of the machines going at the rate of 135 miles per hour..... Certainly we are living in an age of great and marvelous inventions and accomplishments. We are living in a time spoken of by Daniel the Prophet-the time of the end: "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." Dan. 12:4. Never was there such a time of rapid transit as now and all perfected in a few short years. These things are all significant. MARY W. PAULSON, M.D., Medical Superintendent, Hinsdale Sanitarium. "Air Conquest Fulfilling God's Word." The Life Boat, April, 1919, p. 109. AMAZING STATEMENT OF PROF. LARKIN CHAPTER XIV. PROPHECY AND THE LATE EUROPEAN WAR BIBLE EVIDENCE. 93. Did Jesus prophesy the perplexity of the world during the late European War? Luke 21:25, 26-And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. SECULAR EVIDENCE. Prof. Edgar Lucian Larkin, Director of the Mount Lowe Astronomical Observatory, Southern California, and author of "Within the Mind Maze" and other works, makes the following startling statement: "The mind of the human race is now in a dangerous state. How do I know this? -By reading my simply amazing letters received daily from so many parts of the world, and by conversing with travelers here from nearly every nation on the planet. Human thought is in an abnormal paranoiac condition. A paranoiac is liable to become violent at any moment. So is the human race, now as I write. I would not have the reader see the letters received here; I burn them. They reveal an awful state of mentation.... Some fearful influence is agitating the lower faculties of the mind of man. My books have elicited thousands of replies, and I am alarmed over the thoughts therein. I assert and state and send forth from this mountain summit this day, Feb. 21, 1916, that the mind of the human race is in a dreadful condition." ARTHUR G. DANIELLS, The World War, pp. 86, 87. "The wild onrush of events in a world at war;.... the dazed perplexity of the world's most trusted leaders,—all these are characteristic of the days through which we are living."-Nicholas Murray Butler, President Columbia University, in “A World in Ferment," p. 88. The world is in perplexity. To all the sufferings incident to human experience in normal times has been added, by the most terrible of all wars, "distress of nations, with perplexity.". The year 1918 opened with twenty-three nations at war, and ten more had severed diplomatic relations. The population of these nations is fifteen hundred million,-more than seven eighths of the human race.. ... The fourth year of the war found fifty million men under arms, notwithstanding the loss of thirty million by death, wounds, and capture, during the first three years of conflict.... Conservative estimates place the cost of the war for the first three and a half years at one 120 THE WORLD-WAR-MAD hundred twenty-five billion dollars. These figures stagger the human mind. A billion!.... The expenditure of a billion dollars for this war represents a dollar for every minute that has passed since the birth of Christ to the close of 1900. But this war has cost one hundred twentyfive times that sum, which means that in three and a half years these nations have spent a sum equal to one hundred twenty-five dollars for every minute of the Christian era. During the first ten months the United States has been in the war it has cost the Government seven billion dollars. This is an average expenditure of twenty-four million dollars a day, one million an hour, or $277 a second, day and night. What might not have been accomplished had this money been used for the saving of life and the betterment of living conditions! . . . . While it is true that the experience of the human race has always been one of unrest, of change, and of conflict, never in all that long history has this spirit been so nearly universal as at the present moment..... The editor of the Washington Herald, in the issue of January 26, 1918, says: 'A war-crazed world may be a convert to chaos before it finishes its madness. Why not? The unbelievable has ceased to be merely possible.... Russia has become the political insane asylum of the world. It is the maddest thing in a mad, mad universe. . And the editor of the New York Evening Sun (Aug. 8, 1914) asks, "Did such strange cross-currents ever before flow across a page of history?" ARTHUR G. DANIELLS, A World in Perplexity.—1918. ... In the year 1914 there suddenly burst upon the world the most terrible war which has ever been known in the history of the race. Five years ago Sir Edward Grey, addressing the members of the House of Commons, said: "It is really as if, in the atmosphere of the world, there were some mischievous influence at work which troubles and excites every part of it..... Some countries are in revolution, others are at war... Really it is as if the world were indulging in a fit of political alcoholism, and the best that can be done by those of us who are in positions of responsibility is to keep cool and sober. GEORGE B. THOMPSON, General Conference Field Secretary, What Do These 94. Did Daniel, about 2500 years ago, prophesy failure for William Hohenzollern's dream of world empire? BIBLE EVIDENCE. Daniel 2:43 (B. C. 603)-And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. SECULAR EVIDENCE. About two hundred years later the iron monarchy of Rome (as Gibbon describes it) became the mistress of the then known world, symbolized in the image by the legs of iron. The feet of the image, composed partly of iron and partly of clay, was interpreted by Daniel |