p. 296 | Conflicts Which Are Inevitable

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Tuesday, May 12, 1885

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 62, No. 19

Conflicts Which Are Inevitable.

Three great questions, involving social, political, and religious revolutions of untold magnitude, and startling in their apparent nearness, are looming up in the mists of the future. Hardly, however, can we speak of them as involved in mist; for they are rapidly assuming a wonderful and unmistakable distinctness.

1. The Eastern Question. England holds possession of India. Russia is determined at least to share in so rich a prize. The great highway from Russia to India lies through the Asiatic provinces of Toorkistan and Afghanistan in a south-easterly direction. Toorkistan being already secured, Russia is now engaged in crushing in the north-western boundary of Afghanistan. Her objective point is India. This all the world understands. Before this is reached, however, these two nations, England and Russia, must come into conflict. This is just as inevitable as that two trains starting from opposite ends of a single line of railroad, and each seeking at a continuous rate of speed to make the other end, must somewhere come into collision. However much parleying and quibbling there may be, temporarily postponing the issue, it is only temporarily postponed; and the crisis is sure to come. Whoever knew a greedy and unscrupulous nation to become bankrupt in pretexts for carrying out its own ends?

And the conflict which must come involves the fate of Turkey and all the East in the near future. If men would now turn the glass of prophecy upon the situation—that only glass that carries the vision beyond earthly scenes—right there they would behold coming into the field of view, the coronation of the Lord Jesus over all the kings of the earth, and the all-conquering and everlasting kingdom of our God.

2. The Labor Question. By this is meant the conflict that is approaching between the laboring classes and capitalists. The rich are doing just what the apostle James said they would do in the last days—heaping up treasures. And laborers are largely in the condition he describes also; that is, with wages “kept back by fraud.” Too largely capital is concentrated in the hands of monopolies—monopolies which systematically oppress and rob the working-men. When they consider that the enormous wealth of many capitalists is accumulated at their expense, and see themselves growing poorer and the rich richer, and when they are themselves goaded by the gnawings of hunger and frenzied by the sight of suffering wives and children, it is not unaccountably strange that they, being human, should determine to meet fraud by violence, and recover some of that wealth which they consider justly their own. But this means plunder, robbery, mob-law, riot, and ruin.

David Gregg, a minister, in a paper read before the Philothean Society, New York, March 14, 1885, said:—

“There is unusual discontent among the laboring classes. . . . The hard times have reduced or taken away the wages of the laboring classes, and they feel their helplessness; they recognize how little there is between them and starvation. Thrown out of work, they have time to think and talk of their helplessness, and of the treatment which they have received from society and from capitalists and from monopolies, and to discuss their rights and their grievances. . . . These times of idleness are used by the working classes for the purpose of effecting labor organizations. . . . These organizations are growing. They are the index of a coming revolution.”

He further states that “the laboring classes have a cause and a case.” “Powerful monopolies,” he continues, “are ‘grinding them down without a single compunction of conscience. The most conscienceless, godless thing on the earth, is a rich monopoly. The ancient demons cast out of priestcraft and kingcraft, have entered into the herd of monopolies, and are incarnated in them. Thus incarnated, they are ready for every devilish thing. The oppressing monopolies, like kingcraft of old, call for a revolution that will result in putting monopolies into bonds. Oppressing monopolies must go.”

The Christian Union, in an article on the same subject, says:—

“The whole of society is virtually preparing for war. A marshaling of forces is going on; the parties being those determined to maintain the industrial system as it is, and those determined to abolish it.”

The significance of all these things is that they are evidently to be prominent elements in the closing time of trouble, which must therefore be close at hand.

3. The Sunday Question. It is coming to be recognized more and more that a settled contest is springing up throughout the length and breadth of the land over the Sunday-Sabbath question; the effort being, on the one hand to maintain it as a social and civil institution in the United States, and on the other hand to overthrow it as such. We may rejoice in the coming agitation on one account; and that is that a wide spread interest will be created on the subject, and thus a golden opportunity be offered to present the teaching of the Scriptures on the Sabbath question, with the prospect that many will listen. Will the public mind ever become so enlightened on this question that at least influential and supposed to be intelligent public journals will be ashamed to make such assertions as the following? One of our religious exchanges, speaking of certain congressmen who encroached upon Sunday time in their congressional work, and arguing that they were therefore not fit to be entrusted with public duties, says:—

“The forbearance of God will be exhausted, as it has been in the past, and the men who abuse his Sabbaths will be given up to the folly of their own hearts.”

And this, by one who is every week trampling into the very dust the only divine Sabbath which God ever gave, or man has ever had, and trying to bolster up in its place, a foul usurper, which God abhors, and which he has most severely denounced in his word. Brethren, there lies before us an ocean of ignorance on this question, only agitated here and there by a whirlpool of dishonesty. The circumstances call upon every man, woman, and child who has an understanding of the teaching of God’s word on this question, to cry aloud and spare not.