The Spirit of Prophecy in the Advent Movement

“Great Changes”

In the last volume of the “Testimonies for the Church,” issued before the World War, it was stated: “Great changes are soon to take place in our world, and the final movements will be rapid ones.”—Vol. IX, p. 11. SPIAM 112.3

Out of the world conflict, great and sudden changes surely came. In the 1926 postwar volumes of the “Encyclopedia Britannica” the editor reviewed the great changes of the fifteen-year period beginning in 1910 when the former edition of the Encyclopedia had closed. The editor reviewed the rapid changes up to 1926. He called attention to the fact that during that period there had been “a universal revolution in human affairs.” Great changes had indeed come, and the movements had been “rapid ones.” The Britannica’s summing up of these rapid changes is worth setting down, even now, though swifter yet the changes come in this present time. The Encyclopedia said: SPIAM 112.4

“There have been no more momentous and transforming years in the experience of mankind. Formerly that space of a decade and a half would have been called at best a period. We may justly term it an epoch. It crowds into itself more historic drama and social significance, more economic energy and moral ferment, more destructive force, yet more constructive effort and idealism in every sphere, than have been known in most centuries. In wide regions the former political structure and lines of the map have been altered in a manner that would have surpassed all powers of belief if prophesied beforehand. Old empires and dynasties have vanished; new nations and systems have appeared. With this, science and invention have gone forward with accelerating speed to wonderful results. All industrial life is searched by questioning and full of new developments.... SPIAM 113.1

“Wide and signal as have been the changes in the world’s external circumstances, still more general and profound have been the changes in the world’s internal thought and feeling. In fifteen years, as a result partly of physical conflict unparalleled for scale, violence, and intensity; partly of the subsequent mental reactions, ...there has occurred a universal revolution in human affairs and the human mind.”—Volume XXIX. SPIAM 113.2

Well have those phrases of the Spirit of prophecy recurred again and again to our minds during yet more recent years. We are living in a “split-second world,” as one inventor has stated, telling how the antipodes are but a few seconds distant by radio communication. “The tempest is coming.” We may well repeat it. All creation is hastening on at a pace unparalleled. The Spirit of prophecy spoke truly as it forewarned, “Great changes are soon to take place in our world, and the final movements will be rapid ones.” SPIAM 113.3