Page:Signswondersgodw0000wood.djvu/232

 been visited one or more times by a great convulsion of nature, and they have been increasing at an alarming rate. I mention these only that have been disastrous to life and property.

In 1899 six villages were destroyed and seven others damaged by an earthquake in Russia, in which one thousand people lost their lives. In the same year, in Asia Minor, over sixteen hundred deaths occurred from the same cause, while many others were injured.

Most of us can recall the earthquake in South Carolina, in which three-fourths of the city of Charleston was destroyed, and about one hundred people perished. This same seismic disturbance travelled across the Atlantic, and visited France and Italy, two thousand people perishing in the latter country.

Let me give you the awful destruction of life and property through earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, for just one year, 1892:

In Turkestan, there were ten thousand deaths, and fifteen thousand houses destroyed; and at another time during the same year, there were nearly seven hundred deaths, and one thousand injured. On the Island of St. Vincent two thousand people perished through a volcanic eruption. We all remember quite vividly the eruption of Mount Pelee, which resulted in the destruction of Martinique, where two thousand people were swept into eternity, and large numbers injured. And all this in one year! What an awful record!

In the first three years of the present century, there were forty-eight earthquakes. Allowing the same number for each successive three years, should the world stand, we would have the amazing record of sixteen hundred earthquakes for this century.

“The chariots shall be with flaming torches in the day of his preparation. The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle against one another in the broadways; they shall seem like torches, and they shall run like lightning.” (Nahum 2.3-4.)

(.) We have had them now for almost fifteen years, and we become so familiar with these big, awkward chariots with their immense lights, constantly passing to and fro in our streets, jostling one against another and running like lightning, that we have forgotten that they are only another fulfillment of God’s prophesy for the last days.