THANKSGIVING
DAY en and NOW
ust a little over three centuries
N ago, as the chill of winter began
to settle over their inhospitable
surroundings, the little colony of Pil-
grims, a mere speck in the unknown
wilds of the new continent, kept the
first American Thanksgiving.
Were it possible to turn back the
hands of time to the conditions pre-
vailing then, how many marvelous
things would be swept away at the
stroke, and how slow and strange and
ancient would seem the world.
The great ocean “Greyhounds,”
floating palaces, with all the conveniences
of a modern city, would give way to little
sail craft little different from those that
sailed the seas of Abraham. A journey
across the Atlantic would mean weeks
or months. The giant dirigible, the air-
plane, the automobile, and lightning
express trains would give way to the
clumsy animal-drawn vehicles that had
sufficed man for thousands of years.
Sewing, spinning, and weaving would
all be done by hand, and the cotton
gin and the great textile mills would be
unknown. There would be no tele-
graph, no telephone, no phonograph,
no talkies; and the great printing presses
with their daily trainloads of newspapers
would cease, and radio and television
would not be dreamed of.
But on this present thanksgiving
morning we may read of the most im-
portant happenings of the day from
every quarter of the globe. We can sit
in our own homes and listen to con-
certs, lectures, and sermons, hundreds
and even thousands of miles away. It is
possible to stand on the shores at
Plymouth and converse with persons in
England.
A 4
Of this strange transformation that
has come so suddenly upon the world,
Winston Churchill, in Popular Me-
chanics for March, 1932, says: “The
great mass of human beings absorbed
in the toils, and cares, and activities of
life are only dimly conscious of the
pace at which mankind has begun to
travel. We look back one hundred
Page Ten -
What is the meaning
of the enormous
strides of modern
CIVILIZATION “PD
years and see that great changes have
taken place. We look back fifty years
and see that the speed is constantly
quickening. . . . Mankind has some-
times traveled forward and sometimes
backward, or has stood still for hundreds
of years. It remained stationary in
India and China for thousands of years.
But now it is moving very fast.
v
“What is it that has produced this
new prodigious speed of man?—Science
is the cause. In the methods of pro-
duction and communication, in the
modes of getting food and exchanging
goods, there was less change between
the time of Sargon and the time of
Louis XIV than there has been between
the accession of Queen Victoria and the
present day. Darius could probably
send a message from Susa to Sardis
faster than Philip II could transmit an
order from Madrid to Brussels. Sir
Robert Peel, summoned in 1834 from
Rome to form a government in London,
took the same time as the Emperor
Vespasian when he had to hasten to
his province of Britain. A priest from
Thebes would probably have felt more
at home at the Council of Trent, two
thousand years after Thebes had
vanished, than Sir Isaac Newton at a
modern undergraduate physical so-
ciety, or George Stephenson in the
Institute of Electrical Engineers. The
changes have been so sudden and so
gigantic that no period in history can
be compared with the past century.”
Why have the minds of men become
so active, in these recent years, in these
fields of study, causing them to stumble
upon so many marvelous and revolu-
tionary discoveries and inventions? A
EWING GALLOWAY Photo
right answer to this question is of more
importance than would at first appear,
for we will relate ourselves in a right
or wrong way to the present-day condi-
tions In accordance with our under-
standing of this question.
This peculiar age in which we find
ourselves was foretold by the God of
heaven millenniums ago, as a sure
harbinger of the end of time. And
when the time came, He touched the
springs of human genius, ushering in
this revolutionary period in the thoughts
and activities of men—undeniable proof
of the divine origin and infallibility of
the Scriptures. “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
mereased.” Daniel 12: 4.
Now the fulfillment of this prophecy,
given so many years ago, was intended
to serve three distinct purposes.
First—Jesus (Matthew 24) gave the
signs that would forewarn His people
of the nearness of His second coming,
the last of these signs being the procla-
mation of the message announcing His
coming: “And this gospel of the king-
dom shall be preached in all the world
for a witness unto all nations; and then
shall the end come.” Matthew 24: 14.
John in his vision on the Isle of
Patmos saw this same message going,
Just before the reaping of the harvest
The Watchman Magazine