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E. ORAIGHEAD,

Printer, Stereotyper, and Electrotyper, Carton Building,

81, 83, and 85 Centre Street.

BT 890 •C98

1252

21

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PREFACE.

It is impossible for the most thoughtless to overlook the impressive and almost unprecedented character of the age in which we live. Events, as rapid in their succession as they are startling in their magnitude, splendour, and consequences, chase each other like waves on the sea, or fall on us like falling stars on earth of a winter evening.

I stated in "Apocalyptic Sketches" that the last vial—that is, the symbol which denotes the source and measure and duration of the "Great Tribulation"was, in all probability, poured out in 1848, from which time to 1867 we may expect to feel its intensest effects. Subsequent observation, and comparison of facts as they evolve with the "sure word of prophecy" as it is written, have served to strengthen my conviction of the accuracy of this deduction; and in this volume it is my object to show that the prophecies of the Redeemer enunciated on the Mount of Olives, and other predic

tions referable to the same category and era, are being daily translated into history. It is under the action of the last vial, which, in order to denote the universality of its effects, was poured "into the air," that we discover those abnormal, physical, political, and social conditions, which persons ignorant of, or hostile to all prophetic investigations, allow to have an intensity and universality, to say the least startling.

Disease, during the last ten years, has steadily struck with destructive blight the potato and the vine, men and cattle, with a force and frequency surely unusual; and the only explanation scientific investigation has arrived at is just that stated in prophecy as the effect of the last vial, a morbific taint or influence in "the air." I do not say there never was before cholera, or diphtheria, or miasma destructive of vegetable life; but surely these influences, all of them the subjects of prophecy, have recently been developed with an intensity, a continuity, and to an extent, and with a concurrence at least most unusual.

Diseases of various types, from the consuming fever of Lisbon in 1857 down to less marked degeneracy of physical health, have been noticed and commented on by physicians. Frequently do they remark that some change, probably in the air, or its ozone, or its electricity, has taken place, followed by a weakening of the springs of life. So real is this alteration, that the

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