Dear Sir,

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 43, 4 May 1948, Page 4

Dear Sir,

Letters to the Editor must be clearly written bn one side of the paper only and where a nom-de-plume is used the name of the writer must be included for reference purposes. The Editor reserves the right to abridge, amend or withhold any letter or letters. j WHITHER BOUNTY HUMANITY Sir, —Bible prophecy assumes a position of unprecedented importance today. It provides the only scientific and rational answer to the unsolved problems that curtain our future. Scientists, statesmen, leading financiers and educators have become evangelists in our day. They state the conviction that the world is headed for a cataclysm so vast and terrible that it may end all life on this planet. .

These expressions—so reminiscent of the ancient prophets, would a short time ago have been dismissed as utter nonsense, or considered as a mark of mental instability and lack of education. At least until 1939, men trusted that through the evolution—any processes of man—in spite of difficulties, science would provide, without divine assistance a glowing golden age of the future.' Few people talk that way today. The shattering upheaval of the past few years has changed the whole direction of human thought as if an earthquake had turned the Amazon into a new course. Fear-filled scientists and leaders of world thought have today become the most dismal prophets of doom. Some think it can be but a matter of months before the shooting .stars and the atomic bombs begin to fall. Using language no preacher ever dared to use they picture the death throes of the nations in stark and grisly detail. It is a matter of amazement to hear leaders of world thought ardently proclaim, independan.tly from the Bible, the very truths once generally scoffed at. With the events which Christ and the Apostles foretold crowding into the climax of history, it is of singular interest to hear the astounded and unwilling lips of independant thinkers acknowledge that the Bible was right after all. Bible prophecy spoke it before they thought it, and no living person knows enough to contradict it. Fulfilled prophecy remains the Bible’s unanswered challenge to scepticism. The facts today show that the prophecies focussing on the sunset of human history are already advanced to such a stage of fulfilment that man’s unaided reason grasps with apprehension the fearful possibilities impending. The fast fulfilling signs of the times declare that the coming of Christ is near at hand. Plaques and judgments are already falling upon men. The calamities by land and sea, the unsettled state of society, the alarms of war are portentious. They forecast events of the greatest magnitude. Whither then is humanity bound? The answer to that question is beyond the. pale of governments, it is individual, and whither or not we are prepared to follow the prophetic path that shines clearly into the future, will alone determine the answer. Yours etc., C. R. MURCHISON,