Running parallel with this development of transportation on land and sea, is what may be called the growth of our instantaneous means of communication. At the opening of the period we are considering the pony express and mail coach were our most rapid means of communication, and looking back to those days such means of communication seem marvellously inadequate to civilized life. At the close of the century, however, by means of ocean cables and telegraph lines, and telephone instrumentalities—to say nothing of the more wonderful wireless telegraphy now coming into use—we are in instant communication with all the great centers of civilization, and each morning may read the world's daily history gathered by these agencies for our instruction.
In the same period, in the matter of illumination, we went from the tallow dip and farthing rush light to gas and electricity. From the slow working hand press to the lightning Hoe multicolor printing press, capable of printing, in different colors, folding, pasting and counting from twenty-four thousand to one hundred thousand impressions per hour! Within our period improvements in telescopes have revealed new wonders of the universe. Improvement in microscopes have revealed wonders undreamed of in former times both in organic and inorganic nature. In the laboratories of the world new mysteries of light and heat and other elementary forces of nature were revealed. Substances which aforetime had been regarded as opaque were found in some lights to be transparent. Indeed in all the arts and sciences such progress was made as had not before been made in a period of a thousand years.[[22]] There seemed to have come an awakening of intellectual power in men, and the whole world was transformed by means of it. Political liberties were enlarged, old tyrannies were rendered for the present and future impossible in many countries, because of the consciousness of inherent power in the people.
Our period witnessed also the rise and progress of the peace movement. A movement whose chief purpose is to substitute peaceful arbitration as a method of settling international differences for the dreadful arbitrament of war. The first peace society was formed in America early in the century—1815—and while not attracting much attention at first, the movement gradually increased in importance until at last it arose from a merely national movement to an international one, as is evidenced from the fact that at its great conference at the Hague in 1899 there were accredited representatives from the following nations: United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, China, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Persia, Portugal, Roumania, Servia, Siam, Switzerland, and Turkey. It was this conference of 1899 that finally established the world's permanent court of arbitration at the Hague, to which several important international questions have already been referred and settled. And while the peace movement and arbitration has not yet relieved the world from recurrence of dreadful wars, still the establishment of the permanent court for international arbitration is a mighty stride in the interest of the world's peace. It gives more than hope. It establishes confidence that the time will come when there will be a disarmament of the nations, and the old prophet's dream figured forth in his vision of the nations beating their spears into pruning hooks and their swords into plow shares will be realized, and the nations shall learn war no more.
It cannot be that this wonderful transformation of the world within our period has no significance. A new era has certainly dawned upon the world. Old things are passing away. All things are becoming new. Surely such changing conditions in material things prophesy corresponding changes in men as individuals and in their community life. These material improvements will doubtless be met by corresponding improvements in moral and spiritual wellbeing. There is undoubtedly a close connection between this influx of intellectual light and the splendid opening of the great new dispensation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. When the Lord renewed divine communication to man in the visions and revelations granted to Joseph Smith, there seemed to have accompanied this influx of spiritual light the intellectual light of which I have been speaking, and which has accomplished such transformations in the affairs of men and nations as are here noted. To the spirit which is in man the Spirit of the Lord has given inspiration to some purpose. It is not difficult to believe—nay to conceive the contrary seems impossible—that the Lord, according to the Book of Mormon prophecy, has commenced to bring about the restoration of his people Israel upon the earth, and to usher into the world that blessed reign of truth, peace and righteousness so long hoped for; so long the theme of poets, sages, statesmen and prophets; when with righteousness the Lord shall judge the pure and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth; when the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them; when the cow and the bear shall feed, and their young ones shall lie down together; when the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and the suckling child shall play on the hole of the cockatrice's den; when they shall not hurt nor destroy in all God's holy mountain; when the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea; when man shall know how sweet and pleasant it is for men to dwell together in unity and peace; and when, to correspond with these moral and spiritual conditions of the world, the material forces and resources of the earth shall be developed; distance annihilated; all the ends of the earth brought together in instant communication; poverty and crime banished; when labor shall have its own and the idler shall not sit in the lap of luxury, a burden to labor, but all shall contribute by intelligent industry to an enlightened world's necessities. The realization of the dream has long been deferred, but we are taught by scripture that if the vision tarry, wait for it, for it will come. Surely we may wait in confidence when in such a marked manner as here indicated the hand of God is to be seen fashioning and directing those events which shall culminate in the perfect realization of all the good that has been decreed for the earth and the inhabitants thereof.
V.
The Sign of the Modern World's Awakening.
An interesting feature in the awakening of the world, considered in the last subdivision of this chapter, is the fact that not only did this awakening begin about the time the Book of Mormon was published to the world, but it is one of the prophecies of the book that it should be so. That is to say, the spiritual and intellectual awakening of the modern world, and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon were to be contemporaneous events.
In the course of his ministry among the Nephites, the Messiah directed especial attention to, and laid great stress upon one of the prophecies of Isaiah, which follows:
Thy watchmen shall lift up the voice; with the voice together shall they sing, for they shall see eye to eye, when the Lord shall bring again Zion. Break forth into joy, sing together, ye waste places of Jerusalem, for the Lord hath comforted his people, he hath redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of God.
Later in Messiah's ministry, when referring again to this prophecy, he remarked: