The following is taken from:
Le Roy Edwin Froom, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers:
The Historical Development of Prophetic Interpretation, 4 vols. [Washington,
D.C.: Review and Herald, 1954] 4:297-300)
Regarded
as Sign of the Latter Days
Various observers who described
the great 1833 meteoric shower regarded it as a forerunner of the last day. Let
us now examine some extracts from contemporary prophetic applications.
1. EDITOR OF "OLD
COUNTRYMAN" PRONOUNCES IT "HARBINGER."-Henry J. Pickering,"
New York editor, said of the sixth seal:
"We pronounce the raining
fire which we saw on Wednesday morning last [Nov. 13] an awful type, a sure
forerunner, a merciful sign, of that great and dreadful day which the
inhabitants of the earth will witness when the sixth seal shall be opened.
"That time is just at hand
described not only in the New Testament but in the Old; and a more correct
picture of a fig tree casting its leaves when blown by a mighty wind, it was
not possible to behold.
"Many things now occurring
upon the earth tend to convince us that we are in the 'latter days,' This
exhibition we deem to be a type of an awful day fast hurrying upon us. This is
our sincere opinion; and what we think, we are not ashamed to tell.” [27]
2. DOUGLASS SAW IT AS TOKEN OF
THE TIMES.—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, [28] noted colored orator and journalist, but
still a slave in 1833, saw it as a sign of the times and later wrote:
“I witnessed this gorgeous
spectacle, and was awe-struck. The air seemed filled with bright descending
messengers from the sky. It was about daybreak when I saw this sublime scene. I
was not without the suggestion, at that moment that it might be the harbinger
of the coming of the Son of Man; and in my then state of mind I was prepared to
hail Him as my friend and deliverer. I had read that the ‘stars shall fall from
heaven,’ and they were now falling. I was suffering very much in my mind. . . .
I was looking away to heaven for the rest denied me on earth.” [29]
3. EPISCOPALIAN CLERIC VIEWS
AS SIGN OF LAST DAYS.— Dr. Henry Dana Ward, well-known Episcopalian
clergyman of New York (to be noted later), after observing the scene of the
starry firmament breaking up, as it were, and the stars falling like flakes of
snow, wrote immediately to the editor of The New York Journal of Commerce:
“We felt in our hearts, that it
was a sign of the last days. For, truly, ‘the stars of heaven fell unto the
earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken by a
mighty wind.’—Rev. 6:13. This language of the prophet has always been received
as metaphorical. Yesterday it was literally fulfilled. The ancients understood
by aster in Greek, and stella in Latin, the smaller lights of
heaven. The refinement of modern astronomy has made the distinction between stars
of heaven, and meteors of heaven. Therefore, the idea of the prophet, as
it is expressed in the original Greek, was literally fulfilled in the
phenomenon of yesterday, so as no man before yesterday had conceived to be
possible that it should be fulfilled.” [30]
Ward stressed the exact
fulfillment of the apocalyptic prediction:
“And how did they fall? Neither
myself nor one of the family heard any report; and were I to hunt through
nature for a simile, I could not find one so apt to illustrate the appearance
of the heavens as that which St. John uses in the prophecy, before quoted. ‘It
rained fire!’ says one—Another, ‘it was like a shower of fire.’ Another, ‘it
was like the large flakes of falling snow, before a coming storm, or large
drops of rain before a shower.’
“I admit the fitness of these for
common accuracy; but they come far short of the accuracy of the figure used by
the prophet. ‘The stars of heaven fell unto the earth;’ they were not sheets,
or flakes, or drops of fire; but they were what the world understands by the
name of ‘Falling Stars;’ and one speaking to his fellow in the midst of the
scene, would say, ‘See how the stars fall;’ and he who heard, would not pause
to correct the astronomy of the speaker, any more than he would reply, ‘the sun
does not move,’ to one who should tell him, ‘the sun is rising[.]’
“The stars fell ‘Even as a fig
tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.’ Here is
the exactness of the prophet. The falling stars did not come, as if from
several trees shaken, but from one: those which appeared in the east fell
toward the East; those which appeared in the north fell toward the North; those
which appeared in the west fell toward the West, and those which appeared in
the south (for I went out of my residence into the Park,) fell toward the
South; and they fell, not as the ripe fruit falls. Far from it. But they
flew, they WERE CAST, like the unripe fruit, which at first
refuses to leave the branch; and, when it does break its hold, flies swiftly, strait
off, descending; and in the multitude falling some cross the track of
others, as they are thrown with more or less force.
“Such was the appearance of the
above phenomenon to the inmates of my house. I walked into the Park with two
gentlemen of Pearl Street, feeling and confessing, that this scene had never
been figured to our minds by any book or mortal, save only by the prophet.”
[31]
Ward then said:
“In this narrative I have spoken
not of causes, [32] but of appearances, and the appearances according to the
impression they made on men. . . . No Philosopher or scholar has told or
recorded an event, like that of yesterday morning. A Prophet of 1800 years ago
foretold it exactly, if we will at the trouble of understanding stars falling,
to mean falling-stars.” [33]
4. MANY SEE CORRESPONDENCE
WITH PROPHETIC FORECAST.— The New York Journal of Commerce (November
27, 1833) quoted a report from the Columbia Spy that many thought the
last days had arrived, and that in the neighboring township a clergyman
reported a large prayer meeting attendance that night. The Republican,
of York, Pennsylvania (November 13, 1833), said editorially, “Some refer these
things to the ‘falling stars’ spoken of in Revelation.” A correspondent from
Bowling Green, Missouri, was forcibly “reminded of that remarkable passage in
the Revelations, . . . calling to mind the ‘fig tree, casting her untimely figs
when shaken by a mighty wind,’” [34] as was likewise the clergyman-scientist
Dr. Thomas Milner. [35] And Elijah H. Burritt said later that the fiery scene
“suggested to some the awful grandeur of the image employed in the Apocalypse,
upon the opening of the sixth seal, when ‘the stars’ of heaven fall.” [36]
Thus various laymen and clergymen
alike recognized it at the time as a sign of the approaching end, just as other
men had, on the basis of prophetic depiction, looked forward to and predicted
its appearance. Many, feeling that the 1833 falling of the stars had met the
full demands and descriptions of prophecy, were constrained to say that we have
indeed entered the “last days.” [37]
Notes for the Above:
[27] The Old Countryman (New
York), Nov. 20, 1833; cited widely, as in the New York Star, and Portland
Evening Advertiser, Nov. 26, 1833. The New York Journal of Commerce observes
editorially (Nov. 23), "The Editor of the Old Countryman makes a
very serious matter of the 'Falling Stars.”
[28] FREDERICK DOUGLASS
(1817–1895), born a slave, escaped in 1838 and settled in New Bedford,
Massachusetts. In 1847 he founded The North Star at Rochester, New York,
and in 1870 The New National Era, at Washington, D.C. He was U.S.
Marshal, then Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, and United States
minister to Haiti, 1889–91.
[29] Frederick Douglass, The
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, p. 117.
[30] The New York Journal of
Commerce, Nov. 14, [i.e. 16], 1833, p. [2], dated Nov. 15. For Ward as the
author, see Signs of the Times, Oct. 11, 1843, pp. 62, 63.
[31] Ibid. It is
noteworthy that The New York Journal of Commerce in its issue of
November 27 repeated part of the foregoing statement from Ward.
[32] Ward said in the concluding
paragraph, “Natural causes undoubtedly produced this phenomenon.”
[33] Ibid., Nov. 14 [16].
[34] Quoted in Olmsted,
“Observations,” The American Journal of Science, January, 1834, p. 382.
[35] Thomas Milner, The
Gallery of Nature, p. 14.
[36] Elijah H. Burritt, Geography
of the Heavens, p. 163.
[37] For an example of a
prophetic expositor outside the United States who saw this meteor shower as a
prophetic sign—José de Rozas, prominent jurist of Mexico—see p. 308 of the
present volume.
Further Reading:
Resources
on Joseph Smith’s Prophecies
