Thursday, December 7, 2023

"The Return" (Whitmerite Periodical) and the Land of Israel (1890)

  

The greatest amount of rain tabled in any year during the period of observation is eighty-five inches, which fell in the year 1850-51, in 1889 there fell thirty-five inches. It is calculated that the average annual fall of rain throughout the United States is about forty-five inches. In California it averages only about twenty inches. Thus we see that we have about one fourth more rain in Palestine than in the Atlantic region of the United States.

 

We believe God is beginning to turn the captivity of the land which has lain so many centuries in desolation. The increase in the annual rainfall, the reclaiming of barren tracts of land, the continual improvements in the roads, all warrant this conclusion. These facts speak loudly to those who have ears to hear of the times in which we live.—Hebrew Christan for Jan. 1890. (“Palestine,” The Return 2, no. 2 [February 1890]: 239)