Numbers: Meaning in
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In 1894 President Woodruff stated: “God has held the angels of destruction for many years, lest they should reap down the wheat with the tares. But I want to tell you now, that those angels have left the portals of heaven, and they stand over this people and this nation now, and are hovering over the earth waiting to pour out the judgments. And from this very day they shall be poured out. Calamities and troubles are increasing in the earth, and there is a meaning to these things. Remember this, and reflect upon these matters. If you do your duty, and I do my duty, we’ll have protection, and shall pass through the afflictions in peace and in safety.” (Young Women’s Journal, Aug. 1894, pp. 512–13.) President Joseph Fielding Smith, who was present when President Woodruff talked about these angels at the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple (see Signs of the Times, pp. 112–13), recorded the following: “One day while I was sitting in the presence of my father [President Joseph F. Smith] back about 1908 or 9, somewhere in there, I called attention to these statements of President Woodruff, and I said I would like to go over the records from the time of the dedication of the Temple up until now and see what we can find in regard to calamities, destructions, plagues; and he encouraged me to do it, and so I did. So I went over the newspapers and over the magazines and jotted down year by year the destructions, the commotions among men, everything in the nature of a calamity, and to my great astonishment each year they increased, and they have been increasing ever since I quit making that record. I was greatly astonished by it; and when I called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, he almost got angry at me and he said, ‘Oh, well, we have got better facilities now for discovering these things. I don’t believe it.’ And he is a member of the Church, too, but seemed to lack faith in these predictions. … “This will be astonishing to you, I am sure, and I copied this from the [Literary] Digest of January 20, 1934. “‘Two scientists charting the European record find that the indexed number of Wars rose from 2.678 in the twelfth to 13,735.98 in the twentieth century. “‘Does war tend to decline as nations become more civilized? Many philosophers have said so; but now two sociologists of Harvard University have turned the cold and dispassionate eye of science upon the question, and have decided that future wars, fiercer than any ever fought before, apparently can be avoided only by a miracle. Far from declining, wars increase in number and intensity as nations progress, and the worst flareup since the dawn of history has occurred in our own century.’ “‘Now, of course, he had reference to the war from 1914 to 1918. “‘These scientists are Professor Pitirim A. Sorokin, chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard, and Nicholas N. Golovin, formerly Lieutenant-General in the Imperial Russian army. They have reached their conclusions through a study of all the wars known to have taken place in Europe since Greece and the Western Roman Empire over a period of more than 2,400 years—from 500 B.C. to 1925 A.D. During this period in Greece, Rome, Central Europe, Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands and Russia, there occurred 902 wars (not battles). “‘Each was studied from five points of view, the duration of the war, the size of the fighting force, the number of casualties, including killed and wounded, the number of countries involved, and the proportion of the combatants to the total population of the belligerent nations. “‘From these five “variables” a total indexed number was computed for each war, in order that they might be reasonably expressed in terms of a common denominator.’ “Now, that’s the quotation. Then [in 1936] I made these remarks. “Out of this study these scientists declare that they have discovered that war has tended to increase over all Europe in the late centuries. They say they have learned that in these countries war grew from 2.678 in the twelfth century to 13,735.98 in the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century. Their tables show the growth by centuries. Up to the seventeenth century the wars were comparatively insignificant. Beginning with that century war increased during the eighteenth, with a lull in the nineteenth, yet in that century they were more than 100 times greater than in medieval times. “‘These men conclude that “all commendable hopes that war will disappear in the near future are based on nothing more substantial than hope of a belief in miracles.”’ “And then I made this prediction: “‘If prophecy is to be fulfilled, there awaits the world a conflict more dreadful than any the world has yet seen.’ (Progress of Man, pp. 402–404.) “Now I want to make some comments in regard to the statement by President Woodruff and this parable. “The Lord said that the sending forth of these angels was to be at the end of the harvest, and the harvest is the end of the world. Now, that ought to cause us some very serious reflections. And the angels have been pleading, as I have read it to you, before the Lord to be sent on their mission. Until 1893 the Lord said to them no, and then He set them loose. According to the revelation of President Woodruff, the Lord sent them out on that mission. “What do we gather out of that? That we are at the time of the end. This is the time of the harvest. This is the time spoken of which is called the end of the world.” (Signs of the Times, pp. 116–21.)
President Woodruff
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Numbers: Meaning in
Elder Dallin H. Oaks
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Sheri Dew
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