Just Read the First Two Paragraphs
50,000 pages is a bundle to read. For those of you who never get turned on to old Darwin, you might try just to read the first two paragraphs of the preface to his great work "The Origins." I have drawn extensively on those two paragraphs and set Darwin in a certain historical context. I hope some enjoy it, my context that is:
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THAT MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES
Charles Darwin refers, in the first paragraph of the preface to his book On The Origin Of Species(1859), to the origin of species being "that mystery of mysteries." It is a term, he says in that same first paragraph, which was used "by one of our greatest philosophers." Darwin goes on to say that after "patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on" the subject of specie origin, he allowed himself "to speculate on the subject and draw up some short notes." He enlarged these notes "in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed" probable to him. From 1844 to 1859 Darwin "steadily pursued the same object."
"My work is now nearly finished," he says in the second paragraph of that same preface, "but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this as Mr. Wallace…..has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. Last year he sent to me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir C. Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew of my work--the latter having read my sketch of 1844--honoured me by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr. Wallace's excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts." -Ron Price with appreciation to Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859.
It was a very big year back in 1844!
Marx's first writings that hot summer;
The first electric telegram with the words
"What hath God wrought?" The YMCA
began and Joseph Smith was martyred.
The Millerites experienced what came
To be called The Great Disappointment.
The first international cricket match and
between Canada and the USA, the first safe
was invented and so goes the litany on 1844…..
The time appointed for the judgement,
the judgement of those things which were
written in the books, each according to
their works1 at the time of the end,
the end times; the close of the 2300 days,
the work of investigation and blotting out
of sins--both of the living and of the dead.
The date 1844 marks the end of the longest
time prophecy in the Bible, a prophecy that
is at the very heart of the book of Daniel.
1844 marks the beginning of the first phase
of the judgement and the beginning of the
final work of Jesus in the heavenly sanctuary
prior to His return to this Earth. While Daniel
focuses our attention on the heavenly scenes,
the book of Revelation focuses on a mighty
movement that arises on earth,2 a special
movement that comes at the end of those
2300 days of no-man's-land prophecy.
1Rev. 20:12
2 Rev. 10.
Ron Price
16 January 2006
