# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S16
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

16 The Lutheran Observer.

grievous visitation upon our poor country seems to have borne little fruit as yet in bringing its people to a recognition of their great national sin, that of prideful self-exaltation. The recommendation reads as follows: "I wished, through your excellent paper, to direct the attention of its readers to the remarkable book bearing the title: 'A Defense of Armageddon, or Our Great Country Foretold in the Holy Scriptures.' Never have I been so drawn in by the reading of a work as I was by this one, especially by the author's presentation of the prophetic description of the land of restored Israel, or of the nationality that is to arise in the last times. Surely no one can read the geographical description of the land of restored Israel, as it is given in the Bible and set forth by the author of the work, without at once concluding that the United States is this land, since no other land or region is to be found that answers to the picture as drawn by the prophet. We shall select only a few of the most pointed descriptions and coinciding circumstances, which can only be realized in their application to our land and our nation. Thus: 'that the nationality which was to arise should be gathered together out of the nations; that they should journey westward; that the land which they were to inhabit should be a land between the eastern and the great western sea; that it should be a land which had always lain waste; that it should lie in thirteen different states; that these states should be bounded on the east by the eastern sea, on the west by the great western one; that this land had originally been possessed by a people who had been terrible from the beginning, whose land the rivers had spoiled.' — When the learned commentator Dr. Clark came to this passage, he declared it 'the darkest passage in the whole of Isaiah,' and that for the simple reason that he did not know how to reconcile it with the land of Palestine. — Further: 'that the people gathered together out of the nations should build and dwell securely in villages and cities without walls, having neither gates nor bars, in a land of broad rivers and streams; that the United States are the isles that shall wait for the LORD, and that the ships of Tarshish, or Old Spain, should be the first to open an emigration into this new world.' (Isaiah.) — Diodorus Siculus, a well-known historian of the Augustan age, says that 'the term "isles" in his time chiefly meant undiscovered lands, which were supposed to be found in the Atlantic Ocean.' — Strabo says that 'the word Tarshish refers to Tartessus,' which formerly lay on the spot where Cadiz in Spain now stands. And a Mr. Benson says that 'this opinion (Strabo's opinion) is now generally accepted by scholars.' Having now explained these terms, let us read the passage: 'Surely the undiscovered lands in the western sea shall wait for me, and the ships of Old Spain shall be