Such a Church as that has lost the vision of its true attitude during the absence of its rejected Lord and is well-nigh to forfeiting its commission.

Over the professing Church is sounding to-day with ominous significance the Apostolic words of warning:

"What, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God; and that whosoever will be the friend of the world, is the enemy of God?"

The Corinthian Church attempted to take the place of rulership in the world.

With keen and biting words the Apostle rebukes them.

Thus he writes to them:

"Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to God ye did reign, that we might also reign with you."

Then he adds by way of contrast:

"I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels and to men."

It is this same apostle who under the inspiration of the Spirit in his second epistle writes to Timothy:

"If we suffer, we shall also reign with him."

It is not while her Lord is the crucified and rejected that the Church is to reign and rule over the world. Not while He is seated on His Father's throne in heaven and His own throne on earth is cast down and trampled in the dust. Nay! if the Church is faithful she will walk in separation from the world. If the Church is faithful she will testify against the world, not testify merely against certain abuses, but against the world as a system, that it is built upon the principle of the enthronement of self and not God, the exaltation of the flesh and not spirit.

If the Church shall be faithful and like Noah in the building of his ark condemn the world; if the Church will take up earnestly the solemn truth of God and warn men that no matter how good a government may be established by human means, no matter what culture and morality may fill the earth, no matter to what extent advance may be made in art, in science, nor no matter how safe a place the world may be made to live in, no matter to what heights of natural morality and righteousness man as man may attain, the judgment of God against this system of man called the world is certain, and that He will arise in His majesty to shake terribly the earth, and that only the things that are built on God can remain, the Church will suffer and be rejected even as was her Lord.

The Church is to be faithful to the testimony of Christ and enter into the fellowship of His sufferings.

The day of her triumph will come.

She is yet to rule over the world.

The hour and the circumstances are fixed.

Listen, I pray you, to the words of the Spirit as He speaks through the Apostle Paul:

"When Christ who is our life shall appear—then (and not till then) shall ye also appear with Him in glory."

Only when Christ shall come to take to Himself His long deferred rulership can the Church enter into her rulership over the world. In the fifth chapter of the Revelation you have the new song of the Church, the song of redemption and rule.

This is the triumphant song; it is a song of praise addressed to the Son of God Himself:

"Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation:

And hast made us unto our God kings and priests; and we shall reign on the earth."

But mark the moment when that song is sung, the occasion of occasions!

It is at that supreme moment when as the Lion of the tribe of Judah yonder in His risen and glorified humanity in heaven He steps forward, Son of man, king of the Jews and king of Israel to take the title deeds of His kingdom from the hand of the Father; that moment when He is getting ready to cast His judgments on the earth and come forth as in the days of Noah to sweep away all iniquity and unrighteousness. It is at this moment when He is about to take to Himself His great power and descend in judgment glory that the Church bursts forth into her song of redemption and rule.

It is at the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ alone that the Church will enter upon her function of rulership over the world. She cannot reign till He comes and puts her in the place of His queen and in associated power with Himself.

And because I want to see the Church lifted up out of social, political and fleshly partnership with the world; because I want to see the Church in the place of authority and power making and fulfilling the edicts of God; because I want to see the Church so exalted into the place of rulership that all the nations shall walk in the light of her excellency, her righteousness and holiness; and because this high and glorious state will be attained alone at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ I preach His Second Coming.



V

Only at the Second Coming Will the Solemn and Covenant Promises of God to Israel be Fulfilled

GOD sware to Abraham that he and his posterity should have the land of Palestine for an everlasting possession.

Abraham never got a foot of the land under covenant promise.

The only bit of ground he was able to call his was the burial plot he purchased with his own money.

The children of Israel never entered the promised land under the Abrahamic covenant.

The Lord redeemed them from Egypt, brought them through the divided waters of the Red Sea, led them by His presence, bore them up as on eagle's wings and dealt with them in pure, unconditional grace till they came to Sinai.

There in all the pride and self-sufficiency of the flesh they took themselves off the ground of grace and unconditional covenant and put themselves under the covenant of the law.

This covenant was a covenant of good behaviour.

They were to possess the land as long as they fulfilled the terms of the covenant under the seal of its blessing and cursing.

After the first generation had perished in the wilderness because of their unbelief, the second generation crossed the Jordan dry shod as their fathers had crossed the Red Sea and entered the land under pledge and bond of good behaviour.

They were not able to keep the covenant of their own suggestion. Ten tribes went into an abomination of organized and politically inspired idolatry.

In judgment and according to His warning He caused them to be carried away captives and buried nationally among the people whither they were led and for twenty-five hundred years have been nationally lost to view.

For two thousand years because of similar and aggravated offenses and finally, because as a nation guilty of manslaughter in slaying the Lord their covenant king, the Jews have been the wanderers of the earth, the people of the restless foot, finding a home in every land but their own.

Has God failed to keep His promise?

Has He been unable or unwilling to keep His promise?

Neither postulate is possible.

God's counsel is immutable.

He confirmed it by an oath. And since He could swear by nothing greater He sware by Himself.

In the nature of the case then scattered Israel and wandering Judah must be gathered. They must return to their own land.

God has so promised.

These promises are to be found upon the pages of Holy Writ like the leaves of autumn—so many, so thickly strewn, now in single phrase, in connected passages, in whole chapters that should I attempt to read them slowly and distinctly, giving the sense, it would take me till the morning light.

The Lord declares He has written their names upon the palms of His hand.

They are as near and sensitively dear to Him, He says, as the apple of His eye. He is so interested, so determined concerning their restoration that He uses the most intensive language to express it, language that almost thunders aloud from the page as you read it.

He uses language no less intense than this:

"Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land (the land of Palestine) assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul."

Try and think of that! Let it penetrate your mind. The Lord who made heaven and earth, whose very name is omnipotence, says He will put the whole of His omnipotent heart and the whole of His omnipotent soul into the execution and the accomplishment of His determination and purpose to plant the children of Israel once more and forever in their own land.

In the face of that registered will and purpose what power is there of man or Devil; what force is there in all the sweep of the universe that can hinder the chosen and covenant people of God from going back to Palestine and possessing that land as theirs and theirs alone, forever?

But what evidence have we, what demonstration and proof that God will fulfill this postscript promise and plan?

What evidence have we from the bare statement of God that He will keep this promise?

The evidence is manifold and overwhelming.

Before even the children of Israel crossed the Jordan the Lord warned them in language which burns and blisters that if they did not keep the law covenant and walk in the ways of righteousness and truth He would cause them to fall before their enemies. They should go out one way before them and flee seven ways. Their cities should be taken and their wives ravished. They should be led captives into every land. They should become a proverb, a byword, a hissing and a scorn. Every hand should be against them to do them ill. They should find no ease whither they went, nor should the soles of their feet have rest. Amidst those nations the Lord should give them a trembling heart, failing eyes and sorrow of mind. Their life should hang in doubt. They should fear night and day, and have no assurance of life. In the morning they should say, Would God it were even, and at even they should say, Would God it were morning.

Their land should be made desolate and be an astonishment to the passer-by. In its desolation it should keep the sabbaths they should fail to give it. If they would not allow the land to rest in its sabbatic years, the Lord would cause it to have its ordained and natural rest by driving them out of it and allowing wind and rain and sun to take care of it and keep it fruitful.

Later on all this warning of woe and terror of judgments was emphasized by the prophets against the Jews.

They should become a nation of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

But while the Lord should use the nations to correct them He would not make a full end of His own people.

He would use the nations as the rods of His anger, as the instruments of discipline. He would use them by taking advantage of their own aggressive desires and ambitions, then after using them He would turn upon them, punish them for their pride and godless enmity to His people and make a full end of them.

Then as the hour should draw nigh for the restoration to the land He would cause the Jews as the national representatives of all Israel to bud, to blossom and fill the face of the whole world with fruit.

They should be the first to be restored to the land.

They would go back in unbelief.

And mark how the prophecies have been fulfilled!

The illustration of this fulfillment finds its most tragic emphasis in the history of the Jews since that day when their king, the Son of God and the Holy One of Israel was hung as a malefactor on a Roman cross.

They have not only been wanderers in every land, but they have suffered an agony no tongue can fittingly tell.

The men have been robbed. They have been broken on the wheel. They have been stretched on the rack. They have been flayed alive. They have been burned alive. They have been sent to sea by thousands as herded cattle; and they have been sent thither in rotting and sinking ships. Their wives and daughters have suffered worse than torture or death. Their children have been mutilated; and when they failed to bring a full and satisfactory price in the public market, men, women and children have been given away as worthless slaves, not worth even the price of a kennel dog.

They have been hunted like wild beasts of the mountain. Like frightened beasts they have trembled at the sound of approaching footsteps and the sound of a shaken leaf has caused them to flee.

If their Lord was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, truly may it be said of them that they have been through the centuries a nation of sorrows and acquainted with grief; but the sorrows were unlike those of their Lord. He carried the sorrows, the griefs and woes of others that He might relieve them; they carried their own sorrows put upon them by the wickedness and cruelty of others until tears were their meat and drink night and day.

Behold how the prophecies have been fulfilled in respect to their land.

For centuries it has kept a sabbath of rest.

It has rested from the toil of man; harvests have neither been sown nor reaped, nor the vintage gathered save here and there as with the sword in one hand and the sickle in the other.

The land is there as a land just as it was in the days when the man of Nazareth walked by the shores of blue Galilee or trod the hills of Judah. The mountains of Moab draw their lines of beauty against the measureless deeps of an orient sky. The valleys lie between like fruitful bosoms where wheat and barley may grow. The olive trees stand dusky in the deepening shade. Pomegranate and apricot stretch forth their weighted boughs and the grapes in Eschol clusters hang purple in the slant of westering suns. It is even yet a land of brooks and fountains of waters and men may still dig iron and brass from out of its rugged hills.

Yonder in Bashan within the range of your eyes you may count sixty cities of stone, walls and roofs and windows of stone, great swinging doors of stone. The centuries have beaten the wind, the rain, the storms and flying sand upon them. They remain. They have outworn the centuries. They are silent. No footfall is heard upon the threshold. The houses are empty save for a fox, a swiftly gliding viper, or a belated Bedaween who may stable his horse in a deserted room where once a happy family dwelt in the long ago.

The stone cities are waiting and every stone in door and window seems to be crying out:

"We are waiting till they return whose right alone it is to live and dwell here."

But what of the nations that scattered them and made them to suffer?

Where is Babylon the proud empire that took them captive; where is Babylon the golden city that saw them hang their harps upon the willows, sit down upon the banks of the strange river and give way to weeping as they yearned for their own land again?

Where is Greece whose phalanxes swept through their fields and spoiled their vineyards?

Where is Rome whose iron legions took their city, put thousand on thousands to the sword, destroyed the beautiful temple once hallowed by a Saviour's feet and then drew a ploughshare over Zion that it might become a ploughed field as foretold? The Rome that sculptured on its triumphal arches the figures of the captive Jews it had led in boastful mockery at the chariot wheels of returning conquerors?

These nations in their ancient glory have disappeared, the Lord as He promised has made a full end of them.

But what of Israel?

The Jews have answered for them.

There are fifteen millions of Jews to-day.

They are the most vital and vigorous race on the earth. They are five times the number of all Israel who left Egypt; and they are but a sixth part of them—two tribes, Judah and Benjamin.

They are the money makers and money loaners of the world. They are the merchants, the bankers, the musicians, the professors in school, in college and university. They are the philosophers, the scientists, the electricians and chemists. They have furnished prime ministers, statesmen, judges and generals. Such a statesman as Disraeli who glorified England, such a general as Massena whom Napoleon characterized as the "child of victory."

If to-day you should seek a representative in every department of human genius and endeavour you would find that representative to be either a Jew or a Jewess.

Fifteen millions of Jews!

What are these fifteen millions of Jews but fifteen millions of proofs that the book we call the Bible is true, is inerrant, infallible?

Fifteen millions of demonstrations and fifteen millions of indubitable proofs.

By so much as they prove that God keeps faith with His warnings of woe and judgment, by so much will He keep faith with the promise of good He has made; by so much is it sure He will yet plant them as He has said in their own land and will do so with His whole heart and His whole soul.

Already the sound of their footsteps may be heard on the homeward march.

Zionism is now an immense fact.

The spirit of nationalism has come back to Judah.

The blue and white flag of David has been unfurled.

Diplomats in the nations' counsels agree there can be no settled peace between Europe and the East till the Jew is back in his own land and Judah once more a recognized political state; that the Jews are the only people all the nations will agree should have Palestine, and the words, "Jewish State" are words repeated in common speech round the globe.

England has driven the Turk out of Jerusalem.

The corner-stone of a five million dollar university has been laid upon that Mount of Olives where once the Son of God amid its lonely shades prayed and agonized, a begun fulfillment of the prophecy of Zephaniah that in the latter days the Lord would execute judgment on the Gentile nations that should be gathered there and to His restored and delivered people turn again a pure speech, no longer the stuttering and smattering phrase of Yiddish, but the old Hebraic tongue of their fathers.

Already there are papers in Jerusalem published in Hebrew, schools are taught and many speak in the ancient language.

Many Jews are going back to Palestine.

Many more are there now than returned from Babylon.

They are going back as the Word of God foretold, in utter and absolute unbelief and bitter repudiation of the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was their foretold and foreordained Messiah.

They are going back with the vail upon their eyes and as blind as in the day when their fathers caused Him to be crucified by Roman hands.

They are going back to a time of anguish of which Jeremiah solemnly warns as "the day of Jacob's trouble," and our Lord describes as the tribulation, "the great one," the like of which the world has never seen and will never see again.

They are going back to be set up by a league of ten nations and to enter into an alliance and covenant with its godless head as their political and false Messiah.

They will suffer until there shall come upon that generation all the righteous blood shed upon the earth from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zacharias, the son of Bacharias who was slain between the temple and the altar, and the blood of the Son of God which they invoked in judgment on themselves and their children in that fatal hour when Pilate convinced of the innocence of Jesus and wishing to let Him go had washed His hands in water, putting the responsibility of the crucifixion upon them as a people. Then it was they cried that terrible cry:

"His blood be on us, and on our children."

But then as now, and always since the days of Elijah, there was and is an elect remnant in Israel.

For their sakes the Lord will come.

He will descend with His host to Mount Sinai, the place of the law; the spot where Israel rejected grace and sought that covenant which neither they nor their children have ever been able to keep.

He will sweep with His mighty army to Jerusalem.

He will overthrow the Gentile nations gathered there under the Devil-incarnate Antichrist.

He will stand upon the Mount of Olives.

The elect remnant will behold Him come.

They will look upon Him whom their fathers pierced.

They will fall down in anguish before Him.

They will mourn for Him as one mourneth for his only son.

They will take up the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah and make it their confession of faith and bitter, self-accusing lamentation.

They will say:

"We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."

And in that hour, in that day of days shall there be a fountain opened to the house of David, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and uncleanness.

The Lord will cause Jerusalem to be rebuilded "upon her own heap." He will ordain the erection of that temple in which He shall establish the throne of His holiness.

Like David He will reign first over Judah. After that He will send Gentile messengers like "fishers" to seek out and find the descendants of the ten lost tribes. They will respond to the proclamation that will be made and to the search that will be instituted in that eastern land and among those peoples whither they were first carried away. There will be many impostors among them; but the Lord will make them to "pass under the rod" as when the true sheep are struck with the owner's mark and as they take up their journey Zionward all who are not of Israel will be purged from their midst.

Those who are really of the covenant people will be quickened, regenerated, and when they enter the land will be welcomed by Judah and Benjamin.

They shall become one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel. One king shall be king to them all. They shall not be two nations any more, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms at all. The Lord will make a covenant of peace with them and multiply them and set His sanctuary in the midst of them forever. His tabernacle shall be with them. He will be their very God as He shall be the God of the whole earth. They shall be His peculiar people. All the Gentiles shall know that He has set them apart for Himself when they behold His temple erected in their midst, the most wonderful building in all the earth.

And thus will be fulfilled the prophecy concerning Israel quoted and emphasized by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle Paul that the Deliverer should come to Zion and turn away ungodliness from Jacob and that all Israel—that is—Israel united and as twelve tribes, should be saved.

It is at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, then and not till then that the solemn and covenant promises of God made to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob will be fulfilled and united, redeemed, regenerated and saved Israel set in their own land as the center and channel of blessing to the earth.

And because there can be no permanent peace in the world till Israel has been restored; and because I wish to see, not only peace among the nations and Israel reaping the blessings of the unconditional covenant of God's grace and unchanged faithfulness, but because I yearn to see the hour when the Lord shall enter upon His own inheritance and justify Himself before heaven and earth as Judah's Lord, as Israel's God and turn the accusation of His cross: "This is Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews" into the pean of His coronation as such, I preach the Second Coming.



VI

Only at the Second Coming of the Christ of God Will a Government of Everlasting Righteousness and Peace be Established Upon the Earth

IT was the original purpose of God to make the people of Israel the head of nations, place them in Palestine as the geographical center of the earth, make them its political center, send His own Son to be their incarnate king, use them as a channel of earthly and spiritual blessing and make this world the most perfect and happiest spot in all the wide universe.

They failed to meet their opportunity.

Then the Lord transferred the possibility of world rulership from the Jews to the Gentiles.

He did this by handing political power and authority to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.

This rulership and sway of the world descended in its ordained and foretold succession down through Medo-Persia with its incorporation of Babylon, through the temporary but immensely extended empire of Greece which under Alexander included both Babylon and Medo-Persia, and after that the colossal and magic empire of Rome, swallowing up as it did the three empires or kingdoms which preceded it.

Since the division of Rome into Western and Eastern empires the rulership of the world has been maintained by the various nations composed of those people dwelling in the territory once occupied by Rome.

The world has been ruled by Turks, Spaniards, Germans, by the French and by the English.

The Gentile nations in this special and prophetic territory have been the world rulers.

It has been peculiarly Gentile rulership and in Scripture is called, "The times of the Gentiles."

Gentile times, Gentile rulership has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.

It has been an amazing rule.

It has been a rulership that has revealed the genius, the brilliance and the God-given powers of man.

It has been a rulership that has revealed the iniquity, the sin, the mad ambition and devil-inspired policies of man.

In all the twenty-five hundred years of this Gentile rule there have not been one hundred consecutive years of universal peace.

It has been twenty-five hundred years of war, of rapine, murder and measureless lust.

Cities have been destroyed, fields have been laid waste, women have endured the last outrage. Children have been orphaned, right has been upon the scaffold and wrong upon the throne, prison chains have been for virtue, silk and velvet for vice, civilization after civilization has been destroyed, the earth has been filled with anguish beyond the power of tongue or pen to describe, and blood enough has been shed through man's inhumanity to man to float all the navies of the world, and money and treasure enough wasted to have provided a palace for every man and woman on earth.

A little less than five years ago men everywhere were talking of peace and safety.

Christianity and civilization were walking hand in hand.

Christianity or that which professed to be Christianity had accepted all the claimed benefits of civilization.

Rapid transit, the telephone, all the triumphs of applied science were announced as the by-products of the Gospel. Even though the churches were becoming more or less empty and the people were turning away to other centers of instruction or enlightenment or consolation or hope, preachers were everywhere and with great insistence announcing that the world was growing better every day and that we were rapidly approaching the purple and the gold of millennial times. The hour was not far distant when the lion and the lamb should lie down together. There was much talk about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. People were coming together and having a better and more disinterested estimate of each other. Religion was ceasing to be dogmatic and precise and becoming more and more a profession that was free from restraint.

Christian ministers in the pulpit and supposedly wise men in the counsels of the nations with optimistic utterance announced that the days of barbarism had passed away, the brutality of war was at an end. Men and nations would no longer adjourn their differences to the field of battle. A magnificent palace of peace had been erected in that country that had for centuries been the bloody ground where Europe settled its political issues. In this splendid home of arbitration the nations were to meet as friends and brothers and calmly arrange and solve all matters that had hitherto kept them menacingly apart.

War had become so abhorrent to what was called the Christian sense of the nations that mothers were exhorted to banish from the nurseries anything that might suggest the thought of war, such as trumpets, drums or toy guns. So completely had the peace idea pervaded the mind of the people, the idea that peace had come to stay and nothing must be tolerated that would even hint at war, that a soldier or a sailor wearing the uniform of his country was no longer acceptable in a public place, were it a restaurant, a music hall or even a church.

Men who were opposed to spending a dollar to make a nation ready for the possibility of war were hailed as the advanced thinkers and the men worthy of the suffrage of the people; while those who contended human nature had not been changed, that a nation was simply the individual grown large and the jealousies, the covetousness and ambitions of governments would always make it possible for the strong to prey upon the weak and for the unprincipled under the guise of national necessity to attack their unprepared neighbours and therefore just as much as a city rests in confidence with the presence within it of a well-equipped police force, equally so the comfort and security of peace could be best maintained by a nation governed by right principles whose army and navy were ready to resist successfully any unjust assault upon its honour or integrity, were treated with pity, if not scorn, as still under the spell of benighted and barbaric days.

"Peace and safety!" these were the pleasant words that lulled a pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied rest and the mirage of millennial days already arrived.

Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of a clear sky, or the overflow in raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous, ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among those people at one time constituting the four kingdoms to whom God had committed the rulership of the world; that region occupied by Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome and whose administration of world affairs is called "the times of the Gentiles."

To-night ten millions of the world's flower of manhood lie rotting in their graves. Six millions of women and children have been starved to death. Women have been unspeakably ruined, children mutilated and flung as helpless debris upon the charity of strangers, suffering their orphaned estate and not knowing why.

All the genius, the science and invention of man with poured out, unlimited wealth, have been drafted to produce the most terrifically destructive means of war. All the boasted progress and culture of the preceding centuries were called upon to wage the contest until it should affright even the participants themselves. Clouds of poison gas filled the once sweet and vital air of spring time and summer mornings. Human beings wearing hideous masks and looking like other world monsters rushed in mad onslaught upon one another. They burrowed in holes and trenches like wild beasts concealed in their lair and waiting for the prey. Through the startled heavens winged things like huge vampires vomiting fire and blood took their way over cities, towns and unprotected hospitals, leaving behind them the dead, the dying and the tortured. Hunger with its sunken cheeks, and pestilence with its green eyes, its slavering lips have trod the earth till horror with wordless anguish has kept vigil by the blackened hearthstones of ruined homes and deserted firesides.

To-night, the fields of Flanders where the poppies grow and where the dead who died too soon and lie almost too thick to count, are as though a mighty juggernaut had rolled its fearful wheels over them, crushing both man and earth together into one monstrous pulp of hopeless ruin.

To-night France, where the lilies were wont to bloom, is torn and ripped in all the one-time beauty and fascination of her white and winding roads, poplar fringed, in the culture of her fruited gardens, her orchards and her royal forests, as though some monstrous creation of pre-Adamite days had survived and broken through all restraint of all the ages to riot and gorge himself with unlimited delight of destruction.

All this after two thousand years of professed Christianity and the constant iteration that the Church was slowly winning its way to the ruler-ship of the world; that each hour the world was growing better and more and more the principles of the Christ of God dominating the universal heart of man.

The world awoke to find its heart unchanged and war with aggressive animalism still the underlying and primal force in man.

To-night in face of all this, in face of the solemn declaration of the Son of God that during the whole time of His absence there would be war and rumours of war, and specially within the territory once occupied by Rome; that there would be distress of nations with perplexity, men's hearts failing them for fear for looking after the things that should be coming on the earth; that the people like the waves of the sea should be roaring, uttering their discordant voices in the thunder of protest and bitter discontent, breaking the bonds of old customs and lashing the times with lawlessness and unprecedented crime; in face of the warning of the Apostle Paul that in the last days, that is to say in the closing hours of this age, there should be, not peaceful but perilous times; that evil men should wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived; in the face of the inspired assurance of the Apostle James that as this dispensation should draw to its close Capital and Labour should stand in bitter attitude to each other; that the accumulated wealth of a special class called "rich men" should be "heaped together" that they might be spoiled and that miseries should come upon them; that on the one side should be the aggression of the profiteers and on the other the violence of those who would refuse to be exploited; in face of this assurance of industrial and class war; in face of the fact that the softest toned apostle whose pen is always transcribing the word "love," and who has reached the highest and most sublime definition of God as love; in face of the fact that this apostle affirms the hour will come when the whole world under religious, political and devilish inspiration will rush to conflict, that everywhere will be heard the tramp of armed men and the gathering of the nations for a war such as the world has not yet seen; in face of the picture which this apostle of love paints where the armies of the world are seen gathered in battle array against the Lord Christ and His right to reign; in the face of this divine warning the statesmen of the world are assembled in counsel at Paris, the world's capital of pleasure, in a palace once dedicated to lust and wanton self-gratification, whose panelled ceiling and mirrored walls are filled with and reflect the scenes and glorification of war, that by the stroke of a pen, by a series of resolutions, they may constitute a league of nations bulking so big that every threatened wave of future war may be flung back as when the dykes of Holland reject the sea.

The astonishing and suggestive thing is that in the making and remaking of the map of Europe and Asia undertaken by the framers of the league, they are, all unconsciously, restoring the outlines of the old Roman Empire and preparing the way for the final and desperate revival of Rome under the form of ten confederate nations, with its last kaiser, that dark and woful figure, the man of sin, the son of perdition, the Antichrist.

And there are Christian teachers who see in this league another herald of the millennium before Christ comes which they so sedulously preached previously to the war. They see in this league an evidence that the Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace is in reality reigning over the earth and bending the nations to His will for the reign of peace.

In the whole history of theological exegesis and interpretation I know of nothing so utterly faulty, illogical and wholly unscriptural as that exegesis which teaches the angel song at Bethlehem to be the announcement of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace and that as such He should establish it among the nations after His ascension to heaven and during His absence from the world.

The angels sang glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace to "men of good will."

The angel who spoke to the shepherds keeping the temple sheep for the morning and the evening sacrifice was testifying to them that there was no longer need to keep the sheep for such a purpose. The day of animal sacrifices had passed, the living God had provided the true sacrifice, He who was born beneath the chaplet of heaven's music, the Lamb of God ordained before the foundation of the world. He had been born into the world that He might make peace by the blood of His cross, not between man and man, not between nation and nation, but between man and God. He had been born to die and by His death reconcile a rebel world to God; on the basis of this sacrifice yet to be and when He should have risen from the dead as witness of the efficacy of His death He would bring peace to every soul that should be of good will—every soul that should surrender to the will of God by believing on Him, offering Him by faith as a sacrifice and claiming Him as a substitute. Every such soul should be at peace with, and have the peace of, God.

This was the meaning of that natal hour at Bethlehem.

The angels were not singing over Him as the Prince of Peace who had come to abolish war among the nations, but as the ordained sacrifice who should bring peace between the individual man and his God. And yet—He is to be the Prince of Peace and reign and rule as such over the earth, putting an end to war and establishing perfect peace among the nations.

The promise of His reign and rule as the Prince of Peace is clearly set forth in Scripture; as it is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah:

"Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his peace and government there shall be no end."

But when? Where?

Listen:

"Upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom to order it."

And hear what Gabriel says to Mary when he comes to announce to her that she has been chosen of Almighty God to give birth to the Messiah of Israel.

The angel says:

"Thou shalt call his name Jesus . . . He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:

And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end."

He is to be the Prince of Peace when He sits upon the throne of united Israel in their own land and not before.

He was born in fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah.

He was a Son given. The Son of God who was God the Son.

He was a Son given and became a child born.

He grew up to the station of manhood.

He entered upon His pre-arranged ministry.

At the appointed hour and to the very second foretold by Gabriel to Daniel and in the exact manner announced by the prophet Zechariah He rode into Jerusalem, went into the temple, claiming it as His Father's house of prayer and by so much declaring Himself to be the Son of the Highest and the heir of David's throne.

The shout of the multitude had announced Him officially.

They had said:

"Hosanna! Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord."

In crying this aloud they were fulfilling the prediction of Zechariah.

He had, under the vision of God, looked forward to this hour and with the Spirit of God upon him had exhorted the people who should be alive when Jesus should come to acclaim him.

He said:

"Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem; behold thy King cometh unto thee; he is just, and having salvation (political as well as spiritual salvation); lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass."

The multitude were shouting as Zechariah said they should shout. They were confessing that He who came that day up the slopes of Zion was the Prince of Judah and King of Israel.

He came to His own, but His own received Him not.

Instead of the diadem of David He got a crown of thorns. Instead of the sceptre of Israel He got the vine stick of a Roman centurion thrust through His rope-tied hands. Instead of a throne He got a malefactor's cross. Instead of a robe of royal purple He got the winding sheet of the dead. Instead of a palace He got a borrowed grave.

The Jews have paid the price of that blindness and betrayal. The man-slayer who unwittingly slew his neighbour or was even ignorant of it at the moment sooner or later found he had to flee from the avenger of blood instantly upon his track. He became an exile from his home, forced to dwell in a provided place called the city of refuge. He could not return to his home till the second coming of a priest.

The Jews were guilty, as a nation, of manslaughter.

They were deceived and involved by their leaders. They really did not know that He whom they hounded to death at the last was not only the covenant king of Israel, and the Holy One of their fathers, but the Prince of life.

Because of their blindness, blunder and sin they were cast out of the land. Because, even though in ignorance, they slew their King, they were exiled by the judgment of God from their home. They deprived the Lord of that land that was His through the covenant of Abraham, and the Lord in turn deprived them of the right of dwelling in the land. They should be exiles so long as He was an exile. Nor can they return till He comes the second time as a priest, not after the order of Aaron, but Melchisedec; for it is written that He shall be both a king and priest upon His throne.

Only can the Jews return and be owned nationally of the Lord when He shall come.

He will come and He will come as the Prince of Peace.

He will not come, I repeat, with the olive branch in His hand and the cooing dove nestling upon His shoulder.

Nay! not at all!

He will come as the Avenger of His elect, as the Son of man, as the judge of all flesh.

He will come to overthrow the combination of Devil and man.

His Coming will be the climax of old and outworn ages, the beginning of the new.

The glory of His Coming cannot be described.

Through years of meditation and continued effort at description I have exhausted my vocabulary and worn to tatters the oft-repeated phrases with which I have sought with heart full of adoring enthusiasm to announce the wonders of that hour.

If all the suns and systems were turned into speech till every flaming center of light were an adjective with increasing emphasis of qualification and expression the attempt to put into words the glory of that Coming would be a pitiful and overwhelming failure.

He will come surrounded by an innumerable host whose hallelujahs shall so vibrate that the very heavens will roll apart at their soundings.

The Lord will come in His threefold glory, the glory of the Father, the glory of the angels and His own glory: the glory of His eternal and unbegun sonship with the Father, as chief of the angels and as that man who is very God, as that God who is real and immortal man. Then will He set up the kingdom, the government for which the ages have dreamed and groaned and guessed and prayed.

That hour of hours!

Satan bound, iniquity overthrown, God and Christ and the Holy Spirit ruling in the lives of men. The very air surcharged with the righteousness of God; so surcharged that he who thinks a lie shall fall dead in the tracks where he meditated it. No longer need of judge, of jury, of prison bars, nor hangman's rope, nor electric chair.

An hour when no longer the scarlet poppies of hate, of jealousies and mad ambition shall bud and blossom into war. War over forever, swords beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Every man the same right as any other man, the right to sunshine, to air, to water, the beauty of the landscape and all the usufruct of earth.

That hour when no man shall call another his master; when no longer a man shall toil and bend his back and break his heart for a stipend of bread; for a hole in the ground and the worm of corruption as mistress of his bed.

That hour when life shall be worth while and when the centuries of peace and perfectness of actual being shall pass on till they are counted as eternity.

And because this government of peace and splendour and all the outflowing possibilities of a world in which righteousness shall reign and God shall be first can be brought about only by and at the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; because until He does so come wars and sorrows and the darkness of sin will continue; because all the legislation of man and all the leagues of nations will utterly fail to establish permanent peace; because in spite of the best endeavours of all the merely moral forces in the earth there is nothing can keep this system called the world from going on the rocks; because only the hand of God's Christ can break the bands of iniquity, quiet earth's fever pulses and putting down all authority bring in the peace that never can be broken; because when He comes the government of right and truth and the life that is really worth while shall come; and because from my heart I want to see that longed-for hour of heaven on earth, I preach the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.



VII

It is at the Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ that the Earth Will be Delivered from the Bondage of Corruption and Transformed into the Paradise of God

WHEN man fell creation fell.

It fell because creation in respect to this earth was headed up in him.

God placed a ban upon it, a restraint of its fruitfulness.

Instead He gave liberty to thorns and briars and poisonous, creeping things.

You may plant your garden, you may plant your orchard, set your vines and sow your fields. You may go to sleep and rest and think your work is done, that nothing remains but to awake again and receive the looked-for fruit and harvest.

When you do awake you will find the poisonous, creeping things have climbed over your wall and fence, have glided in among the good seed, flung their tentacles of death about them and are slowly, surely strangling the life out of them.

If you would have your garden to grow, your orchard to yield its fruit, your vineyard to hang out its purple clusters, your harvests to ripen in the kiss of sun and developing touch of caressing winds, then you must rise early and toil late. For every acre of worthful land you must crown your brow with the sweat of unceasing and exacting toil.

The earth is in bondage. It is held in the close, the gripping and relentless bonds of corruption.

Everywhere and in all things is the corruption of the dead.

The very air you breathe is dust from the mingled bones of the dead. The earth is crammed with the dead of man and beast. The grain that is reaped and the flowers that bloom grow forth from the fatness of the grave and the impulse of corruption, watered by tears distilled from the heartache of the generations old who have sorrowed above that grave and wept and hoped in vain.

Put your ear to the bosom of old mother earth and you will hear a moaning and lament like unto women in travail who seek to bring to the birth.

I am told the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now; that it is on the tiptoe of expectation with neck and head stretched out waiting for the Coming of the Son of God and all the sons of glory.

O yes! creation in all her borders is crying out for the Son of God to come.

It is crying out from all its rivers, from the moan of the sea, in the shiver of earthquake and the rush of the lava tide from the red throat of the flaming volcano. It is crying out in the heat of burning deserts, in every pain that is felt, in every tear of anguish that stains the face and speaks the agony of the heart, in every clod that falls with its accent of woe upon the coffin lid, in all the bitterness, the shame and tragedy of a sin-smitten and Devil-hurt world; everything in nature from rock and worm to man is crying out: "Come, Lord Jesus, and build again this broken and ruined earth of thine."

He will hear the cry.

When He comes He will take off the ban.

He will deliver from corruption.

The earth will no longer shiver as an aspen.

Fear will no longer walk forth like a tyrant and set the pulses beating or hold them strangling.

Briars and thorns and fiend-like weeds and smothering, choking things that have kept the earth in barrenness where Eden-like gardens should have bloomed, and, thank God, all graves, will disappear. The desert shall bloom as the rose, the earth shall be renewed, made beautiful, and all creation loosened from its prison bonds shall sing and echo with unending harmonies in every freely fruiting and growing thing throughout all its delivered and happy borders.

For a thousand golden years under a new heavens and beneath a pure sky where the air shall flow round it as a river of crystal from the throne of God the earth will roll onward to the music of its sister spheres keeping time in the great diapason of the universe that owns and celebrates the glory of God; then, at last, it will pass through gates of fire and come forth into that new orbit, as that new earth wherein is no more dividing sea, storm swept and full of the wrecks of ships, of greater wrecks of hopes, and tiled with the white bones of the dead; that new earth where there shall be no more night with its hidden evil and its long and darksome hours in which the sufferer yearns for morning light, no more tears, nor sorrow, nor pain, nor any more that black and ever multiplying horror they call death; that new earth that shall be no longer the footstool, but the exalted and special throne of God—the center of the universe.

Into this new and perfect earth the Church shall descend—a company of redeemed, blood-washed, immortal sons of God.

The Son of God and God the Son Himself shall descend and dwell there. Then for the first time shall the children of God behold in Him the full lineament of their Father's face; for, though He be the eternal Son He shall be seen and known as the "everlasting Father," or "the Father of the everlasting age."

The onlooking worlds as they swing in their chorus of adoration about this radiant and omnipotent center will learn and proclaim the immense truth that this earth was created, not merely as an expression of the wisdom, genius and might of God in His function as a creator, but as the arena of redemption, as the spot whence in all the wide empire of His power might be known and felt the pulse beat of His heart. As the innumerable hosts of heaven sweep around this center of grace and redemption, as they behold beings who once were lost in sin, wrecked and ruined beyond human hope or angelic aid, now immortal, holy, happy sons of God, they will break forth in ever increasing songs of adoration and shall say as they sing till the universe shall repeat it again and again:

"Behold, the glory of God is not alone in his majesty and might, in his holiness and omnipotence, but in his love."

They shall take up that marvellous passage in John 3: 16 and cry it aloud so that it will ring with accumulating praise to Him who first uttered it:

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

And all the host of heaven shall proclaim:

"God is love. God is love."

All this consummation is to find its initial at the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And because I want to see this earth freed from the stain of sin, the torture of pain, the accents of sorrow, the terror of tears, the hour of dying, the black and shameful grave, the trench of corruption and the Devil's ministry of death; because I want to see a worth-while world where no longer the earth shall turn from night to morn and then from morn to disappointing night again, but shall glow forever in the light of an endless morn; because I want to see a world where the purposes of God in love, in benediction and unfailing grace are no longer seemingly contradicted by untoward events and conditions, by problems that with the best apologies for the divine character no human genius can solve or balance, but are written in high and lifted testimony brighter than the stars of any night and stronger shining than any sun of day; because I want to see a world where man shall be the enthronement of God and shall glorify Him as such, and where every atom of earth shall be full of His love and redolent with His praise, and where life shall be only another name for joy and the unending and the ever new unfoldment of it, the actual joy of unreserved, unlimited living; and because this desire in all its full accomplishment can come and the first notes of infinite triumph alone be struck and the song begin by the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ—I preach His Second Coming.



VIII

The Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ for His Church is the Most Imminent Event on the Horizon of Time

BETWEEN us and the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in glory to Mount Zion to set up and establish His kingdom there are many predicted and consecutively fixed events.

Between us and the moment when our Lord shall suddenly and secretly descend to take the Church to Himself into the place prepared, hold her in security above the woe hour coming on all them that dwell on the face of the earth and then bring her back to reign and rule with Him in glory, there is not a single, predicted event; and this—in the very nature of the case.

In the nature of the case because this age in which we live is a parenthesis between the kingdom postponed upon the one side and the kingdom to be brought in upon the other.

In this age God is not seeking to convert the world, but to take out of it a people for His Name.

It is an age of selection and therefore an age of election.

When you take some things out of the midst of other things there will be, not only a first one, but necessarily a last one.

As there was a first one elected, called out and taken into union with a risen Lord, so must there be a last one who shall be called through the Gospel, quickened by the Spirit and bound up in indissoluble union with a living Lord.

When that last one is called and responds to the life-giving power of the Spirit the Lord will descend into the upper air and take the completed and corporate Church to Himself—the dead raised, the living changed.

When that last elect one will be called you do not know, it is not known to a single soul on earth.

Since you do not know when the last elect of God shall be called, and it is sure the Lord will come when that last elect one is called, then you do not know when the Lord will come; and so far as you are concerned, and so far as any revelation otherwise is given, it may be any hour and, therefore, "any moment"; consequently the Coming of the Lord for His Church is—imminent.

Thus the imminency of the Lord's Coming for His Church is grounded on election.

Imminency is so absolutely linked up with election that you cannot deny imminency without denying election; and to deny election is to deny God Himself, deny Him in the very essence of His own prerogative, the prerogative of foreordination, of decree.

The imminency of the Lord's Coming for His Church is grounded on the Lord's own declaration that He is coming for her as a thief comes.

This is His declaration and warning to the Church at Sardis, that Church which is the symbol of Protestantism in the closing hours of the age. The warning is given to the pastor, through the pastor to the Church and through the local assembly at Sardis to the whole Church.

This is what the risen Lord actually says:

"Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard; and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will arrive over thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will arrive over thee."

The characteristics of thief coming are marked and clear.

The thief does not come with strident voice, with thunderous noise, nor in open daylight, but between the midnight and the morn, with shodden feet, silently, softly, and takes the treasure while all in the house are sunken in the depths of sleep.

When the sunbeams of the morning pelt the eyelids of the laggard sleepers they awake to find the thief has come and gone and in his going has taken the treasure with him.

If the symbol be of avail and not a mere exercise in logomachy then will the Lord, indeed, descend in the moral and spiritual night of the world while men are sleeping and in fancied security pleasantly dreaming.

He will descend unseen, unnoted. If men shall hear the sound of a trump it will have no greater significance to their spiritually deaf ears than any other passing sound. He will take, not the "great house" of religious profession, but those alone in that profession who have been regenerated and are indwelt by the Spirit, the dead who have fallen asleep in His name and the living who abide in Him.

Above all—imminency is grounded in the integrity of the Son of God and His apostles.

Unless all language is a deception; unless the promises of God are a baited lie; unless the apostles of Christ are the most shameless of all wanton tricksters; unless the Son of God Himself is the coolest traitor to truth who ever fooled the trusting hearts of needy men; unless He is the one being of all others who had the subtle and effective genius of making promises that fill the ear and are broken to the heart; unless He was the most skillful of all deceivers and rejoiced with malignant delight in deceiving the souls of men and thus proved Himself to be not the Son of God at all but the very son of falsehood, then seeing He is the reverse of all that, is in truth the very Son of God and truth itself, by His own unqualified statement, by its very character as exhortative warning His Coming must be and is—imminent. It is on the threshold of unfolding history and the gates of heaven are ajar ready for His Coming. So imminent is it that there is nothing between us and that event of events but the shout of command, the voice of the archangel and the shattering sound of the trump. So imminent that there is not the thickness of an eyelash between us and that moment when the door in heaven shall open wide and His voice with all compelling power shall say, "Come up hither."

Listen to what He says:

"Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come."

Watch! because He is coming.

Watch! because you do not know what hour He will come.

Watch! because as the householder He said He might come in any one of the four watches, at even, at midnight, in the cockcrowing or in the morning.

He did not come at even.

Surely the midnight has come. It is dark enough spiritually. There is not only enough of sorrow, sin, confusion and unbelief in a godless world, but rank treason to the truth and repudiation of the written Word in the professing Church to call it spiritual midnight.

It seems sometimes like the cockcrowing.

There are sounds of chanticleer, blasts of trumpets, changing of the guards and sentinels of old customs and ways, and echoes in the events now unrolling that prelude the great morning and the great day.

There is nothing certain about the hour but its—uncertainty.

Watch! because you may be alive at His Coming.

That is the word of Holy Scripture and not my suggestion.

Listen to the Apostle: "We which are alive, and remain unto the coming of the Lord."

The Apostle said that for his generation.

He said it not under his own mistaken idea as the Chicago department of "sacred literature" would suggest, but under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of the Holy God.

Paul as a mere man might make mistakes just as the modern theological professor not infrequently does.

The Holy Spirit speaking through Paul could not make a mistake Himself, neither could it be possible for Paul under the direction of the Holy Spirit to make a mistake.

Paul was led by the Holy Spirit to believe it possible the Son of God might come in his day.

What Paul under inspiration said for his generation, he said for our generation.

He said it for you and for me.

Because no man knows the hour when the Lord will come it might be in your hour and my hour.

The Master Himself said:

"You know not what hour your Lord doth come."

Who is he who will have the hardihood to fix the hour when the Master has said no man knows?

Who is he who will put a thousand years between the Church and her returning Lord?

Where is the difference between a thousand years' delay and one moment that can be fixed by any man?

If the Lord says you do not know the hour and necessarily do not know the minute of the hour, if you fix a minute between us and the Coming you deny the words of the Son of God Himself that the minute and the hour are unknown.

Who is he who has it all fixed and polished and pumice stoned to the exact date?

The Lord has said no man on earth knows, not an angel in heaven knows. He Himself took the place of a servant and by the exercise of His omnipotent will residing in His eternal and unchanged personality as Son of God and God the Son, shut out the knowledge of it from His humanity, from Himself as man, and said He did not know when He should come.

Admit that a revelation has since been given to Him as a man or that He has taken the ban off His human side Himself and that He knows when He will come for the Church and the exact hour of His appearing in glory; admit this if you like and for the sake of argument (although there is not the slightest shade of a shadow of evidence for such an argument) it still remains that no such revelation has ever been given to the Church; neither has the restriction of the Son of God to His disciples been removed. You remember what He said just before He ascended!

This is what He said:

"It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power."

That this restriction was for the Church is the declaration of the Apostle. This is what he said to the Church at Thessalonica:

"Of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you."

Why had he no need to write to them?

Because the day of the Lord, he said, should come as a thief, and as that day is introduced by the Coming of the Lord for His Church, then His coming for the Church was, as He Himself afterwards declared in his letter to Sardis, like the coming of a thief. This Coming Paul had described in the fourth chapter of his first letter to the Thessalonians.

It was not for the Church to know in Paul's day when the Lord should come as the bridegroom for His bride.

No revelation has been given in any epistle to the Church since. What was true in Paul's day as to the attitude of the Church is true in this day. Listen to the commended attitude of the Thessalonian Church:

"Ye turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven."

There you have it.

The Church is to wait; that means to watch, to expect, to be ready.

This is what the Apostle said.

This is what the Son of God Himself said and still says to-day.

He affirms we do not know the hour.

He exhorts us to watch.

The affirmation and the exhortation hold for this hour.

If therefore the Son of God be not incarnate falsehood; if He seek not to play with my heart and make me a spectacle to the lost souls of the pit as well as to the mockers among men—He means what He said.

If He meant what He said, then He means that any day, and any hour of the day so far as I know I may meet Him at any turn of the road.

And what would that mean if He should come to-night or to-morrow?

I have told you what it would mean to me.

What would it mean to you, to some of you who have so much invested in Laurel Hill, in that white and beautiful city of the dead, by the banks of your winding river?

When I was a boy my father took me there and I watched as the winds rippled through the long grasses, and I could hear the wash of the river below, I was startled and sometimes shivered as I walked under the shadow of tall monuments, carved figures, and by stately tombs of marble. And once I started back and broke into tears at the sight of the sculptured form of "Old Mortality" bending above a slab with chisel and mallet in hand—and I suppose is there still, grown older in his stony face because more stained with the passing years.

What would it mean to you whose loved ones are lying in that cemetery or any other of the sleeping places of the dead?

Ah! it would mean the home-coming, the greeting, the rapturous kiss and hand-clasp of recognition, the joy of that heaven life that shall know no end and that immortality that shall compensate for all the weariness and the heartache of the mortal path here below.

Yes! it would mean to those of us who by faith in Christ Jesus are children of the living God, the gathering to our arms again of those who have left us and for whom our arms still ache to enfold them once more. And O my soul! it would mean the seeing of Him whom our soul loveth and who unfailingly has loved us; it would mean that boon of boons—seeing Him face to face.

Do you wonder the Holy Spirit who is the finger of God has written over against the word "hope," that qualification, "blessed," and affixed to it the demonstrative, "that," so it doth read: "That blessed hope"?

And yet! and yet! there are men who call themselves the ministers of Christ who would blot out that hope and take away the vision of it from our souls.

With cold, acute, metallic voices in which you may hear the sound of the wheels of machinery and the buzz of business, they tell us that should the Lord suddenly come it would paralyze all industry, put an end to commerce and to trade, overthrow all progress, make worthless every high endeavour for the betterment of man, shut the doors of school, of college and university, render useless the architect's and builder's plans, throw down the mechanic's tools, the artist's brush, the sculptor's chisel, the writer's pen, still the orator's tongue, make null and void the legislator's high emprise and draw a line of atrophy across the unfolding processes of human life.

Oh, foolish, blind and slow to believe, do you not see that if the Lord should come it would lift our so-called civilization out of the slime and shame of its brazen folly and reeking, though perfumed sin into the glory of eternal righteousness and peace?

Do you not see that it would, at last, make men immortal and give them such beauty of form, such sanity and such culture and worth of being as all the gymnasia and all the eugenics of the hour have failed and will ever fail to achieve?

Do you not see that if the Lord should suddenly come it would at once open the gates of knowledge and bring us face to face with the secrets of the universe and make us masters under God of all natural laws such as all the curriculae of all the institutions of learning, of applied science and philosophy have failed to impart?

Do you not see it would be the fulfillment of the highest ideals and aspirations and would make man what the creator of heaven and earth originally intended man should be—not an animal working with tools and breaking his heart in vain finally to achieve—but a very God who should speak and it should be done, command and it should stand fast; and who should be the incarnate revelation, the eternal enthronement of the invisible God, in power, in character and holiness?

Do you not see it would change this old earth from the swinging cemetery of the dead into the home of deathless men, the home of the eternal and worth-while life?

Oh, listen to me all who hear me!

The hope for this world of daily toil and tears, of graves and unceasing tragedy, of pitiful woe, is not that slow creeping thing called evolution, wallowing on its serpentine belly amid the dust of death and the crime and sin of unchanged and unchangeable human nature—but God Himself—God in Christ, the personal Coming of Him who is the maker of heaven and earth, coming to bring in the new dawn, the new day, the new earth and the new empire of God and man.

Oh, tell me those of you who have been redeemed by blood, regenerated by the Spirit, made partakers of the divine nature, turned heavenward by the power of God, who see cloudless daylight in the Bible, even in the darkness of a spiritual night, hear music in its promises and whose souls are filled with love to God and love to man, tell me would you like Him to come, would you like to see your Lord face to face?

Oh, you who have had the vision of His cross behold it, I beseech you, there!

The head crowned with thorns, the nailed hands, the nailed feet, the pierced side, the blood pouring out of those hands, gliding round His body, weaving itself in its sinuous course over the white flesh into a robe of crimson, and then streaming out into a fringe of intense scarlet as it drops, drop by drop to the thirsty ground, dripping, dripping there. Oh, I can see it and I seem to feel the warm touch of it, the strange, the wonderful cleansing touch of it, the only thing that can make a blackened sinner white; and as it drops each drop seems to say till it turns to very music in the soul:

"Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."

Listen to the dropping of that blood out of the heart of God, every drop the price current of the merchant, the half shekel of the sanctuary, the purchase price of your redemption and mine and the seal of infinite love, of measureless grace.

Oh, tell me would you like Him to come, transfigure you into the beauty of His likeness and put the benediction of His peace upon this old sin-smitten, tear-stained earth?

Do you ever pray the last prayer recorded in Holy Scripture, the last prayer of the Holy Apostolic Church?

Listen to it! Listen to it well!

"Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus."

Is this prayer in your heart?

Does it ever come to your lips?

Do you ever genuinely and openly offer it, wishing with all your heart it might be so, might be answered in your time; or, have you forgotten it like the Church at large?

Do you feel ashamed or afraid to offer it in public?

When you try to offer it in private or public does unbelief smother it?

I once heard a boy say to his mother:

"O mother, don't do so much for me; love me more."

I tell you the truth whether you hear or forbear: as preachers and teachers many of you are doing too much for the Lord. You are busy, morning, noon and night in His name, running here and there, tinkering religiously and morally, putting things together and increasingly active; so busy doing for the Lord that like Martha you have no time to sit still at His feet as did Mary and hear His Word, hear what He has to say to you; so busy doing for Him that you are losing sight of Himself. This was the "somewhat" He had against the Ephesian Church.

That Church was full of works and labours. They had tested false doctrines and false teachers. They stood squarely for fundamentals and were theologically sound; but they had left their "first love," love to Himself, love to His person, devotion to His person, a flaming, outbreaking, overflowing enthusiasm for a personal, a realistic Saviour and Lord. They were taken up with what they were doing for Him rather than with Himself. They had got away from the loving, impelling touch and contact with Himself.

The personal touch with Christ!

That is what He wants from us. Not so much what we are doing for Him, but what He is to us personally. He wants to be the first and the last, the chiefest among ten thousands and the one altogether lovely. This is the definition of true and efficient Christianity —personal devotion to a living and loving Saviour.

Looking down from heaven He is saying to us, no matter how much we may be doing for Him, He is saying this to us:

"Love me more."

And until there is this flaming, burning, out-flowing enthusiasm for and devotion to a personal Lord, to Him for what He is as well as for what He has done for us, there can be no sweeping, wide, resultant revival and ingathering of the elect of God. You may plan and organize and get together, you will have only a flame that will flare for a time and then go out.

Nay! only when we are on fire for Him can we make the hearts of men to burn with the faith that shall turn them to Him and make them hate and forsake whatever does not honour and glorify Him.

Over all the noise and rush of things, and all the machinery well motived men sometimes set going in His name He is saying:

"Love me more! love me more!"

When some one you love with this intense personal love is absent you are not satisfied till that absent one returns, fills your vision and responds to the touch of your greeting and your love.

If you love the very person of the Son of God; if you have a quivering, all-pervading enthusiasm for Him so that He is, indeed, above all personalities in the universe to you, you will want Him to return where you may look upon Him—not as Thomas did for doubt's sake and stumbling hope's sake—but for the very joy of it until the print of the nails in His hand and the print of the nails in His feet shall be to you as the apocalypse of His glory and the illumination of your soul.

Do you really want Him to come—this long absent Redeemer and Lord?

He is listening to hear whether you want Him to come; whether above every plan and scheme you may have been building in His name; above any religious, even spiritual ambition you may have, you want Him to come for—Himself.

He is very still. He is listening to hear whether you will say that one little word that has in it such vibrant meaning, that one word:

"Come."

The Church as a Church has long ago ceased to say—"Come."

But the old prayer is still written here in the closing page of Holy Scripture:

"Amen. Even so, Come, Lord Jesus."

Are you willing to-night to put your faith and your heart into that old prayer and bid Him come?

Have you the faith and sincerity to do it?

You say, "Yes."

Then rise to your feet as one person and say that prayer as I line it out to you until it shall roll upward like a wave on the infinite shore and break on our Lord's listening ears with the music of love's unfailing appeal:

"AMEN. EVEN SO, COME, LORD JESUS."



In response to Dr. Haldeman the great audience filling the building from pit to dome rose to its feet as in a flash and repeated the prayer as he gave it out. It was a moving sight and full of impression as the mighty volume of united voices rose and swelled upward to that throne where our Lord sits as Bridegroom as well as King and yearns in these days to hear His true Bride in all the wonder of her spiritual beauty and the strength of her essential unity say—"Come."



Printed in the United States of America

THE END