p. 51 | Delayeth his Coming

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 24, 1857

Delayeth his Coming.

“A distinguished Geologist announced lately to a crowded and admiring audience, that the world would or might last thirty-six thousand years. What were his data, it is not my affair to scan. But the intelligence was hailed by bursts of rapture and exultation by delighted multitudes. . . . Will it however await their pleasure and their leisure? Then it will not come at all! They love not the appearing of the Son of man in the clouds of heaven. They love not himself nor his coming. And yet he will come, at such an hour, too, as they think not. The prayers of the martyrs, in their white robes, will be heard sooner than they are aware of: the Patriarchs and Prophets, the Apostles and Martyrs, 150 generations of the redeemed, a great multitude which no man can number, unite their prayers with the church throughout all the world, that “it might please him shortly to accomplish the number of his elect and to hasten his Kingdom.” All saying Amen, come Lord Jesus! To postpone that coming, ad infinitum, is to deny it altogether! To make God a liar: for “the Lord is at hand” is his word. And whose prayers will be heard?—Those of his friends and servants to hasten it on; or those of his enemies and persecutors to delay and prevent it! If the end of all things is at hand, and the Judge is at the door, who is wisest, surest, safest?—they that expect him and prepare for him; or they that neither expect nor wish for him at all? Neither the deluge, nor the destruction of the cities of the plain, was a natural event, a cyclical revolution for the Geologist to trace, or the Astronomer to calculate: So, likewise, the Second Advent, or the judgment of the great day. He will come as a thief in the night. When they shall say peace, peace, then sudden destruction cometh upon them. . . . Does not the above mentioned Geologist lay the snare and favor the thief?”—The Life Everlasting. By John Whiting, D. D., Rector of Ballymackey, and Chancellor of Killoe, London, 1856, p. 29.

“Christ coming in his glory, to judge the world, and to make all things new: Here is the pith and kernel of evangelical truth, the pillar of the Catholic church, the weight and the strength of the Christian faith.”—Ib. 79.