The Work of the Two Witnesses
By W. A. S.
Grandly the light of God's Word is streaming into the dark corners of the earth. The two witnesses—the Old and New Testaments—are bearing the message of the coming of the Lord to the uttermost parts. The rapid spread of the Scriptures is a constantly brightening sign of the times to cheer our hearts. How wonderfully God has dealt with his Holy Book! In the long dark period of the papal supremacy he cared for it according to the prophecy: “I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days [the 1,260 years of papal supremacy], clothed in sackcloth.” And those days of papal rule and darkness as of sackcloth were shortened by the powerful witnessing of the Holy Scriptures that brought in the Reformation.5 Then came another effort of the enemy of light to put down the Scriptures in those atheistical days of the French Revolution. Infidelity thought it had begun a movement that would silence the two witnesses. But again the prophecy was fulfilled: “The spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet,” and their enemies beheld them exalted to the heavens; for just then began the great Bible society movement, which has now carried the Scriptures into more tongues than were known of in Europe a century ago. God is hastening on the work of warning the world by many agencies. The annual report of the British Bible Society says of its work last year:— To carry the Scriptures far and wide and to offer them from door to door, the society employed nine hundred and thirty colporteurs throughout last year, at a cost of about forty-five thousand pounds. If our eyes could trace these humble Bible sellers up and down the world amid the many-colored conditions of their service, we should see them busy among Indian rice-fields and along Chinese waterways, over Canadian prairies and through the Australian bush, and beside the great African lakes. We should watch them sheltering in native huts in the snowy defiles of the Andes, and threading their path under trails of purple orchids through the forests of Brazil. From South Malaysia one man writes: “I am now enjoying a semi-nomadic-aquatic existence, spending half my time in a bullock cart and half in a boat. I have not seen an Englishman for the last three months, and probably shall not see one for the next six.” Another writes: “All the time I was selling Scriptures in the market-place, showers of fine cinders fell around me from a volcanic eruption.” Last year these colporteurs sold over 2,250,000 copies of the Scriptures—a total far above all previous records. It is truly a work that is fulfilling prophecy. These colporteurs with the Sacred Word are pioneers in the final work of bearing the gospel to every nation and tongue. The world's Bible societies are agents of Providence for this last time. Everything is shaping for a quick movement in the finishing of God's work in the earth. W. A. S.