Signs of the Near Coming of Christ.
By Dr. G. W. Weldon
DR. G. W. WELDON, Vicar of St. Saviour's, Chelsea, England, says:— Prophecy fulfilled is the history of the past; unfulfilled, it is the history of the future. Each accomplishment of any one predicted event, is not only a guarantee for the accomplishment of future ones, but affords cumulative evidence of the truth of our Christian faith. A candid, humble, prayerful examination of prophecy, shows to us one of the most exalted and delightful views of the divine economy in the history of the world. When we think of God looking through the mists of countless ages, beholding generations yet unborn, depicting, as in a photograph, not only their actions, but their very words and thoughts, and making the conflicting plans and jarring passions of perverse human hearts fulfill to the letter the minutest details of his almighty will, we have a wonderful and magnificent illustration that the Most High ruleth in the kingdoms of men, and is Governor among the nations. The most casual observer of events now transpiring in the world must be constrained to admit that we are living in an age of rapid transition. Events develop themselves now in a single year, which, a century ago, would not have appeared in twenty years. Just exactly as a stone rolling down the mountain-side increases in its velocity in proportion as it approaches the termination of its course, so, as each succeeding year glides on toward the consummation of our hopes in the coming of Christ, events develop themselves with increasing interest and progressive speed. And, therefore, as we look around us now in the present age, and take up our Bibles, and read of certain signs which are to transpire in the last days; if we can find such signs actually in existence around us, we are warranted in saying that we are in the last days, and are approaching the advent of our long-expected and absent Lord. St. Paul says, in his epistle to Timothy, “In the last days perilous times shall come,” and then he gives some of those signs. And Peter says: “In the last days scoffers shall come.” Now our modern skeptics and scoffers are not coarse, but educated mockers—men of science—of whom it may be said, They have everything, except God in spirit and in truth. Many of them apparently possess amiability, kindliness of disposition, and gentleness of heart; and these very qualities in themselves tend to rivet the intellect, and fascinate the hearts of the youthful, and to make them think that this pretended science, so called, is going to displace the word of God, and to usher in an era of something better and more attractive. St. Peter tells us that such scoffers shall be willingly ignorant of the way in which God made the world. Now one of these modern scoffers, a noted physiologist, speaking of the Bible, and the account it gives of the creation of the world in Genesis, says: “These accounts of the creation of the world are fossil forms of thought, and, after a time, they will take their place as the fossils in the history of our geological strata.” Another noted scientific man in the department of chemistry denies altogether the efficacy of prayer. He says that prayer never painted a flower or photographed a sunbeam; and he calls the Mosaic record of creation “the beautiful myths of the Bible.” Another conspicuous modern writer of this school calls the Bible a fairy tale. Now, here are three representatives of the world's modern philosophers (although falsely so called) who are “willingly ignorant that God in the beginning made the heavens and the earth, and without him was not anything made that was made.” The dismal infidelity of such so-called learned men of science is one of the signs of the last days, in fulfillment of the scoffers predicted by Peter. Another—the author of a well-known work—in giving an account of the world, how it came into existence, writes as follows: “The air was black, night eternal illumined only by lightning or volcanoes, the earth unconscious of the sun's existence. But the crust thickens, the atmosphere brightens, and the sun's rays penetrated to the earth.” And thus he accounts for the origin of our globe. And, as regards mankind, he says these strange words: “The ancestors of man were dots of animated jelly.” He stigmatizes prayer as folly, and calls belief in the resurrection a “sweet, fallacious hope of a barbarous and poetic age—illusions still cherished for mankind while yet in its romantic youth.” But he adds—and these are words that probably find their desponding echo in the heart of every infidel—“How sweet it would be to believe it; the shortness of life would comfort us, and we should welcome death. But we do not believe it, and so we cling to our tortured lives, dreading the dark nothingness, and dreading the dispersal of our elements into ever unconscious space.” Oh! how different from St. Paul's joyful assurance, “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens;” and, “If in this life only, we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” The great and good Wilberforce is stigmatized, by the same skeptical writer, as having become the prey of a morbid superstition, when he experienced and openly professed evangelical faith in Christ and conversion of heart. But these very philosophers of the world, who skeptically reject the history and prophecies of the Bible, foolishly make themselves prophets of things to come, which are nowhere revealed except in their own imaginations. One of them, in his philosophical treatise, speaks thus magniloquently of the future: “We are going to have great inventions in the future—motive force to take the place of steam; aerial locomotion to transport labor at a trifling cost to any part of the world; the manufacture of meat from the elements by a chemical process. Food will then be cheap, and our enlightened posterity will look back upon us just as we look back upon savages. Poetry and fine arts will take the place of religion. Science will transform our bodies into something wonderful. Disease being extirpated, the secret of immortality will be discovered. Man will be perfect, but even then no nearer to the First Cause, the inscrutable mystery, God.” Here we have the dreams of a scientific, or deistical, skeptic, who would shut Christ out of the world which he created, and reach an imaginary state of perfection by human discoveries and inventions. But, in opposition to such dreams, we know that nothing but the personal advent of Christ will bring the earth to the state of millennial perfection and Edenic bliss, to which, as paradise restored, it is destined to attain. As the end draws nigh, we must expect wickedness to become aggravated. Just as in the disease of consumption, in proportion as the victim approaches the grave, the body becomes more and more the seat of the disease, until, at last, it sinks a prey to the fell destroyer; so we may expect that, as time advances, the various forms of iniquity and developments of evil will appear in an intensified and aggravated degree. The history of the antediluvian world will repeat itself in these last days. “As it was in the days of Noah, even so shall it be in the days of the Son of man.” St. Paul says there will be in the last days some “having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” These are the modern Pharisees and superstitious formalists, who equally with the skeptical Sadducees flourish like a green bay tree in these latter times. They may be seen on Sunday mornings at fashionable churches, acknowledging, in the general confession, that they are miserable sinners, and have gone astray like lost sheep; and in the afternoon promenading at the Zoo, arrayed in purple and fine linen, with every outward adornment of wealth and luxury; and on week days attending performances at the theater or opera, or dancing polkas and waltzes in brilliant ballrooms. We find Romanism and ritualism putting forth their seductive attractions to deceive, if possible, the very elect; and society for most part becoming more and more worldly, with superabounding luxury, and extravagance, and lavish display, colossal fortunes, and idolatry of life. These, with other things too numerous to particularize, strangely coincide with St. Paul's prediction: “In the last days perilous times shall come; for men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, incontinent,” etc., “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” 2 Tim. 3:1–5. We are, in fact, treading upon the borders of the final crisis of this dispensation. We have much reason to believe that the six thousand years from the creation of man are very near their termination, and that we are on the eve of the appearance of our Saviour Jesus Christ, to establish the glorious fifth monarchy predicted by the prophets. Dan. 7:9–14.