The World's Jubilee

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, Cal. · Apr 29, 1875

The World's Jubilee.

The following rich extract is from an English layman's letter addressed to Dr. Raffles, on a hymn composed by him for the “Jubilee Year of the Missionary Society.” The reader will perceive that it was written before the abolition of American slavery. But, with the exception of this, all the evils of which the writer speaks, have been intensified ten-fold since the article was written. The hymn rejoices in the hope of the world's speedy conversion. The writer says:—

But ere I draw this letter to a close, let me ask you one question, Do you considerately believe that the earth is on the advance to such a consummation as your hymn describes?

I am writing to you with the map of the world suspended before me, the map of this world, of which Satan is the god, and whose right to it, de facto, the Bible does not dispute but recognizes. Will you, in your study, travel with me over the map or ground plot of the great usurper's dominions, and tell me where it is that you have discovered the cause of such jubilant acclamations as your hymn so joyfully, so sweetly, breathes? for I confess that this map is to my eye like Ezekiel's roll, full of “lamentations, and mourning, and woe.”

Where shall we begin? With the dark places of the earth, which by universal consent, are full of the habitations of cruelty? Poor Africa! I will not seem as one that mocketh, by asking you whether you find it there—whether from the Isthmus of Suez to the Straits of Gibraltar, you can find a resting-place for the foot of your happy muse. Well, then, shall we coast it down the western shore, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the cape? Oh! you exclaim, let us hasten on; for these shores are dyed with blood, so deeply dyed, and the stain so continually, hourly renewed, that the Atlantic waves cannot efface it. Back, then, along the eastern shore, with a sigh, a tear, and a groan, for poor Madagascar as we haste along, and another for Arabia, miscalled “the happy,” and its stony and its desert region, as we pass up the Red Sea to the point from whence we started. I ask not if we have yet found a spot where we could pause for a moment to chant our “Jubilee Hymn.”

Let us, then, cross this mighty continent—we shall need no guide. The Pagan, the Mahometan, and the Christian slave-driver, have marked ten thousand roads for us athwart the otherwise trackless deserts, and we have only to follow the track strewed with the bones and wet with the blood of poor Africa's children. Should these be not enough to guide us, let us listen to the cracking of the whips, and the shrieks of agony which fill the sultry air, the groans of the fathers, the wailings of the mothers, and the plaintive cries of the hapless children. But we must hasten on—all, all is dark, dark as midnight, gloomy and cruel as the caverns of hell.

But the Cape! you say—the Cape of Good Hope! Well, we will return to the Cape and to some other sweet oases in the great desert of the fell tyrant's dominions before we part company. At present let us hasten on; surely we may not spend many moments in that frightful continent of South America, which seems to look across the ocean to the continent we have left, and defy it to a rivalry of cruelty and woe.

From the Isthmus of Panama to Cape Horn, and from Cape Horn to the Isthmus of Panama, all, all around and within, is true and faithful to its allegiance to its hellish master.

Onward, then, onward to the land of the “pilgrim fathers.” We need not tarry, I hear you say, in the Gulf of Mexico, to look either to the west on Guatimala, or to the east on Cuba, St. Domingo, or the islands, which for ages have almost concentrated in themselves the groans of creation. Nor will you, I am sure, desire to linger in the slave States of the South, where the “Jubilee Hymn” could not even be heard were it sung by ten thousand voices, for the cry of bitter woe which would drown its notes—where the brutalized tyrant of the South imports and breeds human slaves for his own use and that of the free-born sons of the pilgrim fathers of the North. Haste we, then, from the sickening scenes which your eloquent tongue and your eloquent pen have often in vain endeavored fully to describe.

And have you the heart to sing the hymn in the land of slave-holding Christians, among men who even if they believe the black has been washed in the blood of Jesus, will buy and sell him, grind and oppress him, flog, torture, and murder him; and who, if you or I, or any other who knows what liberty means, should take him by the hand and call him brother, would hand us out of the pale of evil and Christian communion; and if we should be bold enough to propose to proclaim liberty to the captive and the opening of the prison to them that are bound in any other than a spiritual sense, would not scruple to hang us up at the nearest convenient tree?

Linger here, my dear sir, and sing with such a people your “Jubilee Song” if you can. I could not join you if I would; my voice would falter, my tongue would cleave to the roof of my mouth, I should choke with indignation.

Oh! but you say they have divines. I know they have, and many sound and good ones; and greater will be their condemnation. But they have among them one whom a monthly journalist describes in most glowing language, one who has just sent across the Atlantic a book, called “Anastasis,” written to prove that there is no resurrection of the body; that all the resurrection there is or ever will be, takes place simultaneously with the dissolution of the soul and body—a mere resurrection of the principle of animal life, and that this principle of animal life will, at the moment of death, pass into the spiritual bodies of the unseen world. I see you quiver, and well you may. Let America emancipate her negro slaves, and then let her talk of freedom. Let her burn in the market place the books of professors, which deny the resurrection of the body; and then let her talk of her divinity. Let her close the doors of infamy in which the 15,000 hapless victims of the sensuality of the citizens of her capital hide their shame and their sorrows (first comparing the number of these unfortunates with that of the adult male population of the city); and then let her talk of religion and morality.

Meanwhile, it is no place for the strains of the “Jubilee Hymn,” and it is almost a relief from the nausea caused by the scene we are hastening from, to have to pass through the Canadas, and such of the tribes of North American Indians as have escaped the cupidity of the degenerate sons of the “blessed pilgrim fathers,” and crossing the Straits of Behring, to enter upon the vast regions of Asia. But where can we stop? In Siberia, or either of the Tartaries, Russian, Independent, or Chinese? in Turkey, Arabia, Persia, Thibet, Hindostan, or China? All, all belong to the god of this world; all, all are peopled by the children of disobedience. And what of the great islands of the sea, Sumatra; Java, Borneo, New Guinea, and that continental island, Australia, and its companions, Van Dieman's Land and New Zealand—what but the same sad, dark, and gloomy scene?

“Oh! but,” you say, “here we may stop in Oceanica among the sweet little islands of the Southern Sea—isles so green, so tranquil, so simple, so happy.” You need not press me: I sigh for something to remind me of Paradise, however faintly, however feebly. Well, I have brushed off the fly-spots which were mixed in with the happy little isles, and which had increased to my eye their apparent number. Yes, they are green and lovely, and seem almost as if they were rescued from the rent-roll of the great usurper by the hand of the faithful missionaries of the cross; as though the sword was beaten into the plowshare, and the spear into the pruning-hook, and the reclaimed savages would learn war no more. But dearly as we all love to be deceived by that which soothes and solaces, can we, I ask you, can we venture to stop even here to sing your sweet song of triumph? It must not be at Tahiti, poor Tahiti, surely—rescued, well-nigh rescued from the jaws of the dragon, to become the prey to the great papal harlot and her infidel paramour.

And what will be the fate of the rest of the islands of the Southern Ocean, whether Christianized or Pagan, God only knows; but he who calls himself the Vicar of Christ has marked them for his own. They are part and parcel of his new diocese of “Oceania,” and Rome has friends powerful enough and willing enough to aid him in bringing them under the pastoral crook of the hireling shepherd, as we have alas seen to our sorrow.

Who is ignorant or unobservant of the strides Rome is making, of the energies she is putting forth to subdue the world to her dominion? He who sees it not must be blind indeed, with the records of the Propaganda open for his perusal, and the scenes at home and abroad acting before his eyes. And who with the Bible in his hand, knows not of the doom that awaits the man of sin, when he shall come in like a flood, and the standard shall be lifted up against him? When come to the full—when ripe for destruction—the Lord shall consume him with the spirit of his mouth, and destroy him with the brightness of his coming. But till antichrist falls, I have no heart for the “Song of Jubilee.” Come the day, and I trust then to join you in it; when the universe shall hear, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluiah!

for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor to him; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. Amen. Alleluiah!

But we have yet another part of the globe to travel over ere we have finished the map. It is the seat of the beast itself—civilized, Christianized, enlightened Europe. Let us be here rather more minute, and take a glance at the different kingdoms, as they are composed of infidel, papal, patriarchal, Protestant, and papal-protestant materials. Shall we begin with infidel Turkey? Pass on quickly, you exclaim. Shall we stop, then, in equally infidel, though nominally papal, France? Pass on. Italy? Austria? Spain? Portugal? The islands of the Mediterranean? I am not mocking, I assure you I only want to take in detail that which may mislead or mystify if spoken of in the aggregate. Well, then, Russia and the lately revived kingdom of Greece, who, taught by the patriarch and not by the pope, deem it an abomination to worship the image, instead of the picture of the Queen of Heaven,—the mother of God?

True it is, that as we travel northward, we escape from the denser regions of Christian idolatry; but are you willing to pause in Germany, Belgium, or Holland? In Prussia, Denmark, or Sweden? I deem you would rather be hastening on to the land of liberty—the land of Bibles—our own beloved island, the ocean queen. Oh! What a relief! Here, at least, we can breathe after what we have passed through

“Such regions dolorous—a universe of death! Where all life dies—death lives.”

Here, at least, we may breathe freely. But where, oh! where shall we find a resting-place to sing the “Song of Jubilee”? for here, surely, if anywhere on the globe's surface, it may be chanted, and with lute and viol. Where shall we begin the strain? Let us search for a suitable spot. Surely, we shall find it where those who represent the aristocracy of the land are gathered in one peerless assembly; surely, among those whom the people have chosen to represent the great community. I would not speak of dignities or of those in authority with irreverence; but I ask you, what would be the reception of the legislator who should propose, in either of those august assemblies, to frame a law on such a simple cardinal principle as this, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” and adduce the authority of Jesus of Nazareth as his warrant for introducing a bill framed on such an obsolete maxim.

Shall we look for the spot in the ranks of our brave soldiers, and invite the accompaniment of the trumpet and the drum? or among our gallant sailors, in some interval of cessation from oaths and blasphemy? Shall we find it with the conductors of our daily press, which leads while it follows the opinions of the millions of readers? Shall we find it in our commercial or manufacturing towns, or among our rural population?

You know something, sir, of both, and could give a description of each which would make us hide our heads for shame and sorrow. Oh! what a tale do the beer-shops of our agricultural districts tell! And were it seemly to speak of those things which are done of the world, the fair-spoken, respectable-looking, well-dressed world, by our cities and towns, in secret, where could we hide our heads or conceal our shame? You are not ignorant of the statistics of crime, soul-polluting, soul-destroying crime, which have been furnished to the public, of one town, for example—a town where the gospel is proclaimed continually with eloquence and with power, but a town which vies with the great metropolis itself in a sin which increases beyond the ratio of the increase of its vast population.

I have before me a pamphlet, in which the philanthropic writer endeavors to grapple with the monster which is ruining its thousands, aye, sending its tens of thousands of our youth, our baptized youth, down quick into the pit—a pamphlet in which the writer avails himself of facts supplied by one of our fellow-laborers, a devoted minister in your town of our denomination—facts which would seem incredible were they not given on unquestionable authority. Let this one speak for itself; but had it ten thousand voices, it would not tell one ten-thousandth part of the sorrows, the unutterable sorrows, which it is the key to. Hear it, ye men of pleasure! hear it ye deceivers and deceived! ye who are hastening with the gospel sounding in your ear to the pit of destruction, and dragging with you the souls of your wretched associates in crime! There is spent in the town of Liverpool alone, in the course of a single year upon one sin, so emphatically called in the Litany of the national church “a deadly sin,” two hundred thousand pounds.

Ponder this one fact, with which you are already acquainted: follow it out through all of its details, causes, and influences, and I need not ask you whether you select such a town as this for the “Jubilee Hymn”—a town devoting the wealth it once earned in the service of Moloch, during the bloody days when its docks were crowded with slavers, to the service of Moloch's great compeer and rival, the dissolute Belial. Such a town! and can we flatter ourselves that Liverpool stands alone? The statistics of crime tell, but too plainly, that it is rather but a sample of the mass of our civic population. Need I lift up the curtain which conceals the condition of the great metropolis, “the monster city,” as it has not been unfitly called? That curtain has been drawn aside by able and powerful hands; and what scenes of sickening corruption have been disclosed!

“It must be admitted,” says a writer whom I have already quoted, “though the admission bring sorrow to the heart, that by far the great majority of men in every land are still in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity. In heathen lands, vice assumes the most brutal forms, and gathers to itself innumerable victims—it is savage, cruel, relentless; but in those countries where civilization has advanced, there exists a refinement in vice which renders its approach more subtle and its blow more deadly. In the former, it is open and undisguised; in the latter, it is noiseless and secret. In the former, it is bold and daring, giving its victims the chance of escape; in the latter, it has a stealthy pace, and serpent-like, winds its folds around its victims, the more securely to crush them to the heart without a ray of hope.”

“The history of the world furnishes abundant proof that, as civilization has advanced, vice has become more refined, and has brought down certain desolation and ruin. Do not Greece and Rome present examples? and is not the truth of this remark manifest in this country, the land in which so much has been done and is doing to extend and perpetuate the blessing of religion and virtue? The great metropolis itself, in its leading thoroughfares, in its lanes and alleys, in its winding courts, testifies to the truth of the remark. Take but any of the vices with which London is deluged: mark well all its machinery, regard the modus operandi, and it will be discovered that fiendish arts and infernal contrivances are employed to entrap its victims. More especially is it so in reference to the vice of uncleanness, which holds an almost undisputed sway throughout the length and breadth of the land. Horrid and systematic schemes, intricate, but not the less fatal, are continually practiced, which have disturbed domestic peace, drawn thousands into ruin, and entailed a lasting disgrace upon the country.” But the subject is too fearful, too revolting, to be dwelt upon, though too fearfully true and significant to be suppressed. I speak as unto the wise. Judge ye.

Is there no spot, then, where Satan has relaxed his grasp of the territory he has won? Look at the wide sea, which has become almost as populous as the dry land—“the great highway of the world,” which no longer separates man from man, but brings all nations into familiarity with each other. Is there one man more proverbially godless than another—is it not the poor mariner? Thank God for the “Bethel flag.” But oh! what is still the condition of the tens of thousands of every nation, who live in the bosom of the great deep; who fear neither God nor devil, and who look for a final state between Heaven and hell? not fit, as they deem, for the one, because of their wickedness, nor deserving of the other, because of their bravery. Oh! could the different seaports of the world disclose the amount of guilt which every vessel that enters them leaves with its cargo, what a tale would they relate! It is said of our own seamen, that “the curses and imprecations of those they have injured in distant lands are poured upon them, and our country is denounced as the scourge and bane of the world.” What must be said, then, of the crimes of other nations who pretend not to rank with us in the scale of morality?

But while we are on the ocean, let us slack sail, and linger a moment, not for a jubilant hymn, but for a mournful dirge. Would the waters of the great Atlantic stand in a heap, a wall on this side, and on that, as did the waters of the Red Sea in olden time, what would the pathway disclose, the pathway of “the middle passage”? what but the countless bones of millions of poor Africa's sons and daughters—of those who have found a place where the wicked cease from troubling—a refuge from woe—woe past, present, and to come, at the bottom of the silent deep.

Do I hear you say, This can only tell of by-gone days? Would it were so! Thank God, oh, thank God! that we have washed our hands of the guilt of the hellish traffic in human flesh, and that we do what we can to atone for our past atrocities. But what is the state of that traffic at the present moment? Though more than thirty years have elapsed since the slave-trade was declared piracy by the law of England, and though millions have been spent by us for its suppression, the slave-trade has, instead of diminishing, doubled in amount, and every year witnesses the drainage from Africa of 500,000 of her hapless race, of whom the great proportion find a welcome—oh! how welcome, how sweet a grave—in the heart of the deep.

It is a stupendous fact; but could we hear the groan of one poor agonizing wretch, as it ascends from the hold of the slave ship—one shriek, one moan from the agonizing mother, one wail of the little child—the fatherless, motherless, homeless child, as it goes up to the ear of Him who records it all against the day of reckoning, it would leave an impression far deeper even than the one astounding fact that half a million of these sorrowful creatures are yearly doomed to drink the cup of woe handed out to them by their fellow-man—one groan, one single groan, would drown the “Song of Jubilee,” if raised by a thousand voices. But who can count the groans, the shrieks of mourning, lamentation, and woe, that every moment are heard, by day and by night, along the great pathway of the world?

Well is it for us that we cannot see, that we cannot hear, what we are impotent to heal. The heart would give way in its frantic struggle to stay or avenge it.

“No eye but His could ever bear To gaze all down the dread abyss, Because none ever saw so clear The shore beyond of endless bliss.”

No, the groans of creation are anything but jubilant; and well may we exclaim, “O Lord, how long!” The great creation groaneth and travaileth, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, waiting for the appearance of the Lord; the Head of the new creation.

“Oh! that the months would roll away, And bring the coronation day.”

But it is time that I brought this letter to a close. Before doing so, I must fulfill my promise of visiting with you some of the little oases in the world's great desert. Bless God, there are many of them—sweet “little spots inclosed by grace, out of the world's wide wilderness;” and there is no part of that wilderness where they are not to be found. In the frozen shores of the Arctic regions—in the burning sands of the deserts, in the east and west, in the north and south, on Greenland's icy mountains, on India's coral strand, in every country and in every clime, in the quiet village and in the busy town, in the palace, in the cottage, in the mansion, and in the garret and cellar, in the houses of parliament, and in the houses of correction for indigent poverty—God has a seed to serve him, and he is still gathering them out of the world that lieth in the wicked one, by the preaching of the gospel—by the evangelist at home and the evangelist abroad—from every kindred and nation and people and tongue.

Great is the honor he puts upon Britain in making her a “quiver for his arrows. The Bible Society, the Missionary Societies, the Tract Society, like three sister graces, look lovely apart, but oh, how lovely in their blended beauty! What has not God wrought by means of their work of faith and labor of love (and by America, too), notwithstanding our national crimes, in the one great cause of “spreading the knowledge of Christ among the heathen and other unenlightened nations.”

Well, here, you say, here we may surely sing with a joyful heart. True; but it must not be a strain that tells of “the world's jubilee” in the absence of the world's rightful Lord—of the earth's deliverance from bondage while “the god of this world” is triumphant, and making the whole creation groan. It must not be of a time anterior to that when the cry shall be heard, “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”

Tell me not that it is the preaching of the gospel that will do all this. It is only the province of the gospel to announce it. “The gospel of the kingdom” is one thing, “the kingdom” itself is another thing. The invitation is not the feast. We have come to talk about the gospel as though there were something cabalistic in the word. We have come to regard it very much as the Jew regards the law, or the papist the crucifix. It is a message—it is an announcement—it is not that of which it testifies—it is not the kingdom of Christ—it has done and is doing, and will yet do its appointed work, gather out the little flock to whom it is the Father's good pleasure to give the kingdom. But it will do no more. It will not heal the sick, for it is not its province. It will not give sight to the blind, nor hearing to the deaf, nor feet

to the lame, for it is not its province. It will not raise the dead, for it is not its province. It will not cause waters to spring forth in the desert, nor make the wilderness flourish and blossom as the rose. It will not dethrone the god of this world for it is not its province. It will not close the door of the world's great hospital—

“The lazar house, sad, noisome, dark, wherein are laid Numbers of all diseased all maladies Of ghostly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies and asthma, and joint-racking rheums.”

But all this is to be done; and when the number of the elect is complete, that number known only to Him who keeps the book, “the Lamb's book of life,” in which their names are written—when the last of the little flock shall have heard the Shepherd's voice through the instrumentality of the preaching of the gospel—then the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we (the living) shall be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. And then the kingdom shall come, and God's will be done on the earth, as it is done in Heaven, and the groans of creation shall cease.

Let the angel speed, then, his flight through the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation and kindred and tongue and people, and say with a loud voice, “Fear God, and give glory to him, for the hour of his judgment is come.” For then shall come the restitution of all things promised from before the foundation of the world. For, concomitant with and consequent upon the second coming of Christ, shall be—the resurrection of the sleeping saints—the change of the living saints—the casting out and binding of Satan—the destruction of antichrist—the gathering of Israel—the deliverance of the creature from the bondage of corruption—the kingdom of Christ and his saints. And then shall the Redeemer, see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied. And we shall be satisfied too, “if by any means we may attain unto the resurrection of the dead,” awake in his likeness, and share in his glory.

I do not know that I can better close this letter than in the closing words of “the declaration of the faith of the Congregational churches:” “As Christ would have us to be certainly persuaded that there shall be a judgment, to deter all men from sin, and for the greater consolation of the godly in their adversity, so will he have that day unknown to men, that they may shake off all carnal security, and be always watchful, because they know not at what hour the Lord will come, and may be ever prepared to say, ‘Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.’—Amen.” And to this I add my Amen also.