The Second Coming of Christ.
By Uriah Smith
Poets are wont, as they enter upon holy and lofty themes, to invoke the aid of more than mortal beings to unseal their eyes and inspire their hearts with wisdom and understanding. If ever such help could be appropriately sought, if there are circumstances under which it would be especially in place, it is when the inhabitants of a world under the guilt of revolt, and the blight of the curse, yet to be brought back to obedience and redemption, take up the contemplation of the glorious appearing of the Son of the Highest for the accomplishment of this object. For where can thought find a subject more sublime! What event is freighted with so infinite a burden of joy or woe! What day more illustrious since the annals of time began! What movement with such accompaniments of awe and grandeur—the immediate rising to life of all the countless multitude of the righteous dead, which sixty generations, each of a hundred years, have slowly garnered to the tomb; the thrilling passage over that mysterious line which separates mortality and death, from immortality and endless life! It is more than a change of dispensations: it is the end and accomplishment of all dispensations. What revolution with such far-reaching results! And has this earth such an event in store? Is the Lord of life and glory ever to appear again to mortal eyes? If so, how? why? and above all, when? With earnest solicitude the disciples put to our Lord himself the question, “When shall these things be?” And thus by precedent they established that as a legitimate inquiry which has ever since hung upon the lips of his waiting followers, When shall these things be? That things are sadly out of order in this world, any one would be ashamed not to admit. That there is sin here, which God cannot countenance, and evils which could not have entered into his plan, is evident to all. Every human effort to bring order out of this moral chaos has proved a miserable failure. Is God to acknowledge himself baffled by the presence of sin in his universe? Is his original purpose that the earth should be inhabited by a race of holy and happy beings, Isa. 45: 18, to be abandoned? How is he to interpose to accomplish a predetermined end, which an enemy is attempting to hinder? Cut off from all hope in human effort, from its six thousand years of failure, we must look to Heaven for help, if help is to be had. Who but God's own Son is sufficient for the work? He is called the Redeemer. Is he to come and bring a remedy for all our ills, and end all earth's misrule, by his own exalted reign of righteousness and peace? No! says the skeptic, the chilling mist of whose unbelief hides from view not only the Redeemer, but even the Creator himself, such an event will never be. No! says the worldling, whose interests all cry out against the coming One, such an event will never be. No! says the popular church member, whose love for the world has banished from his heart all real love for Christ, he is never literally to appear; or if he is, his coming is far away, certainly not nigh at hand. And the preacher and the teacher, the professor and the student in theological lore, will take up the many texts that speak of the coming of the Son of man in the clouds of heaven, the descending of the Lord from Heaven with the trump of God, the revelation of the Lord Jesus in flaming fire, the riding forth of Him who comes as King of kings and Lord of lords, the opening of the great day of the Lord, and the end of all things, and tell us that these startling descriptions, these momentous events, mean only some national calamity, the destruction of Jerusalem, death, conversion, the outpouring of the Spirit, or some new religious movement. They can get along with these things very well; but they cannot tolerate the idea that these scriptures mean that the Lord himself is literally to appear within the atmosphere of our earth, visible to all eyes, to do so literal a thing as to arrest society in mid career of business, pleasure, or crime, to cause the dead to come up out of their graves and live once more, to pass the decisions of the Judgment upon all, to bring to its final doom the present order of things, and establish that divine dispensation, of which there shall be no end. This would interfere too much with their plans or pleasures. Nevertheless we affirm that just this the Scriptures teach. Into the midst of all this unnecessary, unnatural, and unscriptural confusion upon this question, we launch this proposition: That Christ, the Son of God, in his own person, literally, visibly, is to come within our atmospheric heavens, to introduce a new order of things; that prophecy has mapped out the coming of this event with all the indications of its approach, so that we can determine approximately our nearness to it, just as well as the mariner by following his chart can tell when he is drawing near his destined haven; and we affirm that we have now reached the time when this event, with all its attendant changes, its wiping out of the old, and introduction of the new, its destruction of the wicked and salvation of the righteous, is at our very doors. If this is so, it should be known. The bare possibility that such an event is near should arrest attention. The open probability that such is the case, should excite an absorbing interest. The clear evidences that it is certainly so, should cause all to act immediately in the work of preparation. This certainty can be shown. The world may oppose and disbelieve; but they must hear. U. S.