How the Millennium Is to Come.
By Dr. J. Seiss
PEOPLE think they see signs of promise in the movement of reform. They think to give the church a better shape, and the State a better government, and the world a freer Bible, and that thus the millennium will come. I have no confidence in any such hopes. I see more of promise in the darkest features of the time than in all these pious and patriotic dreams. The world is perhaps more wicked now than it has been since Noah’s flood—considering the light which it rejects. And yet in this very darkness, I read the promise of coming light. In this very misgiving, desperation, and gloom, I see the argument for the speedy springing forth of glorious and unfading hopes, not as human reason calculates, but as God purposes. I behold in it the rapid winding up of the present dispensation to give place to that better state of things of which the prophets all have spoken. Statesmen and churchmen see in it the unmistakable evidences of unprecedented changes, though they widely differ as to what these changes are to be. I have read somewhere, in a very sagacious writer, that when happy changes are contemplated, most people erroneously turn to the quarters of light for the signs of its approach. This has ever been man’s mistake when looking for the fulfillment of God’s great purposes, and is the mistake of many now. People are looking for the setting up of Christ’s kingdom, and the introduction of millennial glory by reforming and rebaptizing present modes of effort and thought. But so it will not be. God’s method of progress is to make darkness the way to light, death the prelude to life, despair the introduction to salvation, and corruption and confusion the road to order and glory. It is not in what seems hopeful, but in what seems gloomy and untoward, that we are to look for the signs of the speedy forthcoming of God’s wonder-working goodness. It is the stirring upon the face of the dark waters that gives prognostics of the breaking forth of light, and life, and beauty. The bursting glories of spring come directly out of the bleak winter. It is from the corrupting seed that we obtain the harvest. The darkest hour is said to be that which immediately precedes the day. The period most hopeful is that when the apparent motives for despondency are most overwhelming. The stress of the controversy between hope and fear always falls upon the eve of triumph. Those dim hours of dismay to the scattered followers of Christ at his crucifixion were but the preludes to the bringing in of light and immortality for man. The bloody persecutions under the Roman emperors which threatened the extinction of Christianity were the immediate precursors of its victory over even the throne of the Cæsars. And so the Scriptures teach that it will be in the ushering in of the great consummation. The sun must darken and the moon withhold her light, and then shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in his wings.—Dr. J. Seiss.