p. 386 | Triumph at His Coming

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Aug 30, 1883

Triumph at His Coming.

AT the age of seventy-three, Rev. Thomas Rawson Birks, professor of moral theology in Cambridge University, England, died July 22, 1883. He was an able writer, and an earnest "pre-millennialist." In a notice of his death in Messiah's Herald we find the following extract from his book "The Four Prophetic Empires":—

"Will it be a smooth and gradual progress by which the fallen world shall slide into happiness, it knows not how, and, after the storms of six thousand years, like a cradled infant, rock itself to rest? Is it by the common efforts of Christian zeal, so that the church militant of our day may be able to take up the boast of the Assyrian, only of a nobler triumph, and say, 'By the strength of my hand have I done it, and by my wisdom, for I am prudent?' No, such is not the lesson of past experience; nor are such hopes confirmed by the true sayings of God. A great work is indeed allotted to the church, but of the first-fruits, not of the harvest; of preparation, not of the full triumph. The redemption will be assuredly complete, but will dawn in righteous judgments. It is through a dark cloud that the bow of the covenant will shine forth in its brightness on a fallen world. Before the stone shall become a mountain and fill the whole earth, 'the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver and the gold' must be 'broken to pieces together,' and be driven away like the chaff of the summer threshing-floor. The Son of man must first appear in the clouds of heaven, and his true saints and servants be gathered into his presence, to render their account, and then to receive their kingdom."