The Two Processions by George Hawkins Pember

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 17, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 36.

The Two Processions.

By George Hawkins Pember

If we would fully understand the present age we must regard it from two points of view. For there are two great processions ever defiling before us, that of the people of God, and that of the world. And it is of the utmost importance that we should distinguish between them, and know clearly which is which, lest by some misadventure we be found walking with the world, when we think that we have joined the church. For the world’s dress in some parts of its procession is strangely like that of the church; just as the robe which the man in the parable fraudulently put on, bore so close a resemblance to the king’s raiment bestowed upon the guests, that the royal servants permitted the impostor to pass without question to the marriage-chamber. But when the king came in to see the guests, he was not deceived; no, not for a moment.

It is, then, possible to get into the wrong procession; but how terrible the consequences of the mistake! For those who march in the one may indeed at present be passing through a stony and dry land, a wilderness of thorns, harassed as they go, by black cares that incessantly hover overhead; but presently, they know not how soon it may be, the Prince of light and love will meet them, and conduct them to those gates within which neither pain, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor death, may ever enter.

But the ranks of the other, gay and thoughtless as they may appear now, will shortly pass into a dismal land, a place of horrors, a region of storms and earthquakes, of war, of famine, and of pestilence, and exposed to all the wrath of Heaven. “And they shall pass through it hardly bestead and hungry; and it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward. And they shall look unto the earth and behold; trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish; and they shall be driven to darkness.” And yet, as the book of Revelation tells us, not even amid the terrors of the end will they give glory to God. Therefore, at last, they shall be sternly taught that he is justice and sovereignty as well as love; they shall discover, by bitter experience, the meaning of that awfully incongruous expression, “the wrath of the Lamb;” they shall be compelled to confess that if judgment is God’s “strange work,” it, nevertheless, is his work. Suddenly as the lightning flashes from the depths of the summer sky, the King in all his majesty shall appear across their path, and they shall miserably perish beneath the sword of his mouth.—G. H. Pember, M. A., in the Silver Morn.