The Tabernacle Sabbath Service, June 8.
Prof. B. G. Wilkinson, of Union College, Neb., stopped a few days last week on his way to his new field of labor in France and Switzerland, to which he was assigned by the late Conference in this place. He granted us the benefit of a discourse in the Tabernacle, Sabbath, June 8. The theme of discourse was the sublime development of God’s work in the past as delineated in the book of Revelation. This book comprises two grand divisions: the first eleven chapters are devoted to the opening of the controversy between truth and error, which it portrays, and the last eleven chapters describe the close of that controversy. These two divisions are subdivided into three sections each, the burden of which is the three great struggles of the Church with hostile powers, classified according to the agents called into action by the enemy of all truth to try to break down and to abolish the work of God from the face of the earth. These occurrences, studied and understood, with the thrilling manifestations of the providence of God in preserving and defending His truth, in the darkest ages, and amid the fiercest opposition of the world, furnish the strongest kind of a foundation in reference to the past, and the best material for hope for the future. A celebrated evangelist long ago said that a genuine and stable religious experience demands two things: some great and well-authenticated fact in the past, on which to build and rest, and some definite and well-supported object of faith in the future, to which to look forward. It was illustrated by reference to the incarnation, the death, and resurrection of Christ, for the great fact in the past, and the predictions and multiplying signs of the second coming of Christ to complete His work as the hope of the future. Having these before the mind, one has something to build upon with reference to the past, and something definite to look forward to, and prepare for, in the future. This advantage the student of prophecy has in its fullness to-day. Experience and history show that the conflict of the Church with opposing powers has been a definite, real, tangible, and historical conflict. Another period of this struggle is still before us, the final collision with the second symbol of Revelation 13, and this will be no less definite, real, and tangible than those of the past; and when the overcomers shout victory on the sea of glass before the throne, it also will become historical, celebrated in the song of Moses and the Lamb. Rev. 15:3. This struggle is now on, and will wax fiercer and more determined till a hundred and forty-four thousand stand redeemed on Mount Zion. In his classes in school, the speaker said he found too many who seemed to be drifting, having no fixed and determinate purpose in life. But the message we are set to give to this generation, is a definite message; it has a fixed purpose in view. Tremendous issues are involved in it. And if ever one should sink his whole life into the cause in which we are engaged, and anchor himself to the firm foundation with links of steel, it is now. No people ever had in their hands a nobler mission. The fields are white for harvest, and the voice is calling, Who will go for me to-day?