8. The Maturity of the Papal Antichrist.—Popery itself is no new thing on earth, so that its mere existence is no peculiar sign of the last day. But its progress and prevalence are entirely new. There is a maturity about it which, in other ages, it could not claim. It is rising in stature and fast hastening to its consummation. In extent of circle she stretches far beyond the territories of other days. In all regions of the earth she is planting her banner and claiming dominion over the nations. Never did she show herself more thoroughly in earnest. She is flinging her chains across the globe. With stealthy foot she has been advancing, step by step, till now she walks abroad at noonday with the sound of the trumpet, lifting up her head in bold defiance. Her hand, like Amalek’s, is “upon the throne of the Lord;” and she acts and speaks as if in nothing she would be restrained of all that she has imagined to do.
Never, since the Reformation, has popery made so deadly and determined a struggle for the recovery of throne and altar. Hundreds of missionary priests are thrusting themselves into every corner, winding themselves into the confidence of the influential, and insinuating themselves with serpent-stealth and subtlety into all seats of power. They mark off their districts, and rear their churches everywhere, carrying on their work of proselytism at any expense, and by every method. They build with costly splendor; they adorn with most attractive grace; they cast the net with consummate art, that beneath its ample stretch they may entangle the thousands of every age, and class, and temper, who love a theatrical religion, that will gratify the carnal sense, and furnish men with a license for the commission of any amount of iniquity. They talk proudly, too, and boast openly of their success, casting off the mask of meekness and modesty which they had in some measure assumed; proclaiming loudly that as no heresy was ever allowed more than a duration of three centuries, the British apostasy has now reached its close. Thus they prophesy of their own speedy triumph, and of our hastening doom.
It is not my part either to confirm or to confute the prophecy. A few years will unfold it all. There may be darker days in reserve for Britain than many will believe. Her day has been long bright, her sky long cloudless. What nation has ever enjoyed a century of such profound tranquillity as we have experienced, unbroken save by a few political commotions, or a few murmurs of fretful discontent. The cup of trembling, which was put into the hands and pressed to the lips of every nation in Europe, in 1793–1815, passed us by. The revolutionary earthquake shocks that have during this century successively laid waste every kingdom around us, convulsing nations and overturning thrones, tearing up a thousand hearths, and agitating ten thousand fearful bosoms with alternate despair and hope, reached us not, nor stirred even one ripple on our sea-bound shore. When God raised up Napoleon Bonaparte as the scourge of the papal empires; when he called him to his foot, gave the nations before him, and made him ruler over kings, giving them as dust to his sword and as driven stubble to his bow, he appointed him his bounds that he could not pass over, and we were preserved, unmolested and secure. When every capital in Europe was in flames, from Moscow to Madrid, we were sitting each man under his own vine and fig-tree, with none to make us afraid. The enemy, with the vanquished might of Europe in his train, prepared to overwhelm us. He threatened, boasted, numbered his armies, talked of a second Armada; but in vain! We were secure. We needed “no bulwarks, no towers along the steep.” We were Protestant, and therefore invincible. Our protest was our palladium. From our far-off lonely island, there went forth upon the earth the solitary voice that testified for Christ against Antichrist, in the midst of a world of idolatry and darkness. God heard the testimony, and he blessed the witness!
But since that time what has taken place? We have laid aside our protest as too bigoted for an enlightened age like ours. We have struck our Protestant colors, and hung out the flag of neutrality; or rather we should say, of religious indifference. With our own hands, we have taken down the old ancestral standard which has braved three centuries of storm; allowing the spoiler to tear in pieces and trample under foot the inheritance of our fathers, the birthright of our sons; proclaiming to the world that our past protest was a stain upon our history, and that it matters nothing to a nation’s well-being whether the Bible or the Koran be the basis of her statute-book, or whether the national ensign be surmounted by the cross, the crescent, or the triple crown. We have little reason to hope that we shall ride out another storm as we have done the last. The anchor of our national Protestant testimony is gone!
9. The Diffusion of Infidelity.—This at least is new. Our fathers knew comparatively little of this, and our fathers’ fathers almost nothing. An infidel was rare indeed in their day—a man wondered at and shunned. Toward the close of the last century, infidelity burst forth in France, and partially extended itself elsewhere. Of late years it has developed itself with prodigious swiftness, and assumed a bold and lofty attitude of assault. Its extent is incredible. The masses are thoroughly leavened with it. It has insinuated itself everywhere, and is eating out the very heart of everything like deep principle among men. It has corroded the cement by which society hangs together, so that nations and communities are now like walls or towers without mortar, ready to fall to pieces of themselves, or be leveled by the first blast. Its ferocity is alarming, its activity unceasing. Much of it is undisguised and confessed; but very much of it is still secret and unavowed. It taints the air; it blights life; it ossifies conscience; under it all good things wither. It is the worm at the root of all that is noble and excellent in these last days. Hence the hollow condition of things among us—the chill that is upon life’s fellowships and offices of love. Social, political, kindred ties are worm-eaten and ready to break asunder. The erect bearing and manly vigor which religion imparts is no longer visible. Superstition has come to the rescue, and is trying to supply its place. But in vain! Expediency rules. Large masses of the people are either openly or secretly infidel, if not atheistical. God is not acknowledged. His yoke seems to gall men’s shoulders. The nations are ready to cast it off. And what hope is there, what token, that this is to end before the Lord return to end it? Is it not a sign of his approach, and a denial of the possibility of a previous millennium of holy blessedness upon the earth?
10. The Increase of Immorality. Like a flood it is swelling and widening in its course. It is without shame and without fear. Crimes that our fathers knew not of, are common among the nations. Licentiousness riots fearfully, perpetrating deeds without a name, so that it is “a shame even to speak of those things that are done of them in secret.” Drunkenness staggers along every street. Blasphemy pours itself forth, till we shudder, and close the ear against its horrid sounds. Murder has broken loose, and every day our newspapers are telling some horrible tale of bloodshed; man slaying his fellow-man, in fiendish hatred, or more fiendish love of gain; none spared; the parent slaying his children, the child his parent, the husband the wife, the wife the husband; no sanctity of relationship is any safeguard from the poison, or the bullet, or the knife, or the more brutal hammer. Oh, what a cry is going up to God from this land of ours, the cry of innocent blood, blood which a righteous God will yet avenge! But the picture of our spreading immorality is one not easily drawn, save by the record of facts, facts which one man scarcely ventures to whisper to another, too awful to be laid bare before the public eye. It calls for a prophet’s eye to see it, a prophet’s pen to record it, and a prophet’s soul to weep over it “in secret places” before the Lord. Men are truly “lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.” All this is to come to pass in the last days, and to wax worse and worse till the Lord come. How vivid, then, and how numerous, are the signs of the advent,—signs of whose nature, whose progress, and whose termination, demonstrate irresistibly that there can be no millennium before his coming.
11. The Prevalence of Superficiality and Formalism in Religion.—Form without power, a body without a soul, religion without vitality,—these are among the signs of the last days. The show of piety is widespread, but the thing itself occupies a narrow circle. There is much profession, but profession lies on the surface, and underneath all may be worldliness. Depth and solidity are wanting; the aspect of religion is unhealthy; the fresh hue of primitive times is departed; the intense vitality, which of right belongs to it, is dried up, so that, instead of its being the living source of motion to the world without, controlling, or counteracting, or impelling its currents, it lies inert and passive, at the mercy of every outward movement. It is a worldly, self-pleasing religion, adopted for fashion’s sake, and used according to convenience.
Satan has now transformed himself into an angel of light, and under this fair disguise he is working with marvelous success. He is teaching us to build the tombs of our fathers, that we may rest content with the mere approbation of their principles without any imitation of their practice. He leads some astray into fatal error under the pretext of candor and the love of truth; others he saturates with the orthodoxy of the head, that they may become indifferent to the state of their heart before God. Some he persuades to deny the Bible; to others he lauds it, that he may make it a substitute for the God of the Bible. He allows us a wide range of religious feeling and sentiment, if he can only succeed in making them a substitute for God. He hinders not our being serious, earnest, solemn, if he can thereby feed the cravings of a restless, empty soul with something which may prevent us from seeking the bread of life. He permits us to denounce the world’s vanity and hollow pleasures—to be weary of its unsatisfying round of folly, that he may delude us into the idea that this dissatisfaction with the world is a proof that we are religious, and thereby cause us to sit down contented, when yet a great way off from our Father’s house.
These outward things may be in themselves right and good, but what are they without the indwelling Spirit! What is truth without the True One? What is the perfection of church order without the vital power from above? The body is there, but the living spirit has fled.
And are not these the signs of the last days? Is it not when the virgins are slumbering that the midnight cry is to be heard, “Behold, the Bridegroom cometh,” and “when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” Where, then, is there room for a millennium before the advent?
12. Religious Deceivers.—The extent to which these are flourishing in our day is much overlooked. We have grown so familiar with strange opinions that we have almost ceased to notice them. Yet in all countries and in all churches these are springing up. Besides the great leaders in our day, Romanists, Jesuits, and Tractarians, there are the Unitarians, the Mormons the Latter-Day Saints, the Swedenborgians, the spiritualists, and suchlike, who are all saying, “Lo, here is Christ; or, lo, there.” Incredible and absurd as these systems are, they are believed in by tens of thousands, who seem to be given over “to strong delusion that they should believe a lie.” And, then, in addition to these, there are sad heresies springing up around us in various forms, and indicating a restless, feverish state of mind, which must, ere long, issue in something more hideous and fatal.
These are a few of the many signs of the times. Some of them belong specially to our own day, not having been witnessed by any former age. Others, though seen by former generations, have shone out far more fully and decidedly in our own. No previous age can point to signs so many and so vivid as we can do; and it is this that renders our position so very solemn and responsible.—Signs of the Times.