“And as He sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?”—Matt. 24: 3.
“What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” What was his answer? It is really most important that we should attend to this. Did he say, “You have no business with such questions. It is fanaticism to expect to understand what it is folly to ask of me”? Such is the way the world still meets such questions. But why should ministers shrink from any portion of God’s inspired word? If a minister preaches upon subjects external to the Bible, you may justly find fault with him; but if what he preaches be what is written in the Bible, you may dissent from his conclusions, or you may believe his logic is defective; but you cannot find fault with him because he discusses what the Master himself has given and inspired for our learning.
Having seen that the Saviour himself does not denounce the question of the apostles as improper, nor refuse an answer as inexpedient, let me proceed to adduce some of those signs about which they inquired, and which the Redeemer said would indicate the approaching advent of the Prince of Peace, and the end, not of the earth, for the earth is made everlasting as the heavens, but of this present economy or dispensation. Of course those who think the present arrangement an optimism, that death, and sickness, and sorrow, and pain, and bereavements, are all perfectly natural and as it should be, are so far satisfied.
But there are hearts of a nobler beat and deeper sensibility—hearts that feel in their inmost recesses that things are not as they were, nor as they will be. Things most surely are not as they were, for Paradise was the representative model of the earth 6000 years ago; and things are not, thank God, as they will be; for, according to prophecy, a day comes, be it near or be it remote, when, under a new decree, the wilderness shall rejoice, and the solitary place shall blossom like the rose, and the lion—strange inversion of scientific belief—shall eat straw like the ox.
We are not prophets, gifted and ordered to predict the day. The caricaturist and the skeptic may say so; but no intelligent writer on prophecy pretends to predict what shall be, not merely next year, nor for to-morrow. What, then, do we profess to do? To show by induction, which is a scientific process, from the divine premises before us—God’s word—what is revealed as to the signs and phenomena that will precede the second glorious advent of Him in whose personal coming every Christian upon earth believes. Every member of the Church of Scotland accepts the apostles’ creed; in the Church of England the worshiper repeats the apostles’ creed; and both communions profess to believe that he will come again to judge the quick and the dead.
What, therefore, we profess to attempt is carefully to collect the signs of his nearing advent, as these are enunciated by himself or by his apostles; and to leave hearers and readers in the exercise of common sense, of impartial judgment, to compare the signs as they are thus enumerated in the word, with facts and phenomena as they rise above the horizon in the world, and to conclude that we are not, or are proximately; near “the sign of thy coming, and the end of the world,” or of this dispensation.
The great sign our Lord specially states is, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” What must fair and impartial criticism infer from these words? Just this, that as soon as Christianity has been fully addressed to every “nation,” not every individual, the end will arrive. The words are very definite and exact; as soon as Christianity has been addressed to every nation over the whole world; not after converting every nation, for that is not said, but as a message, or “witness,” then shall the end come.
What we have to answer is not whether the sign be a proper one or not, for those that believe the words of Christ cannot entertain such a discussion; but, is there any evidence that this gospel has been preached “to all nations” in the world, so as reasonably to exhaust the prophecy? I will not dogmatically pronounce, but I will state the following simple historic facts: First, up to April, 1857, 35,690,000 copies of the word of God, in 152 languages, had been prudently sown over the whole world. If I include the American Society, 160,000,000 of Bibles, in 200 languages and dialects, have been disseminated in various ways and in recent years over the length and breadth of the world.
I do not think there is a nation or a segment of a nation, with any sort of social organization or speaking the dialect of a language, which has not the word of God, or at least a portion of it, in its own tongue; so that the witness has been given, though the conversion of the people has not followed from it. Some still living may have read that when Wilberforce announced the fact of Carey, the Baptist missionary, going out to preach the gospel in India, the House of Commons, which we would suppose to be the concentration of wisdom, scoffed and sneered at a converted cobbler setting out to convert India. Carey was a shoemaker. God put it into his heart to undertake the work; and gloriously, but silently, he replied to the sneer by sowing seeds in India, which bishops, and presbyters, and great men after him, have been privileged to reap.
After the Baptist Missionary Society, that noble institution, the London Missionary Society, was organized. After it, in rapid succession, came the Church Missionary Society of England, the Church Missionary Society of Scotland, the Wesleyan and the Moravian Missionary societies; and receiving altogether an annual revenue of nearly half a million, they are most faithfully—let skeptics sneer, let Romanists find fault—and most successfully, preaching the gospel as a witness, not without incidental conversions, over all the world, to every nation, kindred, tribe, and tongue.
The Bible Society, the most revolutionary society in the world, has lately received a most noble credential. That poor, restless, unhappy man, Pius IX., the present head of the Roman Catholic Church, enumerates in his Encyclical, among other “pests” of the earth, as the first and greatest pest of all, the British and Foreign Bible Society. This was not said by the pope in a private passion to his private friends. It is enunciated as an infallible proposition; so that every Roman Catholic who does not believe the British and Foreign Bible Society to be a pest, ceases, ipso facto, to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church.
By the action of these Societies, the walls of China have been thrown down; Hindostan or India, with its 180,000,000, has had the gospel preached to it as a witness; and I believe that under the presidency of that most remarkable man, Sir John Lawrence, who for two years was a member and seat-holder in my church, before he received the reins of India in his hands, the gospel will enjoy a freedom and make a progress in that peninsula, such as it has never reached before.
Africa, through the labors of Livingstone, and Dr. Barth, and Speke, and Grant, has been traversed. It can be said truly that Christianity has been preached there at least as a witness. The gospel has penetrated even Japan. A hundred years ago the Jesuits took possession of Japan, and made converts by thousands of the Japanese; but their conversion consisted entirely in sprinkling water on the brow in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Such Christianity had no root in the heart or the head, and the consequence was, that not very long ago, every Jesuit and Roman Catholic Christian was expelled from Japan, and the Japanese resolved that the cross should not be seen, nor Christianity be heard, within the precincts of their islands. There is not a nation upon the earth, amid polar snows or under equatorial suns, that has not heard the gospel preached, and in its own tongue the word of God freely circulated, so that we may expect the blessed day soon to arrive, when, in the language of the great missionary bishop,
“——o’er our ransomed nature,
The Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator,
In bliss returns to reign.”
We are led to believe, from all that is written in the word of God, that toward the end there shall be an era of intense apathy and unconcern on the part of the world to the hope of Christ in particular, and to Christianity itself in general. Our Saviour tells us, “As the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.” For as in the days that were before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.” He states in another passage in Luke 17: 28–30, “Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all; even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.”
Now what was the condition of the world in the days of Noah? Not a condition of positive infidelity, in the sense of intellectual opposition to the origin and claims of religion; but when eating, which is proper, became a life; when drinking, and marrying, and giving in marriage, rose to be the dominant and the absorbing passion of all. “Perimus in licitis.” “We perish in things that are lawful.” It is not so much by doing what is wrong as by indulgence to excess in what is lawful that men become irreligious and sinful. This is a most important test.
What is the condition of the age in which we live? Is it not intense speculation, extreme absorption in the gains and glories of the world? thousands thinking first in the morning and last at night, what will bring the highest per centage? It is not sinful to make the best use of one’s money—God forbid that I should say so—but what I complain of is, making this the main thing, the all-absorbing passion. The tendency, one grieves to say, of all speculation beyond what is legitimate and within the limits of one’s profession, is to exercise an absorbing influence upon the heart, the conscience, and the life.
The end of business is to live, not to grow rich; you don’t live to eat, you eat to live; you don’t become merchants in order to become millionaires and retire, but in order to live according to your station, and bring up your family, and do good according to your means and opportunity in the world. But when business comes to be an exclusive passion—How shall I get soonest rich? How shall I be able soonest to retire, and to have my country-seat, and to give up the smoke and the din and the noise of London? What in its place and measure is reasonable, becomes the one all-absorbing thing; how contrary is all this to the beautiful answer to an important question in a little catechism that people might with advantage all learn: “What is the chief end of man?” What would be the exchange answer? To get rich. What would be the counting-house answer? Make the most money that we can, and as speedily as possible leave. What does the catechism answer? “The chief end of man is to glorify God on earth, and enjoy him forever in Heaven.” Whatever, therefore, supersedes that end, whatever runs contrary to it, may be good in its origin, but it is wrong in its development; for it is perverting and destroying the chief end and object of man.
The Saviour tells us such will be the condition of the world, before he comes again. There will prevail intense absorption in things lawful, but illicit and sinful in excess. Matthew Henry, that quaint, but incomparable, commentator, says, “That time which men think the most improbable and the most unlikely, and therefore feel the most secure, will be the time when the Lord shall come again.”
Another evidence, or “sign of thy coming, and of the end of the age,” is great moral deterioration in the social condition of the nations of the earth. We read in 2 Tim. 3, these words: “This know also, that in the last days”—mark, he is speaking of a period future to him—“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.” The word “perilous” alone is most suggestive. “For,” says the apostle, “men shall be 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; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.”
These are signs or marks of the last days of this dispensation. I do not venture to deny the immense elevation of the people of the nineteenth century in arts, in literature, in science, and in charitable acts and liberal sacrifices. But there are under-currents and side-currents of a very different kind. It would seem that the darkness grows darker while the light grows brighter—contrast giving intensity to the age. I would not exaggerate, but the newspapers constantly record murders of the most atrocious and sanguinary character.
The press has registered so many great crimes recently that one is driven to give up reading the history of incidents so shocking, so revolting. That there is intenser piety in the world than there ever was, none dare deny; but if I may judge from the organs of public opinion, there seems to be an amount of gross wickedness and great crime which do appear to me to be unprecedented in the annals of modern civilization. We can confirm what Paul predicts, if confirmation were needed, by what St. Peter says: “There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming?”—the very thing that the apostle is proceeding to speak about, as much as to say, What a fool you are, “Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
Let the most careful student print or publish a sermon or book upon the meaning and interest of prophecy, and he will find a great portion of the secular press rising up in fierce fury to denounce him, and the caricaturists turning sacred truths into idle jibes and jests. The world gets up in arms the moment one ventures to assert that its present estate will not last forever, or to point to the signs that the Redeemer’s coming draweth nigh. But how interesting that these very scoffers are so far proofs of the fulfillment of the prophecies. “There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
Another sign is, Christ will come amidst great social convulsions, revolutions, national upheavals, and disturbances. The words of the Saviour are, “There shall be upon the earth distress of nations.” This is the universal condition of the nations. “And then,” says the Saviour, in the midst of these, “shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory.” What is the inner condition of the whole world? Just what I have faintly intimated. Every nation feels itself insecure. Every nation is revising its navy, its army, its weapons of offense and of defense, expecting war, but not sure in what quarter of the sky the war-cloud will appear darkening the light of day, paying the largest rewards to the men that will invent the most powerful and most destructive engines of war.
When war next comes, Trafalgar, Alexandria, the Nile, the Peninsula, Waterloo itself—nay, the Crimean war, will be but the battles of pigmies in comparison of the battles of Titans likely soon to be. What do we find predicted in the Apocalypse? It says that under the sixth vial, when the voice rings down from Heaven, “Behold, I come as a thief,” unclean spirits go out to gather the nations and the kings of the nations together “unto that great day,”—it is in our translation “battle,” but the Greek word is not make, which is “a battle,” but polemon, which is, “a war”—“to gather the nations unto that great war of Almighty God.”
Does it not look as if all nations were making ready for a war that they believe, if we may judge from their preparations, will be on the most gigantic scale, and fraught with the most terrific issues? There is not a king in Europe at this moment that has not his hand upon his sword-hilt; there is not a Cabinet at this moment that is not discussing the navy, and the army, and the weapons that they are to wield.
Do not these things look very much like the fulfillment of the prophecy, “Distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth;” or, as it is said in Matthew, “Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom”?
And then he adds, “And there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.” It is no doubt true that there have always been earthquakes; but the problem every reader must solve is their greater or lesser frequency and intensity during the last 15 years. I do not say that every earthquake is the sign that this dispensation is about to close, and Christ about to come, nor that every pestilence is so; but the Saviour knew when he pronounced his prophecy that there had always been famines, there had always been earthquakes; and yet he says these shall be marks of the nearness of his advent. It is not occasional instances, but frequent and terrible ones, constituting the aggregate of all the features described in prophecy and meeting their application in the age in which we live.
There will also be pestilences. I remember the pestilence in 1849; I was in the midst of the cholera in various districts of the metropolis. In 1854, the cholera appeared again, more circumscribed, but from what I saw of it, in far greater intensity. The cattle disease—no importation from abroad, but the creative action of a new condition of the air, brought into action by a depraved sanitary condition—has startled all Europe. Recently the Black Death, the old plague, crossed the Ural Mountains and entered Russia. * The fulfillment of that prediction, “And pestilence in divers places,” is thus undeniably seen.
But what should be our place? Our refuge should be the 91st Psalm, “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.” “Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.” He who has his heart filled with trust in God, and his hope rising beyond the stars, and goes forth and does his duty, such a one is much safer than those people that run away and leave the post of duty to those that dare fulfill it.—Dr. Cumming.