Signs of Sin and Hope for God's Return
By Talmage
I do not see how God can afford to stay away any longer. It seems to me this world has been mauled of sin about long enough. The church has made such slow headway against the paganism, and the Mohammedanism, and the fraud, and the libertinism, and the drunkenness, and the rapine, and the murder of the world, that there are ten thousand hands now stretched up, beckoning for God to come, and to come now. Enough corn in the United States and Great Britain is annually wasted in brewing and distilling to feed five million men. Every grogshop, every house of infamy, every gambling saloon, every dishonest store and bank insurance company, declare there is no God, or if there is, let him strike if he dare! Corruption is in most of the city governments—corruption reaching from the weather vane on the top of the city halls down to the lowest stone in the foundation. Thousands of men anxiously waiting for Tweed, the apostle of scoundrelism, to get out of jail; churches with men in their membership not clean enough to swab the door-step of the pit; the theaters, huge houses of shame; three-fourths of the newspapers, with their editors, reporters and printing-presses suborned of the devil; American and European society rotten until the filth drips hissing through into the world beneath, and smells up sickening to the world above; France and Prussia feeling for each other's throats, and, although the dead in battle outnumber five times all the present population of the earth, yet nations longing for war, and this hour six million men arming for conflict, while applauding nations look on, and the cry is, “Blood! give us more blood!” the earth staggering under successive shocks like a foundering ship at the moment when the passengers cry, “She's going down!” the imminent necessity for the world's reformation and purification—all these I take as a proof of the fact that “the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.” THAT God is coming with his judgments among the nations, I cannot doubt. Look at the floods on both sides the sea. France going down under the wave; the wealth of nations swept off in a day; harvests, vineyards, villages unmoored. Look at the insectiverous assault which was at first considered hardly worthy of a small item in a newspaper; but the grasshopper, and the Colorado bug, and the army worm, have gone on until public fasts have been declared, and the Lord Almighty invoked to arrest the national calamity. Look at the marine disasters, and hear the voice of the shipwrecks. Listen to the roar of the unparalleled conflagrations in Chicago, and Boston, and London. See the toppling over of great commercial establishments everywhere. I tell you that God's controversy with the nations has begun. “The coming of the Lord draweth nigh.”—Talmage.