THE COMING OF THE LORD DRAWETH NIGH.
An extract from a sermon by T. De Witt Talmage, at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, Sunday evening, Sept. 19, from James 5:8. The feelings with which we await the coming of any person or thing depend very much upon the nature of the person or thing advancing, or upon our fitness to meet him or it. It is evening in a very pleasant household. There is a key heard at the front door. The children come down the stairs with a bound, clapping their hands, and shouting, “Father’s coming!” But disaster has entered that home. The writs have been issued. It is time for the furniture to be levied on. From the oldest to the youngest member of the household the feeling is that the home must be broken up. The front door bell rings, an official is about to enter, and the whisper all through the rooms of that house is: “The sheriff is coming!” March weather gets through scolding, and one day the windows toward the south are opened, and the apple blossoms, the peach blossoms, and the plum blossoms garland the field. Old age feels the flush of new life in its veins; infirmity looks up and smiles, and all through the land, the word is: “Spring is coming!” December hangs icicles on the eaves of the poor man’s house—no wood gathered—no coal. The cracked window pane invites the sleet to come in. The older sister, with numb fingers, attempts to tie the shoe-latchet of the little brother, and stops to blow warmth into her blue hands; and the father shiveringly looks down and says, “Alas! alas! winter is coming!” Well, it is just so in regard to the announcement of my text. To one it sounds like a father’s; to another, like an executioner’s footstep. To one, it is the breath of a June morning; to the other, it is the blast of a December hurricane. “The coming of the Lord draweth nigh!” I do not see how God can afford to stay away longer. It seems to me that this world has been mauled of sin about long enough. The church has made such slow headway against the Paganism, the Mohammedanism, the fraud, the libertinism, the drunkenness, the rapine, and the murder of the world that there are ten thousand hands now stretched up beckoning for God to come now. Enough corn in the United States and Great Britain annually wasted in brewing and distilling to feed five million men. Every grog-shop, every house of infamy, every gambling saloon, every dishonest store, bank, insurance company, declares there is no God, or if there be, let him strike if he dare! Corruption 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 free from the law; churches with men in their membership not clean enough to swab the door-step of the pit; the theatres, 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 to the core; 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 in Europe arming for conflict, while applauding nations look on, and the cry is “Blood! give us more blood!” the earth staggering under the 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, 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 insectiferous assault which was first considered hardly worthy of a small item in a newspaper; but the grasshopper, 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.” I see also a sign of the divine advance in the opportunity for repentance which is being given to the nations—revivals in India; revivals in Italy; revivals in Germany; revivals in Great Britain; revivals in the United States. If there were not something tremendous coming, God would not be so18urgent or importunate in his call. Churches are calling; Christian and secular printing-presses calling; Young Men’s Christian Associations calling; God and angels and men are calling. Messengers of salvation are in the air. Telegraphs flash the gospel news. Steamships carry Christian ambassadors to and fro. Yes, we are on the eve of a great universal earthquake. “The coming of the Lord draweth nigh.” But there is a deeper stop in the organ of my text that needs to be pulled out, and that organ stop is the Judgment trumpet. My text distinctly points toward that august arrival. Now there is one secret that God has never told even to an archangel. There are no spirits so exalted in Heaven that God has ever told one of them. It is the secret of secrets. It is the secret of the ages. If all Heaven should rise up and beg God to tell them that one secret he would not be prevailed upon to tell it. That secret is the chronology of the Judgment—the time when. I cannot tell. No angel can tell. The Bible distinctly says man nor angel can tell. But the fact that such a day will come cannot be disputed. The Bible intimates, yea, it positively asserts that in that last day God will come in by a flash of lightning. I suppose that on that day there may be rolled up dun storm clouds, and that there may be folds of darkness all around the perimeter, and that there may be a background black as midnight. Then while the beasts are moaning with terror, and while the housewife is lighting the candle at noonday; and while the janitors of public buildings are lighting the chandeliers, and the nations are trembling and half suffocated with terror, there may be in the distance a faint sound of thunder that will roll louder and louder and louder, as though a thousand tempests were gathering in battle array, and that then there may be a silence, a deep hush, a silence of complete expectancy; and that while the world is hushed in that dreadful stillness, instantaneously with the crash that shall split the hills, there shall burst upon the world a fiery cohort, a book of reckoning, a throne and the Lord omnipotent. I do not know but that the lightning flash that hurls that paraphernalia into the world may set the world on fire; for we are distinctly told that the world and all things that are therein are to be burned up. I see it burning. The ships take fire mid-Atlantic—brig, bark, White Star line and Cunarder. The cities send up jets of flame higher than the spire or dome of Trinity or St. Peter’s. Banks and moneyed institutions with consumed bonds, melted bullion—all the investments of the world not worth a cent on a dollar. The picture canvas of the Louvre and of Luxembourg, and of Dresden and of Berlin, and of Naples, and of Florence, and of Rome, curled up in the hot blast; Gothic arch and Grecian columns falling down low as the hut on the commons; Mount Washington and the Alps and the Himalayas, flat on their faces. A wrecked world! A ruined world! A burning world! A calcined world! An ashen world! An extinct world! Let the stars beat their dirges. Dead cities! Dead mountains! Dead seas! That scene is not something that we are reading about as occurring four or five thousand miles away—at Stockholm or St. Petersburgh. It will occur here, and you and I will be participants. When the roll-call of that day is read, your name and mine will be read in it, and we will answer, “Here!” These very feet will feel the earth’s tremor, these eyes will see the scrolled sky, these hands will be lifted in acclamation or in horror when the Lord shall be revealed from heaven, with mighty angels in flaming fire, taking vengeance upon those who know not God, and who obey not the gospel of his Son. It will be our trial. It will be our judge. It will be our welcome or it will be our doom. If each year be a mile, then over how many miles has that judgment already traveled, and who can estimate the number of revolutions in a minute of the wheel of God’s judgment chariot? It will not be an empty chariot, the occupant flung out by the speed of the travel, or some sharp turn in the way; but firmly seated in that chariot will be the Lord, the most grandly loved and the most outrageously treated Being in all the ages—coming to bless his saints. Rise! O children of the fire, and hail him as he comes to count your wounds. Coming to vindicate his cause! Crouch! O you scientists and infidels, who said there was no Christ, or if there were, he would never appear. Coming to cast out the hard-hearted and rebellious! Oh! bow now before his arrival, that then you may be ready to hail him. Coming with the months! Coming with the weeks! Coming with the days! Coming with the hours! Coming with the minutes! Coming with the seconds—coming! “The coming of the Lord draweth nigh.”—New York Witness.