Evangelist Varley's Testimony.
By Editor
In a letter to the London Christian, the English evangelist, Henry Varley, thus gives his impressions of the moral and religious condition of the United States:— I never felt so deeply as I do to-day the vital importance of the teaching of Scripture concerning the premillennial advent of our Lord. In every city which I have visited I have given a series of Bible-readings on this momentous subject, and I am persuaded that our Lord has greatly used the testimony given. Important and necessary as the work has been which has dragged to the light of day [in England] the shameless workers of iniquity, it must not be forgotten that our Lord said of the character of the times which would immediately precede his second advent. As it was in the days of Lot and Noah so shall it be in the coming of the Son of man,—days of utmost iniquity, bringing in the fearful and overwhelming judgments of the divine vengeance. Infidelity of a refined and highly civilized sort is everywhere abroad among intelligent men in the United States. The preaching is abjectly apologetic. The truth concerning sin and the sinner, the wrath of God and the coming Judgment, is scarcely declared, to say nothing of intemperance, covetousness, and licentiousness, political, social and moral corruption, infidelity and skepticism. The sacrifice of Christ as the only way whereby sin can be put away or its dreadful guilt expiated, is scarcely made known. One of the most miserable travesties of a Christian service which it has ever been my lot to have presence in was that in Brooklyn, the last Lord's Day morning in May last. Henry Ward Beecher was the preacher, his subject, 'The Theory of Evolution;' the audience a spectatorship, the singing artistic, the prayers cold, lifeless, and perfunctory; the reading without spiritual intelligence, unction, or fervor; the preaching a reading, in which the testimony of Genesis was made light of, and described as inconsistent with the scientific doctrine of evolution, which, though not actually demonstrated, might be regarded as truth, because of its widespread acceptance on the part of educated minds. The testimony of Genesis might be regarded, Mr. Beecher said, as 'allegory or parable in the direction of truth.' I need hardly say that I found many true and faithful men in every place I visited; but my firm conviction is that we are well into the perilous character of the last days (2 Tim. 3:1-6), and nowhere, in my judgment, is this more solemnly seen than in the great Western Republic of the United States.