Probability that the United States would be a theme of Prophecy.
By S. D. Baldwin
BY S. D. BALDWIN, A. M., PRESIDENT OF THE SOULE FEMALE COLLEGE. THE whole history of the world is therefore given prophetically at different times, and all points of great interest to the church are embraced in prophecy. There is not a single age since the oral prophets, but is the subject of their predictions; nor is any great nation whose existence virtually affects the church, neglected by them, unless the United States be the nation. Indeed, every epoch of the christian world, and every era is duly chronicled and described. Now among all the epochs, and eras, and nationalities that have ever appeared on earth before and since christianity, none has ever been so replete with good to man and blessings to the church, as the epoch and era of the United States. Its rise was the great epoch of the freedom of christianity. Never before, from the days of Christ, was the church freed from foreign domination; never before since its union with the State, was the control over its purity taken away, and temptation to impurity and corruption removed. The severance of church and State is one of the greatest and most blessed events with which the church was ever favored. No country ever existed, that in so short a space, affected the world so much, and did so much for the good of the cause of God and humanity; and yet ours is but the state of infancy. Now, then, we ask a question: How can it be that all other nations affecting the cause of God, and man, should be specially and repeatedly predicted by prophets, and our country, which has done more good than all others, not be mentioned by the prophets. The prophets mention the minutest facts, and the smallest countries and villages that affected God's ancient and his modern Israel; and how happens it that not a word is said of America? Egypt and Greece, Edom, and Moab and Tyre, and Damascus, Sidon, and all the little towns of Asia Minor, and the Levant, come in for a share of notice, and all the mighty empires affecting the church are carefully enumerated; the divisions of the Roman empire were specially noticed, down to the end of them all, and yet no notice given of a christian country that gives more comfort and relief to the christians and the distressed than was ever given by all the world put together? How can it be possible that this country was left out of prophecy? how came it to be the alone proscribed nation in all the prophetic calendar? Can the greatest epoch, the brightest era in the history of christianity be unnoticed in the Scriptures, while all others of minor note are emphasized with a will? Surely not.—U. S. in Prophecy, pp. 153-8.