The World Lost | AdventAI

Publishing Committee · Rochester, N. Y. · Jun 13, 1854

The World Lost.

If it had light in itself, it would not need another light. If it had life in itself, it would not need to receive it anew. If it were not lost, Heaven need not come to seek and to save it. "I am come a light into the world," saith Christ, "that whosoever believeth in me should not abide in darkness." He that heareth my word and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life. "I am the resurrection and the life." Said John, "He that believeth not the Son, shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him."

The world is lost. If it were not, righteousness would spring and flourish in the spontaneousness and abundance of an indigenous product. Vice, if found at all, would be the sparse and sickly exotic. All experience shows the reverse of this. Sin and crime have proved universally spread, luxuriant and rampant, as natural growth. Virtue, as a foreign plant, has struggled for existence, against incongeniality of soil and climate, and the choking influence of prevalent vice. If man were not lost, evil, if found at all upon his moral character, would be but the occasional excrescence on the tree of his nature. That tree would, notwithstanding, flourish in beauty, laden with the flowers and fruits of goodness. If moral evil were but a wart upon human nature, how easy the removal of the blemish, leaving the character fair and sound in native healthfulness. Instead of this, it proves, to all human surgery, the constitutional cancer. The out-breaking ulcer, cut out of the system at one point, quickly appears in another; proving that the virus has its subsistence in the whole system, circulating in the life-stream, flowing out from the heart through every fibre. When we have broken off from outward transgressions, we discover principles of evil within, too subtle to have been communicated to us in example; too deep to have been rooted by habit; and too mighty to be subdued by human determinations alone, or by the mere letter of the law. We feel that the power that created us originally in holiness, is needed to create us anew to righteousness, since we have become lost to it. We feel the need of an Omnipotent and Infinite Redeemer, to deliver us from our guilt, and to change our character, so that we may be at peace with God, and our hearts become the pure fountain of a holy life.

The condition of the physical, is made to correspond with the character of the moral world.

"Nature, Through all her works gives signs that all is lost."

She has a mortal malady, manifest in the symptoms of her disease, and declared in the "sure word of prophecy." With her winter chill and her summer fever, her vernal bloom is as the hectic brightness on the consumptive's cheek, while corruption and dissolution prey upon the vitals beneath. In the intervals of her earthquake heavings, her dark and self-desolating storms, her calm and brightness are as the ease and quietude and hope in the intermission of the paroxysms of pain, convulsive strivings and assaulting death, in the mortally diseased. Nature is consuming her own life in eking out a limited existence with just strength and duration enough to correspond with the world's moral character, and to answer the purpose of man's probation.

The world, therefore, needs a Redeemer. Jesus our Lord is the Saviour it needs. To as many as receive him, he gives power to become the Sons of God. Their souls are pardoned and renewed to holiness, and by death their bodies sleep to be revived in the resurrection to immortality and incorruptibility and glory. And when the elements of the visible heavens and earth shall have been "dissolved," he will revive them in a "new heaven and a new earth," an eternal and befitting abode for his redeemed people. "Behold!" he saith, "I make all things new."