THE LAST WITNESS by Cummings

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 5, 1860

THE LAST WITNESS.

By Cummings

A very sure, but to the world unnoticed token of the arrival of the world's Saturday evening is the fulfillment of the prophecy that—

“This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached to all the world, for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” Matt. xxiv, 14.

Translating these words literally from the Greek, they read thus: “And there shall be proclaimed as by a herald's voice or trumpet, this the gospel of the kingdom . . . in all the habitable globe . . . for a witness”—that may be accompanied, as the word indicates with martyrdom—“for a witness to all the nations;” or “unto all the Gentiles,” as distinguished from the Jews, “and then the end shall come.”

The Greek word for “gospel,” literally rendered “good news,” is the same as our English, or rather Saxon word “God-spell;” the word “spell” meaning “news,” and “God's-spell” meaning “God's news;” that is, the information that God has to tell us. Every time, therefore, we hear the gospel, we hear news which God makes known to us. What are these news? If I were to state that there is an El Dorado discovered in Surry, or a California in Kent, millions would rush from London across all its bridges

in order to explore the mine, to collect the gold, and become suddenly rich. I have better news than these; but unhappily, news not always and everywhere popular. The very fact of our hearts not being thrilled by their announcement is evidence of something cold, dead, insensible to what is the greatest glory, the richest happiness. The best and brightest things that ever vibrated on human ear, or thrilled human hearts, are these. Here is an epitome of the news: that there is for us orphans an everlasting home; for us exiles a country whose beauty and blessedness no tongue can tell, and no heart can conceive; for young men and women, weary in the shops, exhausted in the streets, sorrowful, depressed, dejected, a rest perfect, everlasting, and complete—the rest that remaineth for the people of God. To hundreds it comes as an old story. “Oh how often,” will it be said, “have we heard that! It has been told us Sunday after Sunday; we have read it in our Bibles; we have been taught it in our schools, and we have committed it to memory from our catechisms.”

This insensibility amid light is just the dreadful state of man's heart that we have to deal with. Familiarity with the message takes away its edge, and blunts its impressions. If the lost could only hear that there is a home and a heaven and a rest accessible to them; if the poor savages in Africa, and in Labrador, and in Greenland, and in China could but learn or hear for the first time and accept the message while they hear it, that this life's close is the commencement of a more glorious one, what a thrill of ecstasy would rush through every heart! Alas! the very exuberance of our blessings makes us insensible to them. This is one of the strangest phenomena, and yet one of the most common, that the more we are familiarized with mercies the less we appreciate them. Were you a traveller in the distant desert, beneath a burning sky, and on a parched soil, weary, scorched, and parched with consuming thirst, oh, with what thankfulness would you welcome one sweet cold spring! you would value it infinitely more than all the wine that the richest and choicest cellars of the greatest and the noblest can furnish.

But pure spring water is so common that we do not value it. Fresh air—perhaps in London somewhat corrupted—is so universal that we are insensible to its excellence. Our greatest blessings are scattered on the high road, and because they are so we neither appreciate nor are thankful for them. The greatest mercies, the brightest hopes, the noblest truths, the most thrilling prospects, that ever tongue told or ear heard, are those heard every Sunday; but they are so familiar that they pass from the ear into the air again, as the wind passes through a ruined archway, creating a murmur in its transit, and leaving, instead of an impression, the silence of death.

That this world is not the end of us; that this body with its aches and its pains and its fevers, and its sicknesses, and its weaknesses, is not our lasting tabernacle, as it now is; that there remaineth a rest for the people of God, an everlasting home, an inheritance of glory, a crown of joy that fadeth not away—is surely glad tidings. O, blessed revelation! oh bright hope! The ancient heathen hoped that there was an elysium, but he could not prove it. The Mahometan fancies on the authority of his Koran that there is an everlasting harem where his sensual passions will be gratified to the utmost; but as his conscience becomes pure and his mind enlightened, he grows sick of the sensuous prospect.

But we have not to prove the existence of a heaven; it is not a corollary, nor an inference, nor a logical conclusion; it is a revelation from that God who dwells in it, and comes to us in all the certainty of an absolute and indubitable truth.

Has the thought of heaven ever cheered you? Has the prospect of a home ever made your fireside brighter, and your heart bound with joy? Have you sat in the country at eventide, and gazed upon the last rays of the retreating sun, and the emerging stars that begin to sparkle, and the quiet beauty of the moon as she mounts to her midnight throne? Have you ever thought, if not of the words, at least of the sentiments of the poet—

“There is a heaven o'er yonder skies, A heaven where pleasure never dies; A heaven I hope and long to see, Where Christ prepares a place for me.”

The amount of hold that truth has on man's conscience, the joy it creates, the impulse it gives, is the measure of your belief and the reception of it. Thus the very first news, good news, is of a home far beyond—a rest for the weary when time shall be lost in eternity; a city that hath foundations; a better country, whose sun never sets, whose sky is never covered with a cloud, where the flowers are amaranthine, where the trees never lose their foliage, where all is beauty and blessedness, and the heart has its deepest feelings and its highest longings gratified to the utmost. Is not this good news? But some one says, “We know not the way; how do we get to this heaven?” Hear the good news: there is a way to this heaven. When man sinned, his sin, like a disruptive earthquake, rent this place we call the earth from that grand continent which we call home and heaven. In that tremendous chasm which disruptive sin dug between happy heaven and our poor, lost, stray, sinful earth, a broad, deep, moaning sea rises and beats against each strand continually. How can that chasm be crossed? Ask the infidel, and he will tell you you must take a leap in the dark; if you miss the opposite shore you must perish. Ask the Romanist; he will tell you the church is the bridge that will carry you across. Ask the New Testament, ask the Son of God, and in his own majestic and emphatic accents he replies, “I am the way; no man cometh to the Father but by me.” As God he touches the opposite shores of the great continent of heaven; as man, he touches the opposite shore of the disrupted and broken-off Island of time; as God-man, he unites the twain into one; reaching the very heights of God's throne, so that the most depressed, the most forsaken, and the most guilty sinner, has but to enter upon that

better than Jacob's ladder, which will carry him from the lowest depths to which sin has sunk him to the greatest heights to which God's love can possibly raise him. Is not this good news? And this way is not a new one. It is in one sense the old way; it is in another sense always new. By a new and “living way,” says the apostle; that word “new,” is applied to all things that never lose their freshness. For instance, of some piece of music you can say, “It is always new;” and yet it was composed by Mozart or by Handel some forty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. You may say of this way it is a new way, and yet it is an old one. It is old because it was preached in Paradise; it is new because it has all the freshness, from all the deep interest attached to it of a first and early discovery. This way has been trodden by many of your fathers and your children have trod it, and have entered into the everlasting rest. And if you examine it, in one part of the road you will find riches; in another part you will find rank; in another part of it beauty; in another crowns, and coronets, and purple robes and great learning, and vast genius, and lofty attainments; in another part the tear of the weeper not yet dried, the blood of martyrs, as if it only had been shed the other day; all these having cast off the world like a loose garment, and dropped it on the road, that they might tread more unembarrassed the path that leads to God, to glory and to happiness; in other words counting all but loss for the “excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord.” You have not a way to strike out; no mountains to cleave, no rocks to blast, no vast hills to tunnel through, no deep valleys to raise to a level, no broad oceans to cross. It joins the Pacific of time with the great Atlantic of eternity, without the difficulties of a Panama 'mid the passage to detain you for a single hour. What a blessed way! What good news! What glad tidings that there is a heaven, a home, an everlasting rest, a joyful retreat. The way to it is so plain that carping scribes may miss it, critical divines may let it go, bitter sectarians may mistake it; but a wayfaring man, that is, an honest man, that wants to find out in the Bible the way to heaven, never can possibly err therein. It is a way too, which has a chart ever directing you, the Spirit of God ever explaining it to you; and so crowded with those that tread it of all classes, ages, complexions, and colors that no man goes alone to heaven. A great multitude out of every nation, kindred, people and tongue, whose backs are on the world, and whose faces are Zionward and to God goes with him.—Cummings, Great Tribulation.