The Coming Future

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 30, 1862

The Coming Future.

‐THE present condition of the world is admittedly unnatural and anomalous. We are living in times when the Christian and the infidel, the statesman and the divine, seem to agree in the expectation that some great crisis is at hand.

The public mind, both at home and abroad, is held in the calm of a feverish suspense. New and strange blasphemies are coming to the birth; the foundations of the State are loosing, and the church of God is beset and assailed on every side.

Amid these thick clouds, all eyes are fixed with an eager gaze upon the dark and coming future. But who shall unravel its mysteries? Who can decipher its solemn roll of fate? Who can pierce with steady eye into the depths of past history, and read there, as in a mirror, the judgment or mercy in store for after generations? Who can expound the strange dream of this fleeting, shadowy world; or unlock to the faith of the church the royal treasure-house of the good things to come? It is here that the wisdom of the world stands rebuked, and its idols are all mute and silent. The research of its historians here proves futile and ineffectual; the policy of its statesmen is baffled and confounded. The future continues veiled from every worldly eye in deepest mystery; and every effort of

human pride to decipher the solemn hand-writing proves utterly in vain.

Divine prophecy is the only light that can remove this impenetrable darkness. There God himself reveals to his own servants the great outlines of his providence, and enables them, by patient search, to trace through the past and future, the grandeur and the majesty of his high counsels of love.—California Paper.