we not grieving Him most signally and awfully? Instead of setting our face stedfastly to go after Christ, are we not following after Antichrist in his manifold delusions, in which by mixing up truth and falsehood, he is seeking to deceive the very elect? Instead of putting ourselves under the teaching of the Spirit, are we not taking the false guidance of the evil one, now clothed in the fair disguise of radiant knowledge, and going before us as an angel of light to mislead and ruin? Not as though some strange thing were happening to us. We look for no times of righteousness in these last days. We have been warned to expect evil and not good,-progressive evil, not progressive good,-until the Lord come.* The age of progress is not the present; it is the age to come. In the present there is the development of evil,—in the * Perhaps our readers may find some pleasure in reading, in connexion with some of these remarks, the following striking old Latin hymn. (See Daniel's Thesaurus Hymnologus, vol. ii., p. 380.) :— "Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt; vigilemus! Ille piissimus, ille gravissimus, ecce venit rex! Surgat homo reus! Instat homo deus, a patre judex !" The unlearned amongst them may take the following as a rough para phrase : ""Tis the last hour! The times they are evil! Let us be watching! Lo He is coming! Threateningly, frowningly! He the Great Judge! He comes! lo, He comes! The evil to end, the good to crown, The right to reward, the troubled to free, King, the most holy, King, the most kingly, Lo, He is coming! Rise, sinner, rise, The God-man is coming, Sent by the Father, Judge of all!" future the development of good. Man is now putting forth his power to the utmost in efforts after progress. Poor progress at the best, yet much boasted of! It is but man's progress; it is but finite development. Man is now put to the proof. He is allowed to do his best, and he is given time to do it in. God will not hinder the attempt, nor hurry him in making it. Full time, ample scope, large opportunity will be granted. Man ruined a world; it is to be proved whether he can rebuild it. He ruined it in a day; he is given six thousand years to attempt its reconstruction. His downward progress was swift enough, it is to be tried whether his upward progress will be as rapid, or whether there can be such a thing as upward progress at all when he is left alone. God has been putting him to the proof. He says to him, Try to govern the world;" man tries it but fails. He says to him, "Try to regenerate a world ;" he tries it and fails. He says to him, Try to remove the curse;" he tries it and fails. He says to him, "Fertilize the earth;" he tries it and fails. He says to him, "Try to advance, make progress,-increase in knowledge;" man tries it and fails. It will not do. Man's day has been a long one; but it has been a day during which in all possible circumstances and with all advantages, he has been proved helpless, ignorant, evil; unfit to rule, and unfit to be left without a ruler; unfit to teach, and unwilling to learn; unfit to be intrusted with the care or management of ought within the world's wide circle,-from the atom of crumbling dust beneath his feet up to his own imperishable soul. 66 66 When God has made this proof to the universe of man's utter incapacity; when he has demonstrated man's unworthiness of trust and inability for any progress, save a downward one; he sets him aside as "a despised and broken vessel," in order to bring in the "greater man,"-aye, the greater than man, even his own eternal Son. The great experiment of 6000 years is now drawing to a close. The vast but awful demonstration is now nearly complete. The case is most manifestly going against man. King, prince, noble, peasant, beggar; statesman, diplomatist, master, parent, child, servant; poet, philosopher, artist, mechanic,-all have had their long age of trial, and all have failed. The verdict will soon be given, and the sentence pronounced. At this crisis we now stand. At the close of a long series of experiments made to see what man could do, we find the world as wicked and lawless (to say no more) as at the first. Peace has not spread her reign among the nations, nor mis rule departed. Righteousness does not sit on the thrones of the nations, nor does holiness beautify the homes of the children of men. Man's merchandise is not consecrated to God, nor his wealth laid at the feet of Jesus. The heart remains still deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Oppression, murder, cruelty, selfishness, lust, sedition, strife and hatred are still uneradicated, unsubdued, unmitigated. Man has found no cure for these maladies. They rage on, but he is powerless. The curse still pervades the earth and poisons the air. Man cannot disinfect it. The thorn and thistle still shoot up their prickly memorials of the primal sin. Man cannot uproot them. Disease still haunts the body, and man says, " depart," in vain. The "rooted sorrow" still keeps place in memory, scorching health's freshness, and tearing down life remorselessly,-man vainly endeavouring to pluck it out. Death still smites down its daily myriads, and man tries in vain to bribe or disarm it. The grave still receives the loved, and preys upon the beautiful,—man pleading in vain that it should give back the joy of his heart and the desire of his eyes! Such are the fruits of the first Adam's doings, and such the powerlessness of his children to remove so much as one of the ten thousand evils. It has been proved that man can ruin, but not restore a world. His attempts at restoration have been sad and mischievous failings. His attempts at PROGRESS have been abortive; so that, progress in evil, progress in alienation from God, is the feature of greatest prominence in his history.* But this progress in evil has a limit. God has set bounds to it which it cannot overpass. He will not allow this earth of his to be totally a hell. He will make the sin of man to praise him, and he will restrain the remainder thereof. A certain amount and a certain duration he will allow, but no more. Neither of these is indefinite; and we seem to be nearing their boundary. It is well. For then shall the good displace the evil, and the blessing the curse. The second Adam is at hand, and, * Such being the case, it seems absolutely incredible that any one should be found maintaining that there is to be a millennium of blessedness between us and the Lord's coming. The whole interval between the Lord's first and second coming is marked throughout by evil, not by good, -increasing evil, not increasing good,-by the prevalence of Antichrist, by the overflow of apostasy, by the spread of Atheism, by convulsions, commotions, and troubles ;-how is it possible, then, for the millennium to precede the Advent? One wonders how men can read the Word of God, and yet maintain such a theory. with him, the kingdom and the glory. He brings the cure. He knits the broken world. He rebukes disease and sorrow. He binds death. He rifles the grave. He delivers creation. He sets up a righteous peaceful throne. He draws aside the curtain that hid heaven from earth, making them as one,the inner and the outer chamber of the one tabernacle of Jehovah, and setting up the true Jacob's ladder, on which the angels shall be seen ascending and descending, still ministering in holy service to him and to his saints in the day of the kingdom, as heretofore they have done in the day of tribulation and shame.* That is the age of PROGRESS! What progress, when God shall set his hand to it! In the light of that ever-widening knowledge, in the blaze of that ever-brightening glory, how poor, how vile shall seem the progress of the dishonoured past! Not merely like age's recollection of childhood's trivialities and wasted time, but like morning's remembrance to the drunkard of last night's revelry and lust; like the King of Babylon's remembrance of his seven years' sojourn with the beasts of the field. ART. II. THE APOSTOLICITY OF CHILIASM.-No. II. ERE the Lord left the earth he, once and again, spoke to his disciples of his second coming, and commanded them to WATCH for it. His words are such as these, "Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come." (Matt. xxiv. 42.) "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." (Matt. xxv. 13.) These exhortations were well understood and acted on by the early Church. They WATCHED. One of the special characteristics of the early Church was its watchfulness. * “When else should the true King come but to dethrone a tyrant, to avenge his country, to restore a world? The alien Herod had usurped the Jewish sceptre, had subverted liberty and rule, had profaned the sanctuary, and had confounded the rites of worship: therefore, when things human were failing, the Divine drew near to succour; the helper, denied in man, appeared in God himself. In like manner will Christ again come, to destroy Antichrist, to throw open Paradise, to strike off the fetters of the world, and, in the place of bondage, to establish eternal freedom."-(Chrysologus, Sermo 156; quoted by Maitland, p. 423.) They not only loved the appearing of the Lord; they not only looked for it; they not only waited for it; but they watched for it. They knew that loving, looking, waiting, were not all that their Lord expected, or their circumstances demanded. These were to be done, but the watching was not to be left undone. To remember the others, and overlook this last, was not only to forget the meaning of the word in which the command was given,-watch, (ypnyoρeite,)—but also to lose sight of the reason for the watching which had been repeated so often, as if to prevent the possibility of either forgetfulness or mistake,-"Ye know not what hour your Lord doth come." Their uncertainty as to the time was to be the ground of their watching. In regard to the time, they were to know nothing, nothing, at least, which could throw them off their guard, nothing which would interpose an interval between them and the Master's coming,-nothing which would diminish the uncertainty of the time when He should come.* Subsequent events were to prove that there was an interval, but that interval was to open out of itself, upon the view of the Church. Its length was hidden, so that neither the early Church, nor the Church in any age, could say, "there is some time to elapse ere the Lord come.' Never was the Church in circumstances to say, "the Lord cannot come for a thousand years yet." Never did she in her early days even attempt to place herself in that position. Had she done so, watching would have been impossible. She might still have loved and looked and waited, but she could not have watched, for watching in its very nature implies that there is no necessary, no known interval between us and the object watched for. A necessary or known interval must destroy watchfulness.+ It has been argued recently, that the early Church could not have watched in this sense,-that the events predicted by Calvin thus expresses it, "He wished them to be uncertain as to his coming; but yet to be prepared to expect him every day, or rather every hour," de jour, en jour ou plutôt d'heure en heure. Thus a keen opponent of Millenarianism writes, "If the thousand years in the Apocalypse were a fixed time, these sayings concerning the suddenness of Christ's second coming would not be true."- Wordsworth, on the Apocalypse, p. 68. Dr. W. sees well what is meant by watchfulness, and in order to keep up the scriptural idea in consistency with his Anti-millenarianism, he denies that the thousand years are a fixed time ! See Mr. David Brown's work, reviewed in another part of this number. |