hall be very tempestuous round about him. He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that he may judge his people. Gather my saints together unto me, those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice. And the heavens shall declare his righteousness; for God is judge himself."

Further, in Malachi iv. 1, 2—

"Behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, all that do wickedly, SHALL BE STUBBLE; and the day that cometh shall BURN THEM UP, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither roet nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of Righteous ness arise with healing in his wings."

To a similar purport, Jeremiah XXX. 23, 24

"Behold the whirlwind of the Lord shall go forth with fury-a continuing whirlwind: it shall fall with pain upon the head of the wicked. The fierce anger of the Lord shall not return until he hath done it, and until he hath performed the intents of his heart; IN THE LATTER DAYS YE SHALL CONSIDER IT."

Again, Psalm xxi. 9—

"Thou shalt make them (his enemies) as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger; the Lord shall swallow them up in his wrath; and the fire shall devour them."

"Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and a horrible tempest; this shall be the portion of their cup" (Psalm xi. 6).

"And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the Isles and they shall know that I am the Lord" (Ezekiel xxxix. 6).

"And the slain of the Lord shall be at that day from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth. They shall not be lamented, neither gathered, nor buried. They shall be dung upon the ground" (Jeremiah xxv. 33).

Surveying these testimonies as a whole, we find that they reveal two separate stages in the coming troubles." First, there is "distress of nations,”—“evil going forth from nation to nation,"—and "men's hearts failing for fear," &c.,—which may be designated as the natural stage; and second, a divine manifestation in the person of the Son of Man (who is "the name of the Lord") accompanied by sweeping judgments of fire and sword which will destroy large masses of mankind; which may be considered as the supernatural. The former precedes the latter. Hence, as the

first indication of the approach of the end, we must look for times of trouble and commotion on the earth. When natural trouble has advanced to a certain point, the Lord Jesus will be revealed, no longer as "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world"-"the Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," but as "the Lion of the tribe of Judah, treading the winepress of the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God," -taking vengeance on this unbelieving generation. The vengeance in relation to mankind as a whole will be destruction to the majority, and discipline to the remnant. Multitudes will perish by war and pestilence; multitudes more will fall victims to the fire which will descend, after the manner of the judgments upon Sodom and Gomorrah; and the flames that consumed the military companies that went to bring Elijah 66 The from the top of the mount. slain of the Lord shall be many from one end of the earth even to the other end of the earth." earth's population will be greatly thinned; its reprobate elements expurgated, leaving a residue composed of the meek and submissive, and well-disposed of mankind, who will constitute the willing subjects of Messiah's kingdom, referred to in Isaiah ii. 3; Jeremiah iii. 17; Micah iv. 2; and Zechariah xiv. 16, as the nations which shall go up "to the house of the God of Jacob," at Jerusalem, to learn of His ways, and walk in His paths, walking no more after the imagination of their evil hearts.

The

But this result will not be at once

developed. The subjugation of the world is a matter of time.

When

Christ comes, the powers will colleague themselves against him. This is evident from Rev. xix. 19: "I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies gathered together to make war AGAINST him that sat on the horse, and against his army.' This is after his descent from heaven (see verse 11). It may be thought incredible that nations

should be so infatuated as to attempt to oppose the movements of omnipotence. The answer is, that what has been may be again. The Egyptians did not succumb before the unmistakable evidence of divine working, but madly pursued Israel after they left Egypt, and came to perdition in the Red Sea. It is not at all improbable that the powers on the Continent may look upon Christ as some new Mahomet-some fanatical caliph bent upon the project of universal conquest. Under this impression they will combine to put him down; but their misguided efforts will recoil upon their own heads to their destruction.

"The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters, but God shall rebuke them: and they shall flee afar off; and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind; and like thistledown before the whirlwind. Behold at eventide trouble; and before the morning HE IS NOT (Isaiah xvii. 13, 14).

"

"He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure" (Psalm ii. 4, 5).

"The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath. He shall judge among the heathen; he shall fill the places with dead bodies. He shall wound the heads over many countries" (Psalm cx. 5, 6).

"It shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth. They shall be gathered together as prisoners are gathered into the pit, and shall be shut up in prison (viz., the grave: Zech. ix. 11); and after many days shall they be found wanting. THEN shall the moon be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, and before his ancients gloriously" (Isaiah xxiv. 21-23).

"The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces; out of heaven shall he thunder upon them (then the sequel). The Lord shall judge the ends of the earth, and he shall give strength to his king, and exalt the horn of his anointed (or Christ)" (1 Samuel ii. 10).

Also, let Zeph. iii. 8, and Haggai ii. 6, 22, be consulted, as well as other Scriptures which may be found on search. Thus the attempt on the part of the "constituted" powers to resist the new-risen Eastern monarch, will result in their utter discomfiture. Their audacity will meet

The entire

with terrible retribution. system of human government which they represent will be shivered to atoms, and the invincible autocracy of the Greater than Solomon will be asserted and universally established. This, however, will not be accomplished in an instant. God could annihilate the power of the enemy in a moment, and at once clear the ground for the erection of His own power in the earth; but there would then be no scope for the intended punishment of this wicked world, and no depth in the moral effect upon "the remnant.' God coula at once have destroyed the Egyptians and liberated the captive Israelites; but then the lesson which was intended to be wrought for all time would not have been graven sufficiently deep; the Jews would have carried away but an indistinct idea of the greatness and omnipotence of Jehovah; and the historical name of God, which is one of the buttresses of our faith, would have been ill-remembered. The divine workings are always characterised by comprehensiveness of aim, and it is only ignorance of the purpose that engenders contempt for the means. In the collision, then, which will take place at the end, between the powers of this world and Christ, the man whom God hath appointed to judge the world in righteousness, man will be allowed to go his utmost length, and to put forth his power in the vain attempt to vanquish unsuspected omnipotence. This will

give time for the moral operation of the judgments which will be brought to bear in their suppression

"WHEN thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness" (Isaiah xxvi. 9).

"All nations shall come and worship before thee; FOR THY JUDGMENTS are made manI" FEST" (Rev. xv. 4).

Many laborious campaigns will probably take place before complete subjugation is effected. The governments of the earth will struggle with desperation to preserve the human regime from threatened annihilation.

which they are addressed in Isaiah xxvi. 20, 21

"Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself, as it were, for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast; for, behold, the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth, also, shall disclose her blood, and no more cover her slain."

The mode of this "entering into the chamber, and shutting the door" to hide, is made apparent in the New Testament; first, by reference to Matt. xxv. 10, where we read "They that were ready went in with him to the marriage, and the door was shut;" and, second, by reference to Rev. xix. 7, 8, where we find that this marriage is the re-union between Christ and his people at his coming. This is further manifest from the teaching of Paul in 1 Thess. iv. 16, 17—

"The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the. archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then, WE WHO ARE ALIVE AND REMAIN shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; AND SO SHALL WE EVER BE WITH THE LORD.' "

This is referred to in 2nd Thess. ii. 1, as "the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together unto him." The first event that takes place, then, after the return of the Lord from heaven, is the 66

gathering together of all His saints to him, including the dead of past ages, who shall have been raised for the purpose. This gathering together is to judgment. Paul

"

may

says: "We (brethren) must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that every man receive the things in body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad (2 Cor. v. 10); and the parables which Christ spake on earth, illustrative of his then approaching departure to heaven, and his subsequent return, have this characteristic: "And it came to pass that when he was returned, having received the kingdom, then he commanded those TO BE CALLED UNTO HIM, to whom he had given

"

the money." From all which, it appears, that on his return, his dead servants will be raised, and his living servants gathered with them from every part of the earth where they may be scattered, to be arraigned before him, that he may "take account of them (Matt. xviii. 23). He will approve of some, and reject others: the latter will be sentenced to share in the judgments which will descend upon the apocalyptic "beast and his armies, or sin, as politically and ecclesiastically incorporate in the powers that will "make war with the Lamb and his army:" the former will be admitted to the marriage ceremony, in which they will be confessed, "before the Father and all the holy angels" (Matt. x. 32), and will thenceforward "follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth (Rev. xiv. 4), and co-operate with him in the infliction upon the nations of that "judgment written which was treated of in the earlier part of the lecture.

"

All this takes place before divine judgments commence, but not before that "distress of nations with perplexity," which is the preliminary symptom of the approaching "time of trouble, such as never was. That state of political embarrassment will, probably, prevail for a considerable time before the saints are called away to the reckoning, and men will only consider it a repetition of commotions that have many times recurred in the course of history. They will only look to its proximate cause. They will never suspect that a divine hand is guiding the development of events, or that "the judge is nigh, even at the door." They will never dream that the world is on the verge of the most awful crisis that has ever occurred in its history,-that divine indignation, long restrained, is about to visit the world in destroying judgments that will break up the entire system of human society, as politi

Which Jesus styles "the devil and his angels" (Matt, xxv. 41).

cally, ecclesiastically, and socially organised. But like the little handcloud presaging the coming storm, the saints will be removed at a particular juncture of affairs without previous intimation. In all probability, the event will be so inconspicuous as to attract little attention. All that the world in general will know of it will be that a few obscure individuals, holding "fanatical doctrines, have mysteriously disappeared; few will ever seriously suppose that there is anything supernatural in the occurrence. Theories of the phenomenon will be ready to hand, and the incident will be forgotten-at least by the majority. Some who happened to know that this expected removal was part of the doctrine of these fanatical people, may be unable to quell a certain feeling of uneasiness which will trouble their breasts, but the world at large will be unaffected, and will move on to the destruction that awaits it at the revelation of Jesus with all his saints.

For the sake of clearness, it will be well to summarise the events already spoken of, in their chronological order :

Ist." On earth distress of nations with perplexity," arising from the complication of international politics, described as "evil going forth from nation to nation," and producing a failing of heart among men (Luke xxi. 25; Jeremiah xxv. 32).

2nd. The coming of Christ as a thief (Rev. xvi. 15), after the development of certain events to be spoken of hereafter.

3rd. Resurrection of "the dead in Christ."

4th. The gathering of the saints to Christ from all parts of the earth,

including the living and those who have been dead.

5th. The judgment of His ser vants, comprising the rejection of the unworthy; and acceptance of the "good and faithful;" the sending away of the former into the territory of the nations on whom judgment will descend, and the uniting of the latter as "the bride made ready," in glorious marriage, to the long absent but then arrived bridegroom.

6th.-War between the "powers that be," and the Lamb, who shall overcome them.

on

7th.-Heavy judgments inflicted

the nations by Jesus and the saints, producing great slaughter over all the earth, and resulting in the complete abolition of the existing order of things, and in the teaching of righteousness to men.

8th.-Setting up of the Kingdom of God, which will last for a thousand years, and then undergo a change in its constitution, adapting it to the necessities of the eternal ages beyond.

This is a general outline of the events which will occur at "the end," in connection with the establishment of the Kingdom of God. It is deficient, however, in one important respect; it does not embrace those events which constitute the occasion ofthe Messiah's thief-like advent, and takes no note of the political signs which are revealed in Scripture as the premonitory indications of the near approach of the end. These, with the question of how near the world probably lies to the great crisis, will be dealt with in the next lecture.