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Word. No one will deny this proposition. It will be at once admitted by men of all classes and all "shades of opinion." But unhappily it is just these shades of opinion that cast a dark shadow over the landscape of revelation, and hide its exquisite beauty from the sight. It was meant to be the teller of its own tale, the witness of its celestial origin, the letter commendatory which supersedes other commendation; but schools, systems, theories, churches, sects, parties, philosophies, have intervened, all professedly with the best intention-and we quite believe them, although the result is exceedingly lamentable. What would not easily adapt itself to the school or system was left out or modified; what would not comport with the logically arranged creed was so interpreted as to fall quietly into its destined place; and what would not harmonize with the philosophy was trained without scruple to do so. The result was systematic theology, taught in colleges, preached in pulpits, embodied in commentaries, believed by the people. The kingdom of God was the Church; the second coming of Christ was death; the resurrection of good and bad took place simultaneously ; and the day of judgment was a period of twenty-four hours at the end of the world. All this was held to be the veritable teaching of the Holy Spirit in Scripture; and those who denied the proposition were denounced by the guardians of the so-called orthodoxy as dangerous heretics.

Ah! those dismal middle ages; what a legacy of error they have left us, and how remarkable it is that with all our boasted achievements in philology, criticism, and scientific theology, we never get beyond the influence of that bewildering legacy! Those middle ages rule us yet. They speak from the professor's chair, they preach in our pulpits, and they wield the pen of our religious writers. Everywhere they meet us, casting a dark shadow over the bright and beautiful book of God, plunging in mystery that which is clear as a midsummer sunbeam, and clothing in perplexing figure, which no one can solve, the plain declarations of outstanding prophecy. The middle ages compose our catechisms, our manuals of devotion, our hymnals, and our prayers. Thus the emancipation of the Bible from the thraldom of Popish darkness is not yet effected, notwithstanding over three centuries of so-called Protestantism. Doctrines are taught and opinions handed down from generation to generation which are palpably at variance both with the spirit and the letter of Christianity. If all this be so, and, alas, it is only too easy to prove it, how terrible the responsibility which rests upon our public teachers!

We are distinctly assured in the Word of God that the end of this age will be characterised by a fearful apostasy. There shall come a

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falling away first, before the day of Christ sets in, and the Man of Sin, the Son of Perdition, shall be revealed. The Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons. In the last days perilous times shall come. The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they keep to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, "Where is the promise of his coming?" Remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, how that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts. There shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways, by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. Many false prophets shall arise and deceive many.

This is a closely condensed view of what is said in the New Testa ment on the character of the close of this dispensation, just before the promised appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, to set up his glorious kingdom. But is this in harmony with the representations of popular teaching regarding the Christian dispensation? On the contrary, instead of the apostasy of Christendom, characterized by daring impiety and atheism, under the leadership of the Man of Sin, the Son of Perdition, popular teaching represents the gradual triumph of the Gospel over every nation and tribe, until all mankind shall become Christian, and the Church be co-extensive with the human race. This is the picture which the pulpit delights to exhibit, and a very beautiful picture it is. In skilful hands it is sometimes executed with such ingenuity, that the moral landscape of the nations seems to laugh before us under the sunlight of spiritual beauty. For imagination, poetry, graphic detail, and bursts of enthusiastic eloquence, it offers an exceedingly fruitful theme. But there is this drawback-it is not true! The Holy Ghost "speaketh expressly" against it. It is not only not the predicted issue of Christian testimony, so far as the nominal Church and the world are concerned, but that issue is directly the reverseapostasy, direful wickedness, impiety, blasphemy, atheism, doom! For mercy spurned, and grace refused, the end of the age is terrible "judgment !" For disobedience to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, the close of the dispensation is "vengeance!" The day of long suffering is ended by "the wrath of the Lamb!"

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Why, then, do so many of our teachers who are set apart for the vindication and exposition of divine truth, venture to proclaim theories which are so broadly contradicted by their sacred text-book? Assuredly it is no pleasure to us to ask this question. We are keenly pained to put it; but after reading it over and over again, conscience compels us to send it to the printer just as it is. Good, wise, learned men do teach that "the Gospel will convert the world to Christ" before his return in glory to judge the quick and the dead. But, as his own word denies this with startling emphasis, and brings forward in proof of that denial appalling representations of the enormous wickedness of the world at the time of the Lord's second coming, we have no alternative but to say that those teachers and the inspired writers contradict each other.

Responsibility! Merciful Saviour, look upon thy ministers! What will the deceived people say of them, and to them, when the story of "Peace, peace," is interrupted by the uprising of the Man of Sin, and the imperious demand that all shall worship him, and deny the Father and the Son? "Sir, you deceived me! You taught me to laugh at the millenarian doctrine. You said that Christ would not come until the end of the world; that the Gospel would convert the nations, and that the idea of a personal Antichrist was a dream, and an absurdity. You deceived me, sir! And now I must either worship this blasphemer or die!" Can one imagine such a speech as this without horror? The very thought of it chills the blood! But there will be many such speeches in the awful day that is about to burst on guilty Christendom-nay, not such speeches, for that which we have written is gentleness itself compared with the utterances of mingled indignation and despair which will come from the pallid lips of many when the fierce demand of the Antichrist for blood shall desolate the nations. This is no trifling matter. It is intensely real, and, therefore, unspeakably appalling. When the waiting Church that loves the appearing of her Lord shall be removed, the condition of those who are left will be fearful in the extreme. This subject is too painful for prolonged thought, but surely a mere allusion to it suggests the necessity of fidelity to revelation, and the solemn responsibility which rests upon every man who occupies the position of a Christian teacher.

But is it really a matter of revelation that Christians who are looking for the coming of the Lord shall escape the predicted horrors of the atheistic domination? We have already seen that the close of this dispensation will be characterized by unprecedented wickedness culminating in unparalleled judgments, and that, therefore, the popular notion of an evangelized world, through the agency of the Church,

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is a great delusion, having no authority whatever in the Word of God. In view of these facts, the question we have just asked assumes great importance, and the answer given to it in the Holy Scripture. will again remind us of the solemn responsibility resting upon those who, though recognised ministers of Jesus, practically unite with the scoffers of these last days in saying, "Where is the promise of his coming?"

Our Lord, speaking of the day that shall come as a snare on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth, says, "Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.” (Luke xxi. 36.) This intimation that his watchful disciples shall escape the terrors of the closing scene, when the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled (for it is to that period, and not to the destruction of Jerusalem, that these words point), is one of the things which the Holy Ghost brings frequently to the minds of the apostles. "Ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, even Jesus who delivered us from the wrath to come." (1 Thess. i. 9, 10.) Here the present is put for the future, denoting the certainty that Jesus will deliver those who wait for Him, from the wrath to come upon the world of the ungodly. "For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. . . . . But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet the hope of salvation. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ." (Chap. v. 2-4, 8-10.) The contrast here between those who shall not escape, and those who shall be saved from the day of wrath, is very striking. The salvation which the latter are to obtain is, of course, salvation from the tremendous terrors of that day. Spiritual salvation it is not, for that they have already. It is the righteous taken away from the evil to come. "Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken" -graciously, as in John xiv. 3, "I will come again and receive you unto myself"-" and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken and the other left." (Matt. xxiv. 40, 41.) Those who are "left" shall be exposed to the tempest, before the bursting of which on the earth the others are "taken." Referring to the cases of Noah and Lot, Peter says, "The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto

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the day of judgment to be punished." (2 Pet. ii. 9.) The flood came not until Noah was safe in the ark; the fire fell not upon the cities of the plain until Lot was removed from danger; the vials of wrath will not be poured upon the earth until those who "wait for the Lord" are taken to a place of glorious safety. "Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.” (Rev. iii. 10.) Most remarkable is this verse, Tòv λóyov Tŷs vπoμovîs μov "the word of my patience"; what a revelation there is here of the dispensation of grace, and of the certainty that, in consequence of grace rejected, it will end in judgment; and what a proof that to look and wait for the patient, long-suffering Saviour is the duty and privilege of the believer-an attitude which is to be rewarded by removal from the scene of trial before the Apocalyptic judgments descend upon. the earth.

Now if these two momentous truths-namely, that Christendom ends in apostasy, and that those who wait for the Lord will be gathered lovingly to Himself before the judgment due to that apostasy descends upon the world,-were presented to our congregations, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the indifference to the sublime realities of the Gospel, the sleep, the deadness of which the complaint is so lamentably general, would, to a great extent, disappear. The law of Heaven is-God's blessing on his own truth. A faithful exhibition of that truth, therefore, is the bounden duty of all the ambassadors of Christ. The great realities of the Gospel should be presented to men as things wonderfully near, not as things afar off, or cold abstractions concerning which curiosity may speculate. And if the day of grace, the era of divine long suffering, is rapidly coming to a close; if the Gospel dispensation, like its Edenic, patriarchal, and Aaronic predecessors, is to end in apostasy; and if the new epoch of royal rule by the manifested Messiah, with the Church of the first-born ones as his co-assessors, converted Israel as his ministers of salvation to the nations, and the entire world as his empire, is just about to begin, the necessity of fidelity to God's revelation, always pressing, is now vehemently imperative. The great crisis to which all generations and all the purposes of God have been tending is near at hand. To talk now about the respective merits of ecclesiastical systems is a waste of precious time, for they are all doomed to dissolution that the sons of God may be manifested in glory with Him who is at once their Redeemer, their life, their Elder Brother, and their Head. To insist now upon form, and ceremony, and ritual is perfect madness, for the Bridegroom cometh; those who are ready will go in with Him to the marriage, and