LECTURE IV.

THINGS COMING ON THE EARTH.

The Great Prophet of the Church predicts, as premonitory of the closing days of our present Economy, earthquakes, and famines, and pestilences, and also

"Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold."-MATTHEW Xxiv. 12.

EVIDENCES of our approaching the Saturday evening of the world's long week multiply on every side: the shadows of twilight begin to gather from every point of the horizon; and hence the cry should become more imminent, urgent, and emphatic than ever, "The Bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him." I dare not speak in the language of dogmatism or rashness, where human frailty has so often foundered, and human imperfection has been so often illustrated. I may, however, refer to the facts as presignificant signs of the beginning of the Great Tribulation. What is all history? Prophecy passing from the past into the preWhat are Alison and Macaulay? what are the newspapers that appear every morning? Simply amanuenses in providence, recording what God has predicted in his inspired Word; so that we seeing the prophecy of what shall be, and reading the unconscious record by men who do not

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think of the prophecy, of what is, are constrained to feel, "O God, thy word is truth." An early sprinkling of this predicted baptism of sorrows is "nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom." It is not difficult to particularize in 1859. Look around-after a peace of forty years, secured by the genius of that great hero whose name has become a household word-dark and sombre shadows began to creep up and the war clouds to gather and deepen in intensity, and statesmen to prophesy disaster. At length it burst upon the shores of the Euxine, and in the heart of the Crimea, in unprecedented terror and fury; and a war commenced and closed accompanied by horrors personal and physical on earth and ocean, of portentous significancemen's hearts failing for fear. We were no sooner relieved from that war, than news arrived as predicted in Ezekiel xxxviii., xxxix., that Russia is moving eastward as rapidly as it can; at war, its old war, with the Circassians, embroiling us with Persia, and ever seeking and searching a pathway to our Indian possessions; we have no sooner settled in some degree, if settled it can be called, than we find ourselves at war with the colossal empire of China; a war chronic, but no less remarkable and suggestive, when viewed in connection with prophecy. During the last seven years you have heard of that empire dividing into twain, from internal causes; and it is most singular that some of the ablest commentators upon prophecy have the impression that all the ten tribes are in China; that the land of Sin into which they were carried, or the land of China, may contain the ancient Ten Tribes, of whose history and existence we have had no record for the last two thousand years; this may error. Whether that war was right or wrong, expedient or not, it is not my province to pronounce; I speak of it as

be

a fact; what is the issue of it? The opening of an impenetrable empire to the glorious Gospel, and the approach of the truth to Pekin itself. The rebels in that empire have some way picked up a knowledge of the Gospel perfectly marvellous. While much has occurred that some may deplore, much may have taken place that some may differ from; yet I have not the least doubt that, as in olden times, the sword is the dread pioneer of the olive-tree. That kingdom must be convulsed by war before it overflow with those rivers that make glad the city of our God; and see erected in its bosom that kingdom which is righteousness, and peace, and joy, in the Holy Ghost.

What an awful, and piercing, and heartrending fulfilment of this prophecy has been sweeping over India! What atrocities, what sufferings, what desolating judgments are on the earth! Those that derided the reiterating warnings I have so long given, now recognise the solemnity and awfulness of the year 1857. All Europe watched each act of that Eastern tragedy, itself a seething volcano. Turn next to Italy. A war was kindled, the ultimate limits of which no man can guess. Every nation trembles-there are lulls, but there is no peace, and all the nations of Europe learn, amid the sprinklings of the last vial, that prophecy has passed into fact, "Nation rising up against nation, and kingdom rising against kingdom." The "Times" observes,-"The chronicles of the last forty-two years are fresh in the minds of all, and how many of those forty-two years have not been mainly illustrated or ensanguined with the military achievements of one nation or another? It has been the fashion to speak of forty years at least of this period as years of peace-but what peace! Now the Spanish and now the Italian Peninsula has been red with the blood of

contending armies; now the Turkish fleet has been sunk beneath the quiet waters of Navarin; and now the Russian hordes have perished like flies in the autumn time, as with ever-diminishing strength they staggered on to the diplomatic haven of Adrianople. At one time the cause of 'liberty,' at another that of 'order,' has been effectually vindicated at Paris, as the red gutters of the time could show; at another tranquillity,' that Russian idol, was enthroned at Warsaw in a very solemn way. The smoke of the opposing cannon has scarcely yet curled away from off the wide Hungarian swamps. Need we speak of England's share in these peaceful transactions? The NorthWestern Provinces of India, the banks of the Indus and of the Irrawaddy, have been the witnesses of our military glory. The fleets and armies of this country have already dealt one downright blow at the power of the Tartar dynasty in China, and even now the sword of England is bared, and about to fall in the same quarter with sharper effect. The story of the great contest which was waged in the Crimea may be passed over with but a passing remark, for that is generally admitted to be a stern parenthesis in the loving record of the nineteenth century. The French, however, for twenty-five years of that time have been steadily occupied in pursuing the African hordes from one mountain pass to another, while at the other extremity of that great continent we ourselves have waged two contests of extermination amid the bush of Caffreland. So far of the peaceful history of the Old World. In the New, peace can scarcely be said to have reigned during the piping times of that murderous miser Francia, in Paraguay; nor precisely along the course and at the mouth of the River Plate; nor among the republics on the Pacific sea-board of South

America; nor in Mexico, where of late the sturdy pioneers of the Northern States drove before them the hybrid population of that lovely region, pretty much as of old the steelclad followers of Cortez swept before them the Indian hosts, as the wind might have swept away the feathers with which they were adorned. It is idle to talk of peace in the past, and a dream to reckon upon it in the future."

We are told also that preliminary to the great period there shall also be "famines in divers places." I will not specify, lest I should be accused of dogmatizing, where positive assertion is so difficult; but is it not fact that during the last ten years, not in one country, but in every country, not even excepting America, famines have prevailed to a very great extent? Ireland was almost desolated by one; our own expenditure and taxation exceedingly increased in consequence. The fairest lands of Europe have recently felt the effects of famine, and failure of the harvest, and deficiency of the crops. India moves from war to famine. The money-market of America was convulsed; there is bread, but no money.

There "shall be

Our own country also felt the storm. pestilences in divers places." In 1849 a pestilence burst upon England, travelling from the East through Germany and Austria to our shores; and instead of the average mortality being about a thousand, it rose to three thousand per week. In 1854 it returned, and fell upon some districts of the country with fearful fury; in Golden Square it fell like the blast of the pestilence itself, where men, strong at ten o'clock in the evening, were carried out to be buried at twelve o'clock. And the morbific agencies which originated that pestilence are still in the air. Some unknown and peculiar type of it prevailed on the shores of France last