Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/192

 Have then any visitations that may probably be supposed, by their magnitude and extraordinary character, to have had such an origin, been experienced, within the last half century, by the nations of Christendom? for to them, more particularly, as forming the professing church, must such judgments belong. Do not the recollections of every person who has lived so long immediately rush forward with an affirmative answer? In the wars, and other dreadful calamities, which began with, and rose out of the French revolution, has not every serious observer of passing events noted features very different from those which attended the wars and convulsions of former times,—of all times later than the first full establishment of Christianity? Will he not allow them to have been such as are fully commensurate with the ideas suggested by the "distress of nations and perplexity, causing men's hearts to fail them for fear," announced by the Lord as among the signs of his Second Coming? which coming, we have seen, in the natural world, is a consequence of the judgment performed in the spiritual. There was one feature in those contests so entirely peculiar, that it well deserves to be particularly noted; and that is, that the war at last raged in every nation on the whole face of the globe that bears the Christian name; a circumstance which never occurred before since Christianity began."

"Never before since the Christian religion was vouchsafed from heaven to be a blessing to mankind, was the whole mass of its professors thus raised by a simultaneous impulse and arrayed against one another; as if they had all agreed as one man, while disagreeing in every thing else, to disown the empire of the Prince of Peace: never indeed before, since the world began, was any war excited, which deluged the surface of the globe with such wide-spread desolation."

"There have, it is true, been wars in all former ages; and if the late tremendous series of conflicts had been of a common description, I should not think of urging them as an argument on this occasion: but if all must allow them to be of a totally unprecedented character, my readers cannot think that I press them too far, in calling upon them to refer such events to an adequate interior cause. What adequate cause of such wonders can be assigned, but some great convulsion in the moral and spiritual world, displaying itself in corresponding events in the world of nature? what, in fact, but the performance of a judgment there, whence flow, as a necessary consequence, natural judgments here."

"And if the war was of so astonishing a character, what have been its effects upon the states of Christendom? Du-