Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/293

 That phenomena of this description have occurred within the last century every one must acknowledge. They are matters of common notoriety. No doubt the extraordinary troubles, which within that time have arisen in Europe, and more or less inflicted suffering upon the whole civilized world, were occasioned by the evils which prevailed; for a long time they had been festering and undermining the welfare of society; but then a period came in which their consequences affected the world to an extent and with a fatality unprecedented in the annals of the human race. Surely affairs involving the commission of so much wickedness, and the endurance of so much suffering, must have had an infernal origin. The tree is to be known by its fruit. The malignant principles and sentiments which the inhabitants of the world of spirits had been so long and so forcibly insinuating into the human mind, rushed out into open violence when the time arrived for the judgment of those spirits: and is it not reasonable to conclude that the afflictions which the world experienced represented the miserable condition to which those spirits had been condemned? May they not be regarded as the effects of the activities and infestation of a spiritual tyranny which judgment overthrew? To what other adequate causes can they be assigned? To say that they were merely the outbirths of vicious minds is no sufficient answer; for it is plain that all minds are operated upon in their determination, by influences more interior than themselves, which, however, they have always the freedom to examine and control.

The principles which led to those terrible results had been growing up in society for a considerable period. The interiors of the whole Christian world had been thrown into a condition of disaster and confusion. In a preceding chapter it was shown that all the circumstances which the