Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/300

 the evil dispositions of mankind, and urged them on to those enormities which history has recorded. The cessation of effects can only be accounted for by a withdrawal of their causes. When, therefore, those evils are in the process of being abated, it is plain that their causes are removed; and, to effect this, they must have been subjected to a judgment. The evils which remain may be regarded as echoes of the disruption that has been accomplished. Society does not acknowledge nor connive at them; the public face is utterly against them; and the reason is because their spiritual causes have been removed. The sensual may shake their heads over these facts; professors of the Church may turn away from these conclusions; the world may hesitate to accept them; but all this scepticism leaves the Christian logic of the case in full possession of the field.

No one who accepts the Bible for his guide will ever venture to affirm that any moral results can take place among mankind which have not their origin in some spiritual cause. And we explain the abolition of the public evils which prevailed throughout the Christian world a century ago, by asserting that their causes were broken up in the spiritual world by the Lord having then executed a judgment upon them. We affirm that this event transpired about the middle of the last century; that the world of spirits was the scene of it; that the spirits of departed men, who were there collected, became the subjects of it; and that some of the results of that phenomenon have since been manifested in the world of men. The results are certain the existence of men as spirits in the world of spirits after natural death is equally certain; and the circumstance that those spirits exercise an influence of some sort upon their survivors upon the earth is plainly taught us in the Word. It is clear, then, that when those