Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/333

 coming at any time, it is His influences which benefit: and the ulterior purposes of every advent has been to confer some new blessings upon society. How clear is this in the case of His first advent! By means of the Christianity He then established, a new condition of spiritual life and thought was created among mankind. A new centre of light was provided, and this extended itself to a wide circumference; it produced new thoughts about Divine things, and gave existence to new loves respecting them, so that in the process of time a really new condition of mental and moral life was evolved, and an entirely new state of society was produced among all the nations by whom its revelations were received. This was accomplished after preceding revelations had been rendered of none effect; and as the Lord's second coming is to be occasioned by corruptions setting in upon the teachings of His first advent, we may rest assured that the general design of that coming is to introduce to the world a new condition of religious and intellectual thought: hence we conclude that whenever such a condition of thought is developed in society, and fairly recognised by it, that then is the period in which the prediction is being fulfilled. This view is in accordance with the generally received law for the interpretation of prophecy, which is that the precise meaning of it is scarcely ever to be determined until the time of its fulfilment: thus we must look to events to establish the truth of our explanation of its terms; when the events and explanations agree, we may safely conclude that the prediction is accomplished. Let us carry this view to the promise we have before us.

There can be no doubt that within the last century a condition of mind has been developed and brought into activity in every department of human learning and civili-