Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/344

 The charitable institutions which have been formed, not only to relieve the sufferings of the body, but to promote the interests of morals, and even to secure the animals from cruelty, cannot be thought of by the pious observer without acknowledging that the hand of Providence must have raised them up; and why now, in preference to all preceding time, if this was not the age in which the Lord, in forms of mercy, displays His coming?

Auother beneficent feature of our times is the formation of Missionary Societies, by which the documents of Christianity are carried to every quarter of the world. And how eminently useful has been the establishment of that noble institution, "The British and Foreign Bible Society!" By this Society the sacred Scriptures have been translated into nearly all the languages of the earth, and distributed in large numbers, without note or comment, to almost every region in which humanity exists. People of all countries have been engaged to assist in the work of translation. They are not simply circulated among the ignorant, semi-civilized portions of the earth: they have become subjects of interest to the learned Mahometan: the pundits of India have had their attention drawn to their contents with favourable results; and a few years ago a million copies of the New Testament were printed in the language of China, for the purpose of distribution among the people of that vast empire; multitudes of whom, by some previous teaching, had been understood to have made some little acquaintance with its religion.

It seems impossible to contemplate these facts with intelligence, and not at the same time to see that they are specialities in the Divine Providence, marking with serious phenomena the epoch in which they have occurred. Surely in this remarkable circulation of the Scriptures, the Lord