Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/77

 We cannot believe that these are correct views of the subject. They are said to be "mysteries" by those who hold them; therefore no one can know that they are true, and every one feels that they are eminently embarrassing to all rational thought. We consider them to be mistakes; still we shall not stop to discuss or to expose them: to us there can be no doubt that they are the fabrications of men, and we prefer to rest our views on the Scripture history of the events themselves.

That the fall of man had its beginning in Adam's transgression is very evident: it is the first recorded act of disobedience, but all which that enormity involved was not completed until the Lord God of Israel visited and redeemed His people; and the "wrath" from which Jesus dellvered them was not the wrath of God, but the wicked influences of an infernal crew. To what else can the debasing influence of wrath belong? The extreme of the Divine mercy was displayed when the extreme of human necessity had arrived. It was when the Lord "came unto His own, and His own received Him not," that the measure of man's iniquity was filled.

We may be reminded that the world had become extremely wicked at the time of the flood; and, also, that after that catastrophe the enormities of men, indicated in the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, were exceedingly revolting; and from these facts it may be argued that men had fallen at those periods quite as low as any degradation observable in their history at the time of the Lord's advent into the world. But those who adopt that conclusion are not yet in possession of all the facts and circumstances which relate to the subject. The fall of man is not to be considered simply as a fall into criminal acts, but chiefly as the cor-