"THEY SHALL MAKE WAR WITH THE LAMB, AND THE LAMB SHALL OVERCOME THEM."- Revelation xvii. 14. HE relation of the present conflict to the Millennium? "A very distant relation," you may say. Can war and the thousand years of warlessness be kindred? Can the bloody feet of battle be shod Such is the War is the with the preparation of the gospel of peace? doctrine of the Word and Providence of God. forerunner of the Gospel, the one who cries, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord!" and what he cries, he does. The Bible describes the advent of that hour as full of the tumults and deaths of strife. They may have a Biblical, a divine conjunction. Is ours one of that class? Is God appointing and directing it to the consummation of His desires, or is it simply a bloody feud without meaning or end? To see this more fully, consider, I. What is the Millennium? II. What are the principles involved in this struggle? III. How are these related in affinity and time? A sermon preached in Boston, on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1863. The battle of Lookout Mountain was fought on the 24th of November, and that of Missionary Ridge on the 25th. I. What is the Millennium? We need not plunge into the morass of speculation as to the time or circumstances of the Millennial year. Some fancy that it precedes the final resurrection, some that it follows it. Some believe the present race and earth will be destroyed, or rejuvenated by miraculous intervention in the present order of things; others believe that the present race of man, under its present circumstances, will occupy the present earth, changed in naught save sin. Whatever be our theories as to the mode of its coming and existence, all who believe in it agree as to its character. It is simply the triumph of Christ over Satan in the hearts and lives, the laws and institutions, of man. What that war is between Christ and anti-Christ, all hearts that know themselves, too painfully understand. It is spiritual, vital, all penetrating, all embracing. It is a struggle as to whether man shall be saved from sin, or kept in sin. It is an attempt to make the earth a heaven or a hell. This war begins in our moral nature, and in the sovereign head of that nature, the free will. It extends through every emotion, sensibility, intellect, appetite, habit, custom, law, or institution, whether of the individual or society. It extends its vast, imperceptible influences to the lowest orders of creation, and even the lifeless elements of earth and air. At the first revolt of the reigning will in man from its superreigning Creator, "Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe The ground was cursed because of his sin. It rolls in waves, it cleaves in fire, it is frozen in winter, it is parched in summer, for thy sake, O man. Not the ground alone is affected, the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. The whole creation is to be restored only by the restoration of man. His new creation can alone renew the face of the earth. As is the fall, so must the rising be. As the struggle, so the triumph. The plunge was through Satan unto sin, the deliverance must be through Christ unto holiness. The perfected deliverance is the Millennium. It is God again at the helm of the soul, voluntarily restored there as He was voluntarily expelled; God moving thence through every thought, impulse, volition, bringing all into subjection to Him; God thus sanctifying every part of every soul, and making them communities of holiness, centers of sacred life, sweeping away by their personal and united grace the curse and the crime of civil and social life, working in healing influences in the animate creation and in the earth itself, until the statelier Eden comes again" to a long-degraded and ruined world. This is the essence of the Christian, the Bible Millennium. This was promised to the first transgressor on his first repentance. It gladdened far off his penitent eyes, "Fair as a star when only one Is shining in the sky." It grew nearer and clearer to the faith of Abraham. The solitary star had become a cluster, a hemisphere sprinkled with beaming hopes. The Lord Jehovah Jesus, in the solemn midnight, centuries ago, visited him in his little. black, goat-skin tent, under the rocky range of Hebron, and brought him forth from its lowly, flapping door into the hollow of the darkened hills. Far up the clear depths within depths he beheld "The abyss where the everlasting stars abide." "Look now toward heaven," said his divine guide," and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be. And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." And yet he was then the only representative of that multitude and blessedness in all the earth. The mighty idolatries of Egypt, among which he had dwelt, were in the hight of their seemingly eternal solidity of strength and glory. Their temples, stout as the pillars of earth, were then going up. Their pyramids, defying the shocks of the reeling globe or the bolts of shattering lightning, were then exquisitely cutting the crystal sky with their perfect lines. The Assyrian kingdom, within whose boundaries he was born, and whose Euphratean metropolis he not unlikely had visited in his youth, was then exultant in the unlimited pomp and sway of a Satanic faith. The deluge of spiritual death rose higher than the highest mountains of society, filled the whole earth, every dell, and cleft, and crevice of every heart of every people. His soul alone floated on the desolate, rainy seas, a spiritual ark, built and guided of God, in whose holy recesses the faith of his wife and son, and to a less degree his nephews, were also carried. Jacob's dying eyes beheld the like vision under a slight increase of the on-marching light. A few score of his own blood, separated from the rest of the world as unclean, are all that profess the true and saving faith; and these are worldly, violent, corrupt, differing from their heathen neighbors in but little more than their creed, and often inferior to them in dignity and excellency of character. Levi, the father of the priestly line, was shamed by the mildness and manliness of Shechem, the pagan. Judah, from whom Christ came, stamped himself and his tribe with indelible infamy. Reuben had gone still further in sin, and done deeds that even in that darkened age struck the public conscience with abhorrence, and called down upon him the dying maledictions of his father. Yet with these men standing about his couch, the aged patriarch sces the coming Shiloh, the Messiah of God, and declares that to Him shall the gathering of the peoples be. The blessing that Abraham saw conferred in Christ upon all the world, Jacob sees is responded to by all the world. The nations shall gather about the Sent of God. Though not a nation then acknowledged Him; though only a few wild, wandering men, sons of a thrifty, itinerant shepherd accepted this announcement without perception of its meaning or desire for its consummation; though judging from his commandments concerning his bones, Joseph was the only one present that really possessed his father's faith in his father's clearness and confidence, still the word is spoken. The world shall come to the feet of Him who comes from God through the line of Judah. How this ray is multiplied in the widening light of Scripture history! How proud stand David and Isaiah on the misty mountain tops of this dawning glory! How clear, and round, and shining it cuts the horizon at Bethlehem and Nazareth, so simple, so lustrous, so pure, so grand, the very brightness of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ! How this light increases in the pages that follow that advent and conclude the oracles of God! The confinement of the truth to a single man, a single family, a single tribe, a single nation, the necessity for all who would receive it to become members of this household, is suddenly changed. As in the night we can overcome the darkness only by seeking the light, while in the day the light seeks us, so in the ages before Shiloh came the world must ally itself to Judah, if it would enjoy heavenly vision; but after His advent the divine light goeth out into all the world. The deeds of the apostles show that this power is moving out for the subjugation and ingathering of the world, East, West, North, and South. Down to Ethiopia, over to Syria, up in Asia Minor, far over to the forest depths of Illyricum, out to the gates of Gibraltar, to Damascus, most ancient of cities, Antioch, most wealthy, Athens, most cultivated, Corinth, most luxurious, Rome, most imperial, everywhere mightily grew the word of God and prevailed. This omnipotent |