Colossians 1

Colossians 1:18-24

THE CHURCH AFTER HUNDRED YEARS Colossians 1:18-24 Delivered before the Northern Baptist Convention, Cleveland, Ohio, Sunday night, June 1st, 1930. THE Christian Church is now celebrating its nineteen hundredth anniversary. Though conceived with the Virgin Birth, it was born at Pentecost following Christ’s resurrection from the grave. Revelation is not a novelty and the Church is not a recent innovation. Revelation is co-existent with man upon the earth; and the Christian Church has held its place in the world and the world’s increased attention, for nineteen hundred years.By Revelation we mean God’s communication with and to man. This, we know, began immediately upon man’s creation and is recorded in this language: “God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). This was the primary, or original, revelation to man.The record of the original Church is in this language: “Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there was added unto them (together) about three thousand souls” (Acts 2:41). Revelation began with the finished creation; the Church was consequent upon a finished redemption.Our task is not that of tracing revelation through six thousand years; it is rather that of studying the Church in its development through near two thousand. The task, while fraught with difficulties, should be attended also by delights.

Men take great pleasure in tracing their family tree, even when told that they will discover a monkey in the trunk thereof. Surely the saints should find greater joy in a spiritual genealogy that originated with the Son of God. To its consideration, then!THE CHURCH This organization is called Christ’s Body.“He is the Head of the Body, the Church” (Colossians 1:18). “For His Body’s sake, which is the Church” (Colossians 1:24). The figure here employed is appropriate and applicable. The body has no will of its own, but expresses that of the head. Not one of its members moves until the mind has commanded. It is the head that effects the organic unity of the body. Each and every member of the body is nervously, and hence vitally, united with the head.So it is with Christ and the Church. Our unity and fellowship with Him are alike shown by a surrender to His will; and the proof of our claim to a healthy place in the Church exists in implicit obedience to Christ—the Head.It is not then, a community of belief, nor an identity of interest, nor a uniformity of language, that makes possible the Church.

Those things are associated with, but they are not adequate to an organism. An organism is possible only as the product of a life; and the true Church is created by the Christ life that vitalizes the same.The figures of Scripture that prove this fact are “the Head of the Body”, “the Vine” and “the branches”, in both of which there is unity and community of life. Therein is the necessity of regeneration. One must become not only a “new creature” as the King James version gives it, but, in fact, “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17), as the correct translation tells us.This Body is constituted of the Blood bought.“Through the Blood of His Cross, hath He reconciled all things unto Himself”; so that we who “were sometime alienated and enemies”, “by wicked works”, now “hath He reconciled in the body of His flesh through death” (Colossians 1:20-22). If there is one historical fact of the Church that can never be called into question, by Bible believers, it is the place appointed to the shed Blood of the Son of God. From the Old Testament teaching, where the high priest made an atonement with blood (Leviticus 4), through the New Testament truths of “redemption through His Blood” (Ephesians 1:7) justification by His Blood (Romans 5:9), sanctification with His own Blood (Hebrews 9:22), to the final victory which is to be accomplished by the Blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony (Revelation 12:11), the Scriptures are harmonized and replete.That strange deflection from the “faith once delivered” that scorns the Blood, and speaks of it as “the gospel of the shambles” belongs, beyond all question, to fulfilled prophecy, on the part of those who now deny the Lord that bought them, and trample underfoot the Blood of the covenant wherewith they were sanctified. But let us not be misunderstood! We are not supposing that any soul is bathed in the drops of Blood that trickled from Christ’s hands, or feet, or side; we are not at all speaking of the white and red corpuscles, nor yet of the serum in which they floated, that fell from His wounded frame; but we are teaching, as every intelligent man should understand that “the life is in the blood”. When Christ lay down His life for men He provided by that sacrifice, for their redemption. That truth was the potential one in the early Church, and has never failed in power, when rightly proclaimed.Baptists, at least, are profoundly interested in the history of Christmas Evans, that remarkable Welshman.

He was born December 25, 1766 and named for his natal day, Christmas; converted at the age of eighteen, and, shortly after, he began to preach by memorizing one of Bishop Beveridge’s sermons and one of Mr. Rolands.In spite of his total lack of education, the delivery of these sermons was such as to profoundly move his auditors.When he spoke before a Baptist Association shortly thereafter, the people said the one to another, “The one-eyed man of Angelaea is a prophet sent from God.” And so it proved!

In all Baptist history we have scarce had his equal. The time came when his ministry was thronged by the thousands, and when his preaching was with such power that hundreds fell under conviction. He took front rank in the Welsh ministry; and for more than half a century without a stain on his name, and with a mind that grew by the process of self-education, he—a giant in body and in brain, so preached as to impress Robert Hall as being the “tallest, stoutest, and greatest man” that he had ever seen. When at last he was dying at Swansea, July 19, 1838, in the seventy-second year of his age, and the fifty-fourth of his ministry, he said to those about his bed, “I am leaving you. I have labored in the sanctuary fifty-three years, and this is my comfort, that I have never labored without Blood in the basin.” The Church is a Blood-bought Body.That Blood-bought Body is the custodian of the Sacred Book. That is why Paul speaks of Christ’s intention to present its members “holy and unblameable and unreprovable in His sight”: if they “continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the Gospel, which ye have heard” (Colossians 1:22-23).That is why Paul, writing to Timothy concerning the oracles of God, said, “O Timothy, keep (or guard) that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: which some professing have erred concerning the faith” (1 Timothy 6:20-21).That is why he was careful to base his own contention for the Truth upon that which he also had received (1 Corinthians 15:1).That is why John, as he approached the close of the Sacred Canon, felt compelled to say, “I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this Book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this Book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the Book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the Book of Life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this Book” (Revelation 22:18-19).Dr.

Gaussen, the great theological teacher of Geneva, in his volume on “Theopneustia”. says truly enough, “The Church is a depository and not a judge. She delivers a testimony, not a judicial sentence.

She discerns the canon of Scripture; she does not make it. She has recognized its authenticity; she has not given it. * * The authority of the Scriptures is not founded, then, on the authority of the Church; it is the Church that is founded on the authority of the Scriptures.”That is why she prizes the Book; it is her Magna Charta. That is why she has fought foes, fiends and fagots in its defence. Christ is the origin of the Church’s life, but the Bible is the source of her light.That is why the history of Christian martyrdom marks the progress of Church life. That is why you can track the Church of God through seventeen centuries by the Blood line. It was the very insistent practice of Christianity to retain the Bible, study the Bible, exemplify the Bible, and teach the Bible, that brought the wrath of men upon her head.

It was when John told Herod what the Bible had to say about monogamy and domestic decency that Herodias demanded his head on a charger. It was when the early Christians proclaimed Jesus King of the Jews, according to the prophecy of Sacred Writ, that their lives and fortunes were instantly put into peril.

It was when Diocletian, the Roman emperor, saw the behavior of his sinful subjects unfavorably contrasted by the saintly character of the Christians of his domain, and heard that they talked of a King to come and a new Kingdom—both prophesied in the Book —that he sought to exterminate the entire movement by the beheading of thousands. The chief charge against most of them was that they were in possession of the Sacred Book.Dr. Armitage, the great Baptist historian, in speaking of the frightful persecutions that broke out in 303 A. D., says: “Because the Scriptures were regarded as the source of all Christian aggression, the aim of the persecutors was to destroy every copy, and the cry passed up and down the empire, “Burn their Testaments!”When an African ruler demanded that Felix should give up his Bible, he answered that he would prefer to be burned than to lose the Book.In Sicily, when Euplius was seized with the Gospels in his hand, and asked, “Why do you keep the Scriptures forbidden by the Emperor?” he replied, “Because I am a Christian. Life eternal is in them; he that giveth up them loses life.”Baptists, at least, ought to be both familiar with this history and sympathetic with the same, for literally hundreds of their martyrs, centuries later, offered their bodies to be burned rather than surrender the Sacred Book.In the city of Zurich there stands to this day a monument to the honor of Arnold of Brescia. It was erected to that noblest of martyrs.

The statue itself is of bronze, and is four meters (13 ft. 4 inches) in height. Arnold stands on the top of the same preaching, his gigantic figure being that of a Monk in long graceful robe.

On its base there is another representation of him, as he stands before the crowd who have gathered to hear, holding in his hand the Sacred Book, the Bible.The history of Michael Sattler should never be forgotten by the denomination now assembled in this city. He had been a Papist, but through study of the Book, became a Baptist, and insisted upon impressing its precious truths upon the people who gathered to hear him. He was warned, but went on with his work, until, by and by, in 1527, refusing to recant or to be silenced, his tongue was cut out, his flesh was torn with red hot pinchers again and again, and finally his dying frame was flung to the fires and burned to ashes. But he went down to his grave, and through it, to glory, retaining, defending, and proclaiming the Sacred Book.This trail of martyrdom is almost too gruesome to pursue further. Only let it be known that that infamous invention, the rack, that indescribable custom of torture, the gibbet, that unthinkable brutality of burning women alive, that devilish ingenuity of making a coffin so small that the victim must be crowded into it, unable to stretch out, and then buried alive—no one of these, nor yet all of them combined, brought these children of faith, the truest representatives of the true Church of God, to either recant or compromise. Is it any wonder that the Church lives and that the Bible remains at once her Magna Charta and her charge!THE But my theme is, “The Church after Nineteen Hundred Years”! Permit me then, to make a hasty review of these centuries; and to dwell briefly at least upon their high spots.The first three centuries mark the conquest of the Church. From that day when Saul “made havock of the Church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison”, and “they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the Word”, until that other apparently victorious day when Constantine saw the Roman empire capitulate to the Church herself, what a series of conquests! As the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its ninth edition, said, “The history of the world presents no phenomenon so striking as the rise and early progress of Christianity. Originating in a country not remarkable for any political, commercial, or literary influence, emanating from One who occupied a humble sphere in the community amidst which he appeared, and announced in the first instance by men of mean extraction, of no literary culture, and not endowed with any surpassing gifts of intellect, it nevertheless spread so rapidly that in an incredibly short period of time it had been diffused throughout the whole civilized world, and in the fourth century of its existence became the recognized and established religion of the Roman empire. When it is remembered that this result was achieved not only without the aid of any worldly influence, but in the face of the keenest opposition on the part of all the learning, wealth, wit and power of the most enlightened and mightiest nations of the earth, the conclusion is strongly forced upon us that a power beyond that of man was concerned in its success, and that its early and unexampled triumphs afford an incontestable proof of its inherent truth and its Divine origin.” The discerning student of history will not forget the vision of the Son of Man.

It was after He had endured the world’s worst; it was after He had faced death and conquered the grave, that He met His eleven disciples in the mount in Galilee, and standing there with their adoring eyes upon Him, said, “All power is given unto Me in Heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:18-20).Therein is the secret of Church success!

Its Head is none other than the Son of God; its commission is from His lips; and its empowerment was, and is, in His promised presence.A recent writer tells us that high up on the Post Office building in New York City, is this inscription: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor hail, nor gloom of night, stays these couriers from the swift commission of their appointed orders.”This is an intended compliment to the faithfulness and efficiency of the old-time postal service men; but it is a poor compliment as compared with that which might have been paid to these first century couriers for Christ; for with them neither fire, nor sword, nor rack, nor gibbet, nor kings, nor devils, nor hell could stay their feet, nor still their tongues, nor even slow their victories.Gibbon, the historian, says: “While the Roman world was invaded by open violence, or undermined by slow decay, a pure and humble religion quietly insinuated itself into the minds of men; grew up in silence and obscurity; derived new vigor from opposition, and finally erected the triumphal banner of the Cross on the ruins of the capitol.”So much, then, for the first three centuries of Church History.The fourth century effected its corruption. There are triumphs that eventuate in defeat. There are victories that result in reverses. There are conquests that destroy the conquerors!One historian tells us, “In her contest with Rome Christianity succeeded in realizing and giving expression to her claim to universal dominion; but in Rome’s overthrow she inflicted an almost fatal wound on herself, when she was unconsciously induced to take the government of a pagan empire as her model for the organization of a spiritual kingdom.”The attainment of Constantine to the emperor’s throne, followed as it was by his professed conversion to the Christian faith, seemed like a climax of accomplishment for the Church herself. History reveals that it was an anti-climax instead.His spectacular conversion by the vision of a flaming cross in the sky, upon which was written, “En touto vika,”—“by this conquer”—is supposed by many to have been only a parhelion, while the phrase, “en touto vika,” was the part of a dream that followed.His occupancy of the throne itself by the slaughter of all competitors, including his sons and even Fausta, his wife, provided poor evidences of personal Christianity, and, although he stopped the slaughter of Christians and restored to them civil and religious rights, he was actuated by personal and state interests rather than those of the Church itself; while his “middle-of-the-road” policy in the matters of both faith and order was the signal for a descent in spirituality that far exceeded even the Church’s growth in numbers and national potency.For nearly 1200 years, the Church felt the consequences of the Constantine policy, and that period is known to ecclesiastical history as the dark ages. That appellation was not in consequence of the Church’s dethronement from power; it was the direct result of her degradation in character.

The principles imposed by Constantine produced her prostitution.He was not so much an advocate of “comparative religions” as he was of “combined religions”. His coins bore the Name of Christ on the one side and the figure of Apollo on the other.

It was Constantine who conceived “the inclusive policy” and demanded of the Alexandrian bishops that they recognize alike the Arians and the orthodox.Whether he believed in baptismal regeneration may be questioned, but it is certain, from his delaying his own baptism until he knew himself to be on his death-bed, that he believed in baptismal remission.It was Constantine also who ignored the New Testament distinctions between Church and Kingdom and by forgetting that ecclesia and basileia are wholly different words and relate to different Divine institutions, he combined Church with state and claimed that he, rather than a returned Christ, had brought “the Kingdom of God” to the earth.The product of such procedures occupies large place in the pages of national and ecclesiastical history. Not only were the Church and the state inextricably interwoven, but the Church and the world were so far identified as to make it difficult to distinguish one spiritual feature of the former.S. E. Herrick in his volume, “Some Heretics of Yesterday”, writing of Savonarola, the very period that is to produce the reformation, gives us this graphic presentation of the times:“The drama of history presents us with no scenes more fascinating in their splendor or more impressive in their tragedy than those which the fifteenth century saw enacted. Private magnificence reached its zenith and common wretchedness sunk to its nadir. Art achieved its most brilliant triumphs, and religion fell into its dreariest formalisms.

Government, nominally republican, was the plaything of strong-handed and unprincipled adventures, who were rich, or mighty, or cunning enough to control the nerveless popular will. Learning among the clergy meant dabbling in scholasticism; among the higher or wealthier laity, some slight acquaintance with pagan writers, and a love for classic antiquities; among the common people there was little or none.

It is almost enough, in order to describe the moral and social life of the century, to say that it was the age of the Medici at Florence and of the Borgias at Rome; an age of culture wedded to corruption; an age whose external garb was elegance, whose inmost heart was moral rottenness; an age whose only grand enthusiasms were for art and vice; all other enthusiasms were accounted vulgar and had died out. Patriotism and religion, at least, if not dead, were camatose. The one needed a Judas Maccabaeus, the other a John the Baptist.”It is the custom of Moderns to hold to scorn the theological view and the ecclesiastical life of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Let it be forever known, however, that this is the very age when reformation effected increasing recovery for the Church of God; the age that brought Savonarola, the eloquent, to the fore; that gave rise to the bravest and noblest of all ecclesiastical reformers, Martin Luther; that witnessed the lives and listened to the testimonies of Latimer, Cranmer, Melanchthon, Knox, Calvin, Coligny, William Brewster, and Wesley—a succession of men, saints of God, who sought the recovery of the New Testament teaching and exemplified the purity of Christian life and demonstrated the spiritual power of the Church when disentangled from the state and guided by the Holy Ghost of God.It is little wonder that those centuries saw apostles of the faith worthy to be compared with Peter, James, John and Paul, and marked Church progress comparable again to that of the first three centuries of ecclesiastical history, having sent her missionaries to, and established her stations and schools in, every continent and island of the earth, exciting even the expectation of a young Mott that the world might be “evangelized in a single generation”. This period was climaxed by the production of such as John Eliot, Hans Egede, Ziegenbalg, Cary, Boardman, Judson, Duff, Morrison, William Burns, Gilmour, John Williams, Samuel Marsden, Patteson, Allen Gardiner, Moffat, Krapf, Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, Clough, Ashmore, and others too numerous to mention.Is it any wonder that one writing at the close of the nineteenth century, said, “Let those who think Christianity is a spent force ponder the following: when Carey, the first Protestant missionary of the world, went to India, the whole of nominal Christians in the world was about 200,000,000. Now there are about 500,000,000.

When he in the eighteenth century went out from Christendom as a missionary to the dark world of heathendom, the population of the world was about one thousand millions. It is now supposed to be about fifteen hundred millions, which is only another way of saying that while the population of the world has increased during this period fifty percent, Christianity has increased 150 percent, and the ratio shows that the cause of Christ advanced more within the past twenty-five years than it did in the seventy-five preceding.

Our God is marching on!”The nineteenth century -closed with the question of Christ’s disciples once more upon the lips of His followers, “Wilt Thou at this time restore again the Kingdom”? Never since Constantine came to his throne were the prospects of the Church so bright or her conquests so incomparable as in the year 1900.But the twentieth century threatens to repeat the fourth. The most discussed subject of the day is this subject: “Will the Church live?” “Will Christianity be retained?” or is the first dead and the second in the very experience of being cast away?Newspapers, magazines, books and orators are all discussing this subject. In ecclesiastical circles it is a theme of insistent argument, while, in world circles, it is brazenly asserted that the question is settled, and the Church is a corpse and Christianity is a divested garment.These discussions are not wholly without occasion. Never since Pentecost of 1900 years ago has the Church of God faced more or greater enemies than at this moment. The world, the flesh, and the devil were never combined against her more furiously than now.

If there is one agency at Satan’s command which he has not called to the conflict, we can scarcely imagine its character or its name.Atheism no longer wears the veil of shame. She exposes her face with pride and boldly affirms her purpose “to wreck the Church” of God and bury out of sight the debris of the same.Bolshevism, which is a combination of atheism in philosophy and communism in government, enjoys at this moment a fungus growth.

Having conquered in Russia by killing millions of Christian opponents, she proposes to carry her revolution of irreligion to every nation of earth, and her emmissaries are on every continent and every land.Modern education has largely succumbed to the Darwin philosophy which is not only, as Haeckel declared, “anti-Genesis”, but anti-Bible and anti-Christian! Dr. Gilkey of Springfield, Mass., is reported to have said in his recent Brown University address, “Your generation will see a terrific mortality among churches.” A nation wide student conference, one thousand strong, at Evanston, Illinois, said, “We are here to hold the post-mortem of the Church.”Modern inventions have enormously contributed to man’s conquest of earth and sea and air, but yet more to his neglect of the Church and to his moral degradation.Still further, the entire philosophy of Constantine has been reintroduced into the very life of the Church itself, and our greatest single menace is not from without but from within, and threatens the Church of God with a new paganism, with another refusal to distinguish between Trinitarianism and Unitarianism, with the false hope of baptismal remission and consequent unregeneracy, and with the unspeakable affliction of confusing the Church of God and the Kingdom of God, imagining afresh that we can retain the first, after having rejected the historic Christ, and bring in the second without His re-Appearance in glory and power.The confusion that has resulted from all of this has produced cults out of number and divisions past enumeration. It has undermined in a large measure the seat and source of all authority, it has evilly affected the morale of the Church itself, and deluged the world with waves of crime that stagger, and prospects of war that leave it no rest better than a nightmare.Country and village churches are being sold to secular uses. City churches are falling in attendance. Missionary funds are suffering annual decline and denominational combinations are being resorted to, to keep up an appearance of progress, until one writer is justified in saying, “The more elaborate our ecclesiasticism, the finer and costlier our churches, the more sparkling our periodicals, the longer our lists of societies and the more abundant and exquisite their machinery, the smaller our relative growth has become.”What then is the conclusion of the whole matter?

Is the Church defeated, or, as some have recently been asking, Is the Church dead?We answer, “NO” to both questions.The words of Jesus Christ live. They have, today, the same meaning that they had when He uttered them: “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (the Church)”.

The conditions to which we have referred simply involveA In a recent sermon before my own church, I laid out all of those arguments, presenting them with a fair degree of fulness, not with the intention of discouraging, but for the express purpose of making them a basis of sound, and sane and even challenging appeal.The Church of God may be sick from maladministration. We believe she is. She may be disabled by mistaken doses. If we have studied our Bible aright, it is even so.But she will not die: she will live! She will recover! She will conquer!John’s appeal to the seven Churches of Asia shows a prophetic decline.

The Laodicean age, or the last, was the most corrupt. Yet even in that there was enough left to excite the Saviour’s promise of “riches” and “clothing” and “ointment”.If He is Head over all things to the Church, the Body cannot die, while the Head lives.The true Church, then, will continue to function, it is in no danger of death.

It can never be! The immortality of Christ insures the immortality of “His Body, the Church”.There are those who both imagine and dare to say, that science will end the Christian superstition and finally put the Church herself out of commission.Such speakers and writers have studied history all too poorly. What science, pray? The shallow surmisings of the school teachers of this generation are not likely to disprove the Christian evidences that mastered a Newton, a Sir John Herschel, a Kepler, a Davy, a Faraday, a Boyle, a Harvey, a Simpson, a Beale, or a Duke of Argyle, a David Brewster, a Dana, a Hitchcock, a Miller, a Guyot, a Pasteur, a Kelvin and a Dawson.Even the Soviet leaders of Russia and their propagandists in China and Europe and America are not likely to put out of commission the Book that conquered the intellect of a Cromwell, a Blackstone, a Selden, a Sir William Jones, a William Pitt, a Wilburforce, a Wright, an Earl Cairns, a chief justice Marshall, a Webster, and an Abraham Lincoln.The literati of the present day who dip their putrid pens in ink, blackened by their own life’s experience, are not likely to discredit even the ministry that was revered by a Shakespeare, a Milton, an Addison, a Johnson, a Coleridge, a Sir Walter Scott, and that has been honored in office by a Tauler, a Wyclif, a Huss, a Savonarola, a Luther, a Latimer, a Cranmer, a Melanchthon, a Knox, a Coligny, a William Brewster, a Wesley, a Spurgeon, and a Moody, not to mention thousands of others worthy to stand at their side and share their justifiable honors.As one notable writer has truthfully said, “Science had no foundation upon which to raise herself until Christianity supplied the same.” Paganism had utterly failed to furnish such. The men, therefore, who are dealing in mere philosophies may discover again, as Greek philosophers had to do, that their theories will either be wholly disproven or essentially reformed by Christian theology; while those theories that “are falsely called Science”, will fail every one and be forgotten by the final victors of faith.Doubtless there are many living opponents of the Christian faith and of the Church of God who, like Haeckel, will on their death beds want the Bible, and like Huxley when they near the end request the reading of 1 Corinthians 15, and like Darwin, according to Lady Hope, grieve their philosophical meanderings.The Church of God like its Sacred Book will live and thrive on the very ground that has provided a cemetery for these uncertified claims and these superficial philosophies. Hawthorne was not mistaken when he declared that the little church on main street was the one building that gave promise of permanence to civilization.For the Church will not only live but as her Master spake the words of mercy to the dying thief who hung at His side, so she, His Body, will minister at the graves of her present opponents.“Crowns and thrones may perish Kingdoms rise and wane, But the Church of Jesus, Constant will remain, Gates of hell can never, ‘Gainst that Church prevail, We have Christ’s own promise, And that cannot fail.” God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved!Her witness will characterize the close of the age. It was no less an authority than Jesus, “Head over all things to the Church”, who said, “This Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations: and then shall the end come” (Matthew 24:14).The darkness may deepen: the sky may be filled with still other wandering stars; the moon may hang there like a clot of blood and the sun refuse to give its light, but even then the true Church will have no occasion of discouragement but rather a reason to lift up her head and know that the day of her redemption draweth nigh.The final conquest of the Church will be complete in the Kingdom. The King will come; His throne will be established in the earth; the scepter of His power shall sway from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth. We hold that Blessed Hope, the Glorious Appearing of our great God and Saviour—Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from all iniquity and purify us unto Himself a peculiar people.Without such a Hope present conditions would oppress; apostasy would discourage; the prodigious growth of iniquity and crime would cast a shadow on every soul. The skeptical philosophy that abounds would suffice to produce pessimism.But with that Hope the effect is exactly the opposite, for did not Christ Himself say,“There shall he signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; “Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall he shaken. “And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. “And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:25-28). It was when Paul had finished that most eloquent presentation of this Blessed Hope, and its attendant truths of the Resurrection and Rapture, that he wound up with these adequately inspiring words; “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58).