Why I Preach the Second Coming

by Isaac Massey Haldeman

A little less than five years ago men everywhere were talking of peace and safety.

Christianity and civilization were walking hand in hand.

Christianity or that which professed to be Christianity had accepted all the claimed benefits of civilization.

Rapid transit, the telephone, all the triumphs of applied science were announced as the by-products of the Gospel. Even though the churches were becoming more or less empty and the people were turning away to other centers of instruction or enlightenment or consolation or hope, preachers were everywhere and with great insistence announcing that the world was growing better every day and that we were rapidly approaching the purple and the gold of millennial times. The hour was not far distant when the lion and the lamb should lie down together. There was much talk about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. People were coming together and having a better and more disinterested estimate of each other. Religion was ceasing to be dogmatic and precise and becoming more and more a profession that was free from restraint.

Christian ministers in the pulpit and supposedly wise men in the counsels of the nations with optimistic utterance announced that the days of barbarism had passed away, the brutality of war was at an end. Men and nations would no longer adjourn their differences to the field of battle. A magnificent palace of peace had been erected in that country that had for centuries been the bloody ground where Europe settled its political issues. In this splendid home of arbitration the nations were to meet as friends and brothers and calmly arrange and solve all matters that had hitherto kept them menacingly apart.

War had become so abhorrent to what was called the Christian sense of the nations that mothers were exhorted to banish from the nurseries anything that might suggest the thought of war, such as trumpets, drums or toy guns. So completely had the peace idea pervaded the mind of the people, the idea that peace had come to stay and nothing must be tolerated that would even hint at war, that a soldier or a sailor wearing the uniform of his country was no longer acceptable in a public place, were it a restaurant, a music hall or even a church.

Men who were opposed to spending a dollar to make a nation ready for the possibility of war were hailed as the advanced thinkers and the men worthy of the suffrage of the people; while those who contended human nature had not been changed, that a nation was simply the individual grown large and the jealousies, the covetousness and ambitions of governments would always make it possible for the strong to prey upon the weak and for the unprincipled under the guise of national necessity to attack their unprepared neighbours and therefore just as much as a city rests in confidence with the presence within it of a well-equipped police force, equally so the comfort and security of peace could be best maintained by a nation governed by right principles whose army and navy were ready to resist successfully any unjust assault upon its honour or integrity, were treated with pity, if not scorn, as still under the spell of benighted and barbaric days.

“Peace and safety!” these were the pleasant words that lulled a pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied rest and the mirage of millennial days already arrived.

Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of a clear sky, or the overflow in raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous, ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among those people at one time constituting the four kingdoms to whom God had committed the rulership of the world; that region occupied by Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome and whose administration of world affairs is called “the times of the Gentiles.”

To-night ten millions of the world’s flower of manhood lie rotting in their graves. Six millions of women and children have been starved to death. Women have been unspeakably ruined, children mutilated and flung as helpless debris upon the charity of strangers, suffering their orphaned estate and not knowing why.