“Only a year or two ago the world was electrified by hearing of the formation of that wonderful Zionist movement. How it has spread and grown! And how, ever since, the increasing thousands have been flocking back to Palestine! There are now nearly three times the number of Jews in and around Jerusalem, that there were after the return from the Babylonish captivity. Agricultural settlements are extending all over the land. Vineyards and olive-grounds are springing up everywhere.
“Now note a remarkable fulfillment of prophecy. Turn to Isaiah xvii. 10, 11: ‘Therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips. In the day thou shalt make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish; but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.’
“In the early months of eighteen-ninety-four the Jews ordered two million vine-slips from America, which they planted in Palestine. There is the fulfillment of the first part of that prophecy, and if we are justified in believing, as we think we are, that the return of the Lord is imminent, then, as the tribulation will doubtless immediately follow that return, and of the taking out of the Church from the world, then the great gathering in of the harvest of those vines will be in ‘the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.’
“Now, let me read to you, friends, an extract from the testimony of an expert, long resident in Palestine:
“‘There is not the shadow of a doubt,’ he writes, ‘as to the entire changing of the climate of the land here (Palestine). The former and latter rains are becoming the regular order of the seasons, and this is doubtless due (physically, I mean) to the fact that the new colonists are planting trees everywhere where they settle. The land, for thousands of years, has been denuded of trees, so that there was nothing to attract the clouds, etc.
“‘Comparing the rainfall for the last five years, I find that there has been about as much rain in April as in March; whereas, comparing five earlier years, from 1880-85, I find that the rainfall in April was considerably less than in March, and if we go back farther still, we find that rain in April was almost unknown.
“‘Thus God is preparing the land for the people. The people, too, are being prepared for the land. The day is fast approaching when ‘the Lord will arise and have mercy upon Zion.’
“I need hardly, I think, tell you what even the secular press has been giving some most striking articles about quite recently,—namely, the quiet preparation on the part of the Jews of everything for the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem.
“I see, by the lighting up of your faces, that you are familiar with the fact that gates, pillars, marbles, ornaments, and all else requisite for the immediate building of the new temple are practically complete, and only await the evacuation of the hideous Mohamedan, with all his abominations, from Jerusalem, to be hurried to the site of the old temple, and to be reared, a new temple to Jehovah, by the Jew. Any day, Turkey—‘the sick man of the East’—in desperate straits for money, may sell Palestine to the Jews.
“The Jews are to return to their land in unbelief of Christ being the Messiah. They will build their temple, reorganize the old elaborate services, the lamb will be slain again ‘between the two evenings,’ and—but all else of this time belongs to another address. What we have to see this afternoon is that the fig-tree—the Jewish nation—is budding, and to hear Jesus Christ saying to us, ‘When ye see all these things, know that He is near, even at the doors.’