“If our legislators, sitting in council at St. Stephens, realized that before the present Parliamentary session could end in the ordinary way, that Christ might come, what a speedy end they would seek to put to every national iniquity.
“The hideous drink traffic would be swept, root and branch, from our land. And, in sweeping that curse away, the awful problem of the unemployed, the homeless, the starving, all that inures to our national poverty would be swept away.
“The shameful opium traffic with China; the national Greed for territory; the Traffic in White Slaves; and every other national iniquity would be abolished.
“Christian churches, (so-called) would become worthy of the name Christian. All those bits of devilish device used to extract, and extort money from the pockets of the people would end, as by magic. Theatricals would be left to the theatres; nigger entertainments would be left to the music-halls; the church would leave all these things to their master—the Devil.
“In social life, people would pay their debts; the wild, mad, sinful extravagance that marks the life of to-day, would cease. Christians would love one another. Every Evangelical denomination would be inter-denominational in the truest sense, and be one wholly in their Crucified, Risen, coming Lord. A love for the poor fallen world, such as has never been since our Lord spent Himself in service, would be the order of the day, and not the vision of a few. Every missionary society would have more men and women and money than they actually needed.
“But, even as I pen this millennium-like picture, I know, from the Word of God, that it cannot be before Christ comes. But I seek to arouse every Christian to God’s call to them on this matter. You, who profess to be Christ’s, dare not refuse this truth, save at the peril of losing the Crown of Life.
“The vast bulk of the churches, I know, preach, that the world will continually improve until the earth shall be fit for Christ to come and reign. But I defy any cleric or layman to show me a single word of scripture that gives the faintest colour to that belief, or statement—unless the person wrests the passage so advanced from its distinctly marked dispensational setting.
“Things (spiritual) are growing worse and worse. There is a wholesale down-gradeism, too awful to contemplate. ‘Priest and people have erred alike!’ I take up the official organ of a section of the church that has ever been regarded as the most out-an-out, in all that pertains to Evangelical truth, and I find its great head saying ‘The Bible is not the sole spiritual guide for the christian, for, practically, the Bible is a dead book!’
“The chief leader-writer of that same paper—himself usually regarded as the soundest of Believers, the most trenchant of all Evangelical preachers, writes in one of a series of articles, ‘That the so-called Finished work of Christ, is a doctrine not to be found in scripture,’ and glories in the fact that ‘we never have, and, I trust, we never shall, preach this doctrine.’
“All this but proves the truth of the New Testament prophecies, ‘Perilous times shall come,’ ‘Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.’ If only we could all be induced to read the signs of the times in the light of scripture! we should then realize that we were in the thickest darkness of the world’s blackest night, the darkness immediately preceding the dawn, and we should be looking for ‘the Morning Star.’”