in the diverse revelations which God made of himself to man; and which were, if we may use the term without seeming to derogate from their unspeakable importance and their divine origin, of a more desultory nature than those which are, and shall be, accorded to God’s spouse, the infallible church. What is this but to say again what we are endeavoring to express in every page, namely, that “He who sitteth on the white horse went forth conquering, that he might conquer”;[81] and that God’s work ever has been, is now, and ever will be a progressive work. “Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O Thou most mighty. With thy comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously and reign.”[82] When the whole of Scripture is teeming with promises of future more glorious eras of which we now only see the germ, developed here and there in some favored soul, in some special corner of God’s vast vineyard, the church (for the saints have always been men of the future, in advance of their own time), is it not a marvel to hear desponding men talking as though there were nothing better to be hoped for than the end of the world, coming, as they seem to expect it, like a terrific frost which shall nip in the bud all the, as yet, unfulfilled promises, and drown the wicked in a deluge of flame! And this we expect and almost desire, hoping we ourselves may be saved, but without a second thought for God’s beautiful earth, which he has blessed a thousand fold by his own divine footprints on its surface; and where he now makes his tabernacle in ten thousand churches, waiting, nay watching, with that ineffable patience of his, whose cycles of longanimity we are incapable of appreciating!
But it is cruel to speak harshly of a few words of discouragement falling from the lips of those who are weary with vigils waiting for new daylight. Only let us learn that the Sun of Righteousness to our perceptions, as it were, sets and rises again. We are like children who think when the glorious golden disc has sunk beneath the horizon that it is utterly gone and is perhaps extinct, while on the contrary the children of another hemisphere are playing in the warmth of its beams; so we see the dark clouds of evil hiding from us the light of grace, first in one spot, then in another, and we grow downcast and impatient. We forget that “not one jot or one tittle shall pass of the law till all be fulfilled”;[83] and that our Lord tells us he “did not come to destroy either the law or the prophets, but to fulfil them.” Bearing this in mind, let our readers take up the Psalms and the Prophets, and study, with a deliberate faith in the inspired words, the promises which concern the future of the world under the tent of the church, the place of which tent shall be enlarged that she may “pass on to the right hand and to the left; and inhabit the [now] desolate cities.”[84]
It is a want of hope—and let us ever remember that hope is a virtue, and not a mere quality or faculty of the mind—which leads us to read the stupendously sublime promises of God to the whole earth in the future of the church, as so much beautiful imagery of which a limited application manifests itself, from time to time, in the partial conversion of some thousands here and there over the vast face of the semi-civilized world, while millions
upon millions remain heathens, Hindoos, Jews, and Mussulmans. We read these glorious utterances of the Scriptures with the restrained admiration of one who, while admiring a poem, makes allowances for the “fine frenzy” of the poet. We take it cum grano salis, and forget that it is the trumpet voice of absolute truth; and that whether or no it point to a millennium upon earth—a question left open by the church, and so little discussed as yet by her modern theologians that we will not dwell upon it—it must mean all it says; and, after the fashion of God’s gifts, more than we can conceive. This, then, is what the patience and longanimity of God is leading us to. These glories, which have exhausted the tenderest as well as the most powerful utterance of language to depict, are the future of the church, when the spouse of Christ shall be the mistress of the world. St. Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews, quoting the eighth Psalm on the high destinies of man, says, “Thou hast subjected all things under his feet,” and adds, “but we see not as yet all things subject to him.” Nevertheless the delay gave no place for doubt that the promise should have an ultimate and complete fulfilment; while he unfolds to us the wherefore of these sublime predictions, the only adequate reason why the human race should be crowned with glory and honor—the one, sole emphatic cause, namely, that all creation is in and for the Incarnation; that the Incarnation is the basement, and the sublime architrave and final coping-stone of the whole edifice; that the creation is for him as entirely as it is by him, and that man is the younger brother of his Redeemer, and shares in his inheritance.
We have already spoken of the indirect and adaptive government of God; of “the government which he condescends to administer in his world through the moral and physical activity with which he has endowed mankind.” We have shown that the representative law of creation is “increase and multiply.” We now come to the fact that since the fall the corollary of that law is labor and toil. The earth from henceforward brought forth thorns and thistles; in other words, on all sides obstacles and difficulties met the advancing steps of the discrowned lord of creation. Speaking according to the eternal decrees of God, and not according to their manifestation through time, we should say that the younger and fallen sons of God had to reconquer the world they were given to reign over, as the elder Son of God, he who is from all eternity, has, in consequence of the same fall, to reconquer the reign of grace in the souls of men, step by step, vanquishing the thorns and thistles with which our unbelief and iniquity tear and rend his bleeding feet! There is God’s work going on in the material world, and there is God’s work going on in the spiritual world. And what we want to do is to persuade our readers not so constantly to put the two in opposition, as though, while the progress of grace is exclusively God’s work, material progress were quite as exclusively man’s work—to say nothing of those who hold it to be the devil’s work.
When the three Persons of the ever blessed Trinity said, “Let us make man,” it was with the expressed intention that he should have dominion over the whole earth—“universæ terræ.” That constitution of man as the lord of creation was not annulled when man fell. It
is true that it became a dominion he had to contest with the beasts of the forest, who were originally to have been his willing slaves; with the thorns and thistles that ever since bar his passage; and with the convulsions of nature, to the secret harmonies of which he had lost the key; while the angelic guardians of the cosmos could not hold intercourse with him in his degraded state, who, although they be “ministering spirits,” are so in secret only, until the time shall come for their promised mission upon earth. Nevertheless man was a monarch still, though a fallen monarch. Or rather we should say that, as redeemed man, he is God’s viceroy; and in that character is reconquering the material world, that as the ages roll on the church, the spouse of Jesus, may “lengthen her cords and strengthen her stakes.”[85]
Materialism is no necessary consequence of material progress. Scientific discovery, whether as regards the solar system, the dynamic forces, chemical affinities, or the properties of the world’s flora, the habits of its fauna and the uses to which all these may be put, is—next to the development of theological truth, of which in a certain sense, as will one day be proved, it is the correlative—the highest gift of God. It is simply man’s fulfilment of his second and inferior mission upon earth. His first mission, or rather his vocation, is to save his soul from sin, and to live in union with his God. His second is to fill the one spot, be it wide or narrow, which God has assigned him in the creation with all the faculties of his mind and intellect. It may be a very small, a scarcely discernible spot that he occupies; but in his degree
he too has to conquer his territorial inch and govern in the creation, though he do so but as a shepherd or a ploughman. We are conscious as we write this of all that may be said in detriment of material progress, of the luxury it leads to, of the rapid propagation of false opinions, evil literature, and irreligious thought; or of the increased facilities for the wholesale slaughter of mankind in modern warfare. No wonder the pure-minded shrink in dismay from much that material progress appears to be producing in the world, and that timid souls are led to believe that such progress not only is not God’s work, but (if we may make this distinction) is also not his intention. We would entreat all such to take courage from a few considerations which will lay before them their error in principle, and also give them a wider view of God’s merciful designs in his own creation.
First, it may be assumed that, as the Almighty has not abdicated his providential government of the world in favor of the powers of darkness, therefore no great and wide-spread movement takes place amongst the children of men without its having an ultimate end for good. We do not believe that evil is to win the day. We utterly refuse to give credit to those who look upon the Lord of Hosts as vanquished in the end, and upon the personal Lucifer, and the principle of evil which he embodies and represents, as going off the field with a crowd of prisoners who will far outnumber the armies of the Lord. This desponding about the triumphs of grace is the residuum of Protestantism. It is the melancholy of sectarianism. It is not in accordance with the teaching of the church; she who is forever lifting