What a glorious Promise! What a blessing it will be to all the hutnan race!
That will be the “Golden Age,” of which the poets have sung, the “good time
coming,” that Socialists and others have been longing for and talking about.
That will be the time which the Woman’s Christian temperance Union has
been trying to bring about by its efforts to destroy the liquor traffic, and which
the female suffragists and refonners of various kinds hope to bring about in
their way. But though all these human efforts may accomplish something, yet
on the whole all these plans will fail, and for a time anarchy will prevail. And
what then?
“God is His owm interpreter,
And He will make it plain “
God knew the end fiam the beginning, and all along He has been working out
His original Purpose, meantime permitting various human panaceas to be tried,
to let man see that his own efforts to bring about righteousness cannot succeed.
Ah! Human foresight cannot discern what will be the next step. But God
knows the future of His Plan as well as the past, and in His Word He offers
wisdom from above to all His humble followers. And when men have seen all
their plans and experiments end in failure, then they will be willing to look to
God, and they will say, “Come, let us go up to the Mountain [Kingdom] of the
Lord; He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths.”
And so it is written:
“The desire of all nations shall come.” But the desire of all
nations is not yet: first must come the failure of iheir own panaceas. THEN
they will be ready to accept the cure which the Lord has provided. “Ah!” some
one may say, “that will be a blessed time for the fottunate ones who are living
then, but what about the unfortunate ones who have died?” There are fifteen
hundred millions of people living today, the majority of whom never heard the
name of Jesus; the great mass of the dead never heard of Jesus; they have been
dying in ignorance and fear, without God and without hope. A rough estimate
is that not less than twenty billions of people have lived on the earth, and every
one knows that among them have been very few saints. During the First Dispensation how many righteous people were there? At the time of the Flood
there were only eight, Noah and his family.
Of the rest it is said, “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the
earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
continually.” During the Patriarchal Age.there were only a few righteous persons, only a few with whotn God held communion; such as Noah, Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob. During the Jewish Age there were not many; for while God
called the entire Jewish nation, there were only a few of them, the Prophets
and a few others, such as are mentioned in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews,
who were approved of God; and notwithstanding all the instructions of their
Law and the special messages of the Prophets and the severe discipline
through which they as a nation were caused to pass in punishment for their