Whenever and wherever man has been placed in a position of responsibility he has failed. ‘Thus we find him in the garden of Eden, radiant with beauty, surrounded by everything that could make him perfectly happy, and subjected to a simple test of obedience. But he believed the devil’s he, rather than God’s truth, and was sent forth to till a sin-cursed earth in the sweat of his face, and to moulder back to dust. ‘Through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.” Rom. v:12. Never again can he be tried under circumstances so favorable; and the first trial, the dispensation of Innocence, ended in utter disaster and ruin.

This was followed by the dispensation of Conscience. here was no pronounced or written law, but he was left to his own sense of right and wrong to govern and judge his conduct. The result of the experiment is stated in the words, “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.” Gen. vi:9. “Every,” “only,” “evil,” ‘continually ” tell the sad story of deep-seated depravity and wide-spread departure from their Creator. There must have been millions of people on the earth at the time the wrath of God was let loose in a flood to destroy the race; but out of all this vast multitude there was but one righteous man, who, with his household, was saved. So the second trial ended in utter disaster and ruin.

Then came the dispensation of the Family. Scarcely had the waters of the deluge subsided, before man in his defiance of God determined to build a tower that might reach unto heaven. Although confounded in his folly, he soon forgot the destruction of the world and the overthrow of Babel, and relapsed into the former iniquity, until universal idolatry covered the earth. Terah, the father of Abraham, was an idolater when his son was called out from his country and kindred, to train his household in the knowledge of the true God. The most intimate and precious relations were established between Jehovah and one who it three times called His friend, but we find the posterity of this friend in the lime kilns of Egypt, groaning in the degradation of their slavery, and steeped in ignorance and unbelief. So the third trial ended in utter disaster and ruin.

Next we have the dispensation of the Law, when an entire nation was separated. from all other nations, and told how to dress, and what to eat, and when to observe their religious rites, and where to worship, the utmost pains being taken to guard them from the defilement of contact with the world. Yet their national annals, written by their own historians and prophets, contain an almost unbroken record of deliberate disobedience, of persistent and willful disregard of known commands, and of determined rebellion against divine authority, until they were cast out of the land. When Christ came, an aged Simeon and Anna waited for the consolation of Israel, but with hardly an exception the people had wholly departed from God. So the fourth trial ended in utter disaster and ruin. The dispensation of our Lord’s personal ministry succeeded. The result of the new experiment may be described in the words, ‘‘ He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.” Jno. i:9, 10. He performed the most mighty and the most convincing miracles almost without number; He spake as never man did to thousands, and tens of thousands, but He won only a few followers, principally among the poor and illiterate and debased; and when He was nailed to the cross a mocking inscription was placed above His head in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the language of religion, the language of culture, and the language of power.

All that Jew, Greek and Roman did for God’s dear Son was to give Him a manger for a cradle, an instrument of torture on which to die, and a borrowed tomb to hold His mangled body. ‘“He is despised and rejected of men.” So the fifth trial ended in utter disaster and ruin.

This brings us to the dispensation of the Spirit, so called because the Holy Spirit has come to bear witness. to Christ’s ascension, to reprove the world, to help believers as their abiding Comforter, to baptize all true saints into one body, of which our exalted Lord is the head. but so far as salvation is concerned, it is no more the dispensation of the Spirit than any former age, for every child of man who has been redeemed since Adam’s day, has been saved by the Spirit through faith. Human nature and human need are precisely the same they have been from the fall of our first parents to this present time. It is clearly, therefore, not a question is. the competency of the Spirit to save all men, nor of the adaptation of the Gospel to all men, but of the divine purpose as revealed in the inspired Scriptures.

If any one can show a line in these Scriptures from the first of Genesis to the last of Revelation, which promises the conversion of the world by the agencies now employed, it becometh pre-millenialists to retire at once into silence and into seclusion from the field of controversy. Many a prominent preacher and professor boldly asserts that this dispensation of the Spirit has been appointed to bring the whole world to Christ. He is challenged to make good the assertion by the living word of God. ‘Let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace.” Even he will admit that if such is the purpose of God, it has been terribly defeated for more than eighteen hundred and fifty years; if such was the design of the dispensation, it has miserably failed.

In the first place, although Christianity for the first three hundred years of our era rolled like a wave of blessing across the known and habitable globe, scarcely a trace of it is left where it was originally victorious. Churches by hundreds and thousands throughout Southern Europe, Northern Africa and Western Asia, were planted by the hands of the Apostles or their immediate successors, and enriched with the blood of martyrs; but they have entirely disappeared from the face of the earth. The ground they occupied is as barren as heathenism. Remember that this occurred in the dispensation of the Spirit, as did the utter corruption of the church, culminating under Constantine, and spreading over Christendom like a black cloud, that for more than a thousand years was broken here and there by only a single ray of light.

In the second place, the Reformation was speedily followed by rationalism, and the country that gave birth to the former is now the home of the latter. Within an incredibly short period after Luther’s departure Jesus could have said to the most of Protestantism, as He said to the church at Sardis, “I know thy works, that thou hast a name, that thou livest, and art dead.” It took three hundred years to arouse the cold, formal, lifeless mass to any sense of obligation to carry the gospel to the perishing millions of our race, and although the century now closing has been signalized by an enormous expenditure of money and of the lives of men on the foreign field, and although, blessed be God, about 8,000,000 have professed the Christian faith, there are 200,000,000 more to be converted than at the beginning of the century. The church in heathen lands does not begin to keep pace with the natural increase by birth of the Pagan and Mohammedan population. The Rev. James Johnston, a devoted English missionary, tells us that “the actual increase of the population is much more than the 200,000,000;” and “we rejoice in the work accomplished by modern Christian missions, while we mourn over the sad fact, that the increase of the heathen is numerically more than seventy times greater than that of the converts during the century of missions.” Nay, worse still; ‘the great heathen and Mohammedan systems of religion are not only increasing their adherents by the ordinary birth-rate, but are yearly making far more converts than our Christian missions.

In the third place the outlook at home is not much more encouraging. The bright-eyed optimists boast that there are 12,000,000 of Protestant church members. Granted; but there are 50,000,000 more souls to be converted than when the Constitution of the United States was adopted. Their figures perplex a plain man who is not good in mathematics, when he knows upon undoubted authority that not one in ten, at least of our city people, can be induced to listen to the preaching of the gospel. In New York City, for example, with its 1,500,000 inhabitants, but 85,000 were found on a fair day in its various places of worship; and if every seat in every church, chapel, hall and other preaching station was occupied every Sunday, there would still be 1,250,000 persons who could not hear the gospel if they so desired. An item which has just appeared in a sunny New York religious paper tells the story. It is as follows: ‘Churches and population below Fourteenth street: 1850, 86 churches, 400,000 population; 1890, 24 churches, 600,000 population.” London with a population of 6,000,000, the most thoroughly evangelized city of the world, with the ablest preachers and the largest charities, furnishes church accommodations for only 1,500,000; and very few of its houses of worship are half filled. Let any one read Gen. Booth’s “In Darkest England,” and see what is the dreading condition of things in the heart of Christendom. A similar proportion of the neglected and of non-church goers is found in all of our principal cities.

In the fourth place, our leading professors in college and theological seminary, at least the professors who have the ear of the public and are most admired and applauded, seem to be determined to destroy the foundation of faith in the authority and. certainty of God’s word. A powerfully written article which recently appeared in a Chicago secular newspaper, well presents the case:

The sum of all is that the Bible is “a fallible book,” consisting of “idyls, myths, poems, fiction, dreams, predictions, histories, novels, morals and theology,” full of “human inventions and imperfections,” with traces of the divine in it, but, of itself, ‘“no absolute criterion of faith, morals or worship.”. . . .The impertinent assault of Dr. Schaff, Professor Briggs’ colleague, upon the Westminster Confession, sent a shock through all the churches two years ago. . . .And, more recently, the so-called “American Institute of Sacred Literature,” with Professors Briggs and Harper in the lead, teaching that the authority of Jesus Christ and His apostles amounts to nothing in questions of “higher criticism,” since they did not profess to be critics, and had another mission and teaching this in Chicago and Boston under the auspices of the Young Men’s Christian Association—has given intensity to the situation. . . .This is not a Presbyterian, or a Baptist, or a Congregational fight. It is an open apostasy in the bosom of professing Christendom. Not one solitary Assembly or Association or Conference has taken action on the subject. The poison is deep in the veins of the denominations. An eminent Professor in Berlin, another in Neuchatel, another in Vienna, and another in Dorpat have recently written that “nothing now can stay the tide of defection from the faith which is rising in the bosom of Christendom,” and “the church can only expect the divine judgments her sins have provoked.” “A higher critic, enthroned above all earthly critics, will avenge the wrongs done to His own Word and to Himself.”

The sudden outburst of infidelity among able, and learned, and eloquent and influential Professors, who are connected with schools for the training of young men, soon to become pastors, is one of the most significant signs of the times. Besides Professor Briggs and Professor Harper with their destructive ‘ Higher Criticism,” borrowed of course from the Germans, we have Professor Schurman in the Congregational church, Professor Allen in the Episcopal, Professor Workman in the Methodist, publishing statements about the Bible that might make Mr. Ingersoll blush. On the other side of the Atlantic we have Professor Dods, Professor Drummond, Professor Smyth, Professor Davidson assailing the inspiration of God’s word, denying the fall of man, the atonement of Christ, and every essential truth. Professor Momerie of the theological department in King’s College is just out in a book in which he tells us that the inspiration of the Scripture does not differ in quality from that of Shakespeare or Newton.

Let the following suffice to show his teachings that are gladly accepted by many theological Professors of our day:

Between the covers of this little volume (the Bible) we find opinions as diverse and contradictory as have ever existed in the world. And in particular we can trace it in the development of the idea of God from barbarism up to Hegel. . . . The modern priest talks about miracles—Gadarene pigs, and what not—as he might have done at a-time when natural laws had never been heard of, when every one believed, not in the uniformity, but in the irregularity of Nature. . . .He speaks about inspiration and revelation, as if he did not know that much of the teaching of the Bible had been equaled, and even surpassed, in other sacred literatures, and that some of the sayings of Christ Himself—including even the golden rule—had been anticipated by “pagans” hundreds of years before the Christian era. . . .There is a practically infinite difference between the God of the patriarchs, who is always repenting, and the God of-the apostles,..,It is strange that persons who have read the 20th chapter of Matthew should still believe, in the doctrine of Justification by Faith.

The Rev. Minot J. Savage D. D., a Unitarian preacher of Boston, no doubt tells the truth in a recently published discourse, when he says, “There are any number of places in America where there would be Unitarian churches within three months, were it not for the fact that the nominally orthodox ministers of those places have taken the wind completely out of the Unitarian sails. The people say, ‘What is the use of a Unitarian Church? Our minister is as broad as your’s; he no longer preaches an infallible Bible, or hell, or the Trinity.’” He is no doubt truthful also in the statement that a prominent minister, orthodox in name, declared to him he did not know one preacher in his large circle of acquaintance who now believes these doctrines. Can any one fail to see that there has been a departure from the Bible, as wide as infidelity, by numbers who give instruction from the pulpit!

In the fifth place, the pew is in a still more deplorable condition, if this were possible. The atmosphere is laden with the malaria of skepticism, as it is said to be charged with the microbes of deadly disease, and the members of the church inhale it, like others. The germs of unbelief cling to nearly all of our current literature, being found not only in the works of scientists, who are almost to man asseverating agnostics or avowed atheists, but also in magazines, newspapers, good-for nothing novels, and even in volumes o popular sermons. The British Weekly, which is any thing but a pessimistic periodical, declares it to be ‘a fact that the vast majority of the younger men, who are providing the best journalism of the day, are unbelievers. They do not even accept the idea of a GOD.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that professing christians who read much are carried away from the truth. It is one of the many evidences of the supernatural: origin of the Scriptures that they come into sharp conflict with human nature, and if human nature is given a chance, even the human nature of a professing Christian, it will take sides every time against God and His word. This is the secret of the excessive popularity of such religious writers as Professor Drummond. “He adapts Christianity to its present environment,” as one of his admirers has said, and throws down the reins upon the neck of man’s natural desires and self-sufficiency. The educational process of substituting human opinion for the authority of the inspired writings has gone to such extent, that a vast majority of those who have confessed the name of Christ are almost as ignorant of the Bible, as 1f no such book had been written. They prefer to travel on His day for business or pleasure, or if they stay at home, their minds are stuffed with the crime and gossip, the scandal and politics of the Sunday newspaper before they observe the empty form of public worship. The most startling thing about it is the utter deadness of conscience to any claim of God. Numbers of them are living in open and notorious sin, and yet their names are enrolled on the church registers, and they come to the Lord’s table under the fatal delusion that they are Christians. Scarcely a day passes without the mention in the newspapers of the names even of ministers of the gospel in connection with licentiousness; and so numerous are defaulters and thieves who are Sunday School teachers and church officers, they have ceased to excite surprise

Even among the others who maintain a decent outward deportment, how few manifest any real spiritual life! What a mere handful of any considerable congregation in the land can be found in the prayer-meeting, or Sunday-school, or kneeling in family worship, or speaking a word for Christ, so far as can be ascertained! The most of those who appear before the world as the representatives of the Lord Jesus, attend the theatre, or send their children to the dancing school, or whirl in the lustful waltz, or carry on gambling in their own houses under the name of progressive euchre, or they are tricky in trade, or covetous and stingy, or mean and untruthful, ungodly in their amusements, conversation, fashions, habits, maxims, principles, purposes, and reading, no one being able to discover the faintest line of separation between them and the world. Dear Dr. Bonor truly said, “I look for the church, and find it in the world; I look for the world, and find it in the church.” A few years ago a somewhat notorious Catholico-Episcopal or Episcopo-Catholic clergyman of New York city caused quite a hubbub by declaring that Protestantism is a failure. But if judged by the standard of doctrine and duty revealed in the New Testament, the man was right. Or, if it is expected to convert the world, he was right. In this respect both Protestantism and Popery are wretched failures. The world has converted them.

In the sixth place, society is leprous all over. Upon this subject it is enough perhaps, to quote Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, one of the purest and most popular of our writers:

A prominent literary man, himself used to the world and the ways thereof, urged earnestly upon the author the publication of this paper, saying, “In my humble opinion, the ideal of propriety held by what is called society, has absolutely no relation to the moral sense. To take a point; when I see the ease, nay, the eagerness with which our young girls attend and seem to prefer those plays where the ballet is enough to make any gentleman uncomfortable, I am confused. What does it mean?”. . . . Our stage exhibits moral monstrosity to the edge of abomination, . . . . while the fathers of our girls pay two dollars and a half a seat for the privilege of exposing their daughters to sights which ought to be suppressed under the law prohibiting the exhibition of obscene pictures.

Of course her noble indignation will be sneered at as prudery, as her denunciations of the dance will be; and the young girls will continue to swarm to the obscene exhibitions of the theatre, and to be clasped in the embrace of men.

Any fashion which gives to a roue the right to clasp a pure woman in his arms, and hold her for the length of an intoxicating piece of music, is below moral defense. I firmly believe that the time will come when our present license in this respect will be regarded as we now regard the practices attending the worship of Aphrodite. It might be said that nautch dance [a dance performed by prostitutes] is modesty beside our waltz. . . . One need not be a fanatic in the temperance movement to discern one cause for the decrease of modesty in the increase of drinking habits among a certain class of our ladies. ‘ Certainly,” testifies the first young man I happen to ask, himself a person of so-called good morals; “certainly I have often danced with young ladies who were intoxicated. It is not an uncommon thing to meet them ‘too far gone’ to converse.” If the delicacy of a ‘sober girl cannot protect her from the taint in the social atmosphere, what is to be expected from the modesty of a drunken one?. . . .In the old times a modest wife hardly con versed with her own husband as young women do to-day with young men of their acquaintance. . . .It is a fact, gloss It anyhow as we may, that decent women have never dressed so indecently in our country and century as they do in fashionable life to-day.

Perhaps it is well to add the opening of last New Year’s address by Dr. Talmage, the most popular preacher in America, and the most hopeful optimist, who always looks on the “bright side,” and who calls upon the church for a forward movement.

That there is need for such a religious movement is evident from the fact that never since our world was swung out among the planets has there been such an organized and determined effort to overthrow righteousness, and make the ten commandments obsolete and the whole Bible a derision. Meanwhile alcoholism is taking down its victims by the hundreds of thousands, and the political parties get down on their knees practically saying, “O thou Rum Jug, we bow down before thee. Give us the offices, city, state and national. Oh, give us the offices and we will worship thee forever and ever, Amen.” The Christian Sabbath, meanwhile, appointed for physical, mental and spiritual rest, is being secularized and abolished. As if the bad publishing houses of our own country had exhausted their literary filth, the French and Russian sewers have been invited to pour their scurrility and moral slush into the trough, where our American swine are now wallowing. Meanwhile, there are enough marts of 1mfamy in all our city, open and unmolested of the law, to invoke the Omnipotent wrath, which buried Sodom under a deluge of brimstone. The pandemoniac world, I think, has massed its troops, and they are this moment playing their batteries upon family circles, church circles, social circles and national circles. Apollyon is in the saddle and, riding at the head of his myrmidons, would capture this world for darkness and woe.

In the seventh place, neither the government of the United States nor of any other nation in Christendom, posssesses the elements of stability. The vile immoralities of men in public life, both in Great Britain and in America, to say nothing of the determined and desperate socialism pervading the working classes, and the rapid increase of crime and drunkenness and licentiousness and vice in every form are surely rotting away the foundations on which alone empires and republics stand. A friend, who has carefully looked over the columns of a daily city newspaper for a single month of the year 1891, reports that he read accounts of 404 murders and 586 other crimes, such as adultery, burglary, robbery and rape, some of which were worse than brutal, for they were devilish. Add to this the statistics brought out in a paper read before the Young Men’s Christian Association Convention of Illinois, in 1890, telling us “that we have about 7,000,000 of young men between eighteen and thirty, and that 6,000,000 of these never attend a church; that only about 350,000 are members of any church; while there are over 700,000 young men between those ages in our public prisons at some time during each year.”

In this country for the past fifteen years the most earnest and persistent efforts have been made by good men, and by organized bands of women, to put an end to the drink traffic, and to arrest the frightful evils of intemperance. How far these efforts have succeeded may be learned from the following table just received directly from the Revenue Office in Washington City. Under the head, ‘‘ Distilled Spirits Consumed,” it appears that in 1875 there were 66,120,588 gallons used; in 1890, 87,829,562 gallons. Under the head, “Wine Consumed,” in 1875 there were 19,991,330 gallons; in 1889, these had increased to 34,144,477 gallons. Under the head, “Malt Liquors Consumed,” the people in 1875 drank 294,953,157 gallons; and in 1890 they swallowed 856,792,335 gallons. ‘When we add to these figures the appalling fact that there is an annual expenditure in this so-called Christian land of $900,000,000 for liquor, and $600,000,000 for tobacco, while the paltry sum of $5,500,000 is given to Home and ‘oreion Missions, it is evident that the millennium has not yet dawned, but it is growing darker every day.

Senator Ingalls, of Kansas, perhaps the keenest intellect in the United States Senate, whatever may be thought of him as a man or politician, recently delivered before the Senate a carefully prepared oration, which open as follows:

Mr. President, two portentous perils threaten the safety, if they do not e. danger, the existence of the republic. The first of these is ignorant, debased, degraded, spurious, and sophisticated suffrage, contaminated by the sewage of decaying nations; suffrage intimidated and suppressed in the South; suffrage impure and corrupt, apathetic and indifferent, in the great cities of the North; so that it is doubtful whether there has been for half a century a presidential election in this country that expressed the deliberate and intelligent judgment of the whole body of the American people. . The second evil Mr. President, to which I adverted as threatening-the safety, if it does not endanger the existence, of the republic, is the tyranny of combined, concentrated, centralized, and incorporated capital. [He then shows that of the enormous wealth of the country, $65,000,000,000, considerably more than one-half is in the hands of 31,100 persons.] Mr. President, it is the most appalling statement that ever fell upon mortal ears. It is, so far as the results of democracy as a social and political experiment are concerned the most terrible commentary that ever was recorded in the book of time—and Nero fiddles while Rome burns. It is thrown off with a laugh and as near, “as the froth upon the beer” of our political and social system. . . .Nor is this all, Mr. President; the hostility between the employers and the employed In this country is becoming vindictive and permanently malevolent. Labor and capitol are in two hostile camps to-day. Lockouts and strikes and labor difficulties have become practically the normal condition of our system, and it is estimated that during the year that has Just closed, In consequence of these disorders, in consequence of this hostility and this war fare, the actual loss to the country has not been less than $300,000,000.

The saddest feature about it all is the fact that the laboring men, or wage-workers, or breadwinners, as they are foolishly ‘called, hate the ‘church with the bitterest hatred. hey regard it as part of the fashionable and wealthy society which, they complain, deprives them of their rights. Upon this large and important class of the community the Protestant church, at least, has almost entirely lost its hold. Not one in ten thousand of them ever goes near a building in which religious services are observed, and it must be confessed, that the appearance of the congregation, and the intellectual preaching, on the inside are not calculated to draw them. When we find our great scientific authorities announcing that there is no God, and our leading professors declaring that the Bible is not true, and our most popular preachers proclaiming that there is no future punishment, even one who is not the son of a prophet can safely predict that the sources of morality will soon be dried, and the barriers to universal lawlessness speedily removed. No wonder that at the close of the present age the vial of divine wrath is poured out upon the sea; “and it became as the blood of a dead man.” Rev. xvi:3.

Only a glance has been given to some of the difficulties and evils that lie upon the very surface of things. Very much more could have been truthfully written under each of the topics here presented; but perhaps enough has been said to convince any fair-minded reader of the utter failure of man under the best circumstances. It is distasteful, however, to most persons to face unpleasant facts, and hence the actual facts, now presented in the mildest manner, will be scouted, just as the few who predicted the late civil war, arguing from the inevitable logic of current events and from the unavoidable relation of cause to effect, were ridiculed as cranks and pessimists. So the mass of the people and the preachers will continue to laugh, claiming that the church has never been in so flourishing a condition, declaring that the world is becoming better every day, until the storm of God’s wrath shall burst upon them, as the rain of fire and brimstone swept the cities of the plain.

There is an absolute necessity for the personal coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to save an apostate church and a godless, undone world. Never has any former age terminated in more complete disaster and ruin than that which confronts the professing Christian body in the dispensation of the Spirit. Nay, in proportion to the height of privilege to which the gospel has exalted those w ho have heard its glad tidings, will be the depth of their fall; and the ruin of the house, built not upon the impregnable rock of Scripture but upon the sand, shall be great. Even at the end ‘of the millennial period, the seventh dispensation, there will be a final attempt of the liberated Satan and the confederated nations to destroy the authority of Jehovah. It will be amply demonstrated to angels and men and demons that, however cultivated and wherever placed, ‘the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.” Rom. vii:7.

The day of the Lord it cometh,
     It cometh like a thief in the night,
It comes when the world is dreaming
     Of safety and of peace and light;
It cometh, the day of sackcloth,
     With darkness, and storm, and fire,
The day of the Great Avenger,
     The day of the burning ire.

The day of the Lord it cometh,
     When the virgins are all asleep,
And the drunken world is lying
     In a slumber yet more deep;
Like a sudden lurch of the vessel,
     By night on the sunken rock,
All earth in a moment reeleth,
     And goeth down with the shock.

The flash of the sword of havoc
     Foretelleth the day of blood,
Revealing the Judge’s progress,
     The downward march of God;
The fire which no mortal kindles,
     Quick seizes the quaking earth,
And labors the groaning creation
     In the pangs of its second birth.

Then the day of the evil endeth,
     And the righteous reign comes in,
Like a cloud of sorrow evanish,
     The ages of human sin;
The light of the morning gleameth
     Adown, without cloud or gloom,
In chains lies the ruler of darkness,
     And the Prince of Light has come!