The personal coming of Jesus back to this earth is everywhere set forth in the New Testament as the acme and crown and consummation of this present age. In all those passages where in the common version it speaks of the • 'end of the world," the Greek says ' 'the end of the age. " And if it had not been for the blunder of translating the Greek word "age" by the word "world," there would not have been so much darkness and misunderstanding on our Lord's return to reign on this earth. Just as the first coming of Christ in His incarnation was the end of the Jewish age, and all the types and shadows and forms of the Jewish ceremonial religion had their fulfillment and termination in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and after that the Jewish age with all its peculiar forms and ceremonies passed away, so the second coming of Christ back to this earth will be the end of the Gentile age, and the fulfillment and termination of all the present order in the Christian Church.

When our Savior instituted the sacrament which commemorates His death, we are told that every time we partake of that sacrament "we do show forth His death till he comes again.'' Hence the Lord's Supper is an index finger, pointing the believer throughout this age to the reappearing of his Lord. At the return of Christ all the Christian sacraments will come to an end, and also the present order of Christian ministry and the various forms of church government and manifold teachings of church theology. As all the streams flowing down the mountains find their terminus and rest in the bosom of the sea, so all the manifold streams of history in the present order of things will find their fulfillment and rest in the presence and personal reign of Jesus on this earth.

The Jews and Gentiles for the past two thousand years have had separate and distinct histories of their own, and we are told in the New Testament that Jerusalem, which embodied the nationality of the Jews, ''should be trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles were filled.'" And St. Paul tells us in his epistle to the Romans that the Jews were cut off from the olive tree, and the Gentile believers, who were by nature the wild olive tree, were grafted into Christ, but that when the time of the Gentiles was ended the Jews should be again grafted upon the parent stock, which is Christ. Thus we see that at the appearing of our Lord these prophecies concerning the Jews and Gentiles will be fulfilled, and at His reign on earth the Jews will again be restored and accept of Him as their Messiah.

This idea may still further be elaborated in its application to Christian stewardship. Jesus, in addressing the church in connection with the fourth overcometh, says, "but that which ye have hold fast till I come," proving conclusively that there is a certain responsibility of faith and obedience in the believer, which does not terminate until the coming of the Lord.

The same truth is elaborated in the parables of Our Savior. We are told in the 19th chapter of Luke, that as Christ in His last journey approached Jerusalem, the people thought that the Kingdom of God should immediately appear, that is, they supposed Christ would then assume the kingship of His elect people, and set up His reign on the earth. Now we notice that Jesus did hot contradict or deny the faith that He was to reign on this earth, but on the other hand, he confirmed that faith, by speaking a parable, concerning a certain nobleman who went into a far country to receive a kingdom, and before going away, he called his ten servants, and delivered unto them ten pounds, and said to them, "occupy till I come." Then He goes on to speak of the return of the nobleman, and of these ten servants rendering up their account, and to those of them who had been faithful, he said to one, "because thou hast been faithful, have thou authority over ten cities," and to another he said, "have thou authority over five cities." This parable, and also the parable of the talents, proves that the stewardship of Christian ministers is to extend until the second coming of Jesus. Even though God's faithful servants may die before His appearing, yet their work follows them. They still live and labor in their writings, or through secondary agencies, and the amount of their reward for faithful service, or of their punishment for neglect of their gifts, will not be fixed, until the end of this age when Christ returns.

This gives us an insight into the vital relationship between the coming of Jesus and the winding up of the history and the various responsibilities and trusteeships of the present age. This truth has a still further application to Christian character and experience. Instead of regarding the coming of Jesus as a mere trifling matter which has but little connection with Christian faith and experience, we find in the New Testament that it is continually put as a fundamental object of faith and reward, and as having a powerful relationship with our present sanctification and fitness to see His face and participate in His coming kingdom. It seems that invincible narrowness of mind is one of the inevitable entailments of our laden condition, and this narrowness of mind has had no more conspicuous exhibition than the divorcement of various truths in the Scripture which Goa has united, but which men have attempted to separate. A large class of people have in modern years become intensely interested in the personal coming of Jesus, but have studied that subject in a mere material and political aspect to the utter neglect of a deep experience in personal holiness. Many of them are mere materialists, denying the immortality of the soul, and either denying or utterly ignoring the necessity of a personal and full sanctification by the baptism of the Holy Spirit. On the other hand a large number of deeply spiritual persons who accept the full Bible teaching on personal and full salvation as a fitness for life, as well as for entrance to heaven, have entirely passed over the subject of our Savior's return to this earth, and of His personal reign over the nations for a thousand years. They have relegated the whole subject of Christ's coming to what is popularly called ''Second Adventism," and in many instances spoken lightly or triflingly of the coming of Jesus, and with all their zeal and devotion for the spread of scriptural holiness, have stoutly maintained the Roman Catholic doctrine of post-millennialism, that is, that the church was to bring the millennium, and that Christ would not appear again until at the general judgment of both the saved and the lost. But when we look into the New Testament, w r e find both of these classes to be holding to mere partial truths. The Holy Spirit has blended these great truths into unity, and taught us in scores of places the direct connection between scriptural holiness and the pro -millennial appearing of our Lord.

Jesus teaches us in the 22d chapter of Luke the immediate connection between following Him in His humiliations and temptations, and the receiving of a place in His kingdom when He comes to reign on the earth. In the first chapter of Philippians, Paul gives us one of his apostolic prayers that the believers "may have the love of God abounding in them more and more, that they might be sincere and without offense until the day of Christ." Here is a statement of the direct relationship between the fullness of love and the preservation of the believer until the coming of Jesus. Again in the third chapter of Colossians the apostle tells us that we are to be dead to sin, and risen with Christ, and to seek those things which are heavenly, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God, and that our affection is to be set on things divine, because our life is hid with Christ in God, and "that when Christ our life shall appear, then we shall appear with Him in glory." So here again the Holy Ghost has stated the supreme connection between a state of present holiness of heart and life and the personal appearing of our Lord.

Again in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul tells those believers that his hope and joy and crown of rejoicing, or as the Greek has it, his crown of glory, is in the perseverance of these saints until they meet in the presence of their Lord Jesus at His coming. In all these Scriptures there is no allusion to the death-bed, or the grave, as a terminal point of salvation, or stewardship, but everything focalizes "in the presence of Jesus." Again, in the same Epistle and third chapter, the apostle prays that the Lord would increase the love of the saints toward one another, to the end that God might establish their hearts without blame in holiness before God at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with His saints. Again in the fifth chapter he prays that the God of peace himself would sanctify us entirely, and preserve our whole spirit, and soul, and body, without blame, unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus the whole tenor of the New Testament is: "Hold fast till I come;" "Occupy till I come;" "Render your stewardship when the Master returns;'' "Be filled with love, and preserved without blame until Christ comes/"' and these two great facts of personal and full salvation and the second coming of Jesus are continually blended together.

We learn from the tenor of all these Scriptures, and similar passages in the Old Testament, that the presence of Christ himself constitutes the center and substance of His kingdom. For the first two centuries of the Christian era the Scripture teaching of the premillennial coming of Jesus was universally held among Christians. But when the Christian ministry began to lose the fullness of the Spirit, then their faith lost its strength and discernment, and they settled down on the plane of earthly politics and human philosophy, and as the church got more formidable and worldly, the doctrine began to be propagated that the Christian church was to conquer the nations of the world, and thus bring the golden age of prophecy without the personal presence of Jesus on the earth. And although the Protestant churches have thrown off the forms and many of the grosser teachings of Romanism, yet a great many unscriptural doctrines have sifted through from Romanism, and settled down as a sediment in the teachings of Protestantism to a much greater extent than Protestants themselves are aware of. One of these Romanist notions is that of the church conquering the world. When we look into the current view^s of modern worldly literature, we find a universal tendency to ignore God as a personal creator and governor in His works. The commonality of men are perhaps profoundly ignorant of the extent to which they ignore the existence and personality of the God who made them. And this is true of all classes of society, from the most polite to the most vulgar. The modern newspapers, magazines, and works of science, philosophy, literature, art, and history, are turned out by the thousand, and if every human being should suddenly die, and some inhabitant of a distant world should come here and look into these various literary productions, he would be astonished to find how utterly the God of the universe had been ignored in them all. Men speak of "nature'' and "natural law" in a thousand ways without ever seeming to appreciate the thought of a living and personal Creator. And if God is mentioned, He is simply the masculine form of the neuter noun of nature. Now are we aware that a parallel sin is being committed, and has been for centuries committed by numberless multitudes in the visible church with regard to the Kingdom of God on this earth? Professed believers have imbibed the notion that the Kingdom of God will come about by various achievements of civilization and science, and modern progress, and ecclesiastical machinery, and that the kingdom consists merely in certain principles of reform, and religious doctrine, while the personality and visible presence of Jesus as the center and embodiment of that kingdom seems seldom or never to enter the mind. Hence the church is looking for an impersonal kingdom of mere principles. But such a view of the coming of Christ's kingdom is utterly unscriptural, and nothing more or less than an anti-Christ, that is, the substituting of a church or a system of teachings for the personal presence of Jesus Himself. Just as the blazing sun comprises in itself the daily light and warmth of the earth, and the fruitful seasons, and the brightness of day, all flow out directly from the sun, so the Kingdom of God on this earth, the subjugation of the nations, the lifting of the curse from man and animals and material nature, the rectifying of earth's wrongs, and the tilling of the world with the glory of God, all flow out from the person and presence of the Lord Jesus.

As men drifted away from God all their views became more and more impersonal, and they talked of principles and laws and forces. Hence we find Christian Scientists, and Spiritualists, and Freethinkers ignoring a real personal Christ, but running off into a smoky haze of mystified thought in which they harp on "the Christ principle" and similar expressions of nonsense. But did we know that the church has committed this same blunder with regard to the kingdom of God on this earth, making it to consist of a universal spread of impersonal teachings and a conglomerate mass of churchism, instead of the presence of the personal King Himself, upon whose shoulder the government is laid, and out from whose person the empire flows? Hence- men have unwittingly put the church in the place of the Lord Jesus, and there is a continual harping on "working for the church," "being sent out by the church," "being loyal to the church," "raising money for the church," "guarding the interests of the church," being "consecrated to the church," and "'making great sacrifices for the church," and all the while our adorable Jesus, Redeemer, Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and coming King, is grieved to His heart to see how the nominal church has usurped His place in the hearts of men, and has assumed His throne and attempted to play the King in His stead. If in all of the foregoing expressions the word "Jesus" were used instead of the word "church," it would be according to Scripture. This putting the word "church" where the word "Christ" ought to be put is anti-Christ, for anti-Christ does not consist in a particular person, but in a vast multiplied system of the usurpation of the place of Jesus, and while anti-Christ may head up in some particular office as that of the Pope, yet it is spread out as a ubiquitous thing throughout fallen Christianity.

We read in Ezekiel that when God rebuked the kings of Judah for their idolatry, and prophesied their downfall, He says, "Remove the diadem and take off the crown and be abased, for I will overturn, overturn, overturn it, and it shall be no more until He comes whose right it is, and I will give it to Him.' " (Ezk. 21.) Here is a prophecy of the coming of the Son of God to govern this world, and the prophet does not say that "it" shall come, that is, an impersonal system of church government, hut, emphatically till "He" shall come, the personal king.

It is in view of all these truths that the perfect believer is to set his heart on seeing Jesus, and loving His personal appearing. St. Paul gives us to understand that our love is not up to the New Testament standard until we have a perfect desire for the coming of Jesus, and that our whole heart loves His appearing.