just to organise a confederacy against the Church again. By what steps he will proceed, and on what precise questions the quarrel will ostensibly be raised-whether he will set up a new religion, or whether, as seems more probable, he will breathe into them an anti-religious spirit, that cannot rest so long as God has any open friends, and Christ any witnesses, and the Church exists as a visible body—we cannot tell, and shall in vain attempt to determine. One thing only is certain-he will succeed in raising a mighty party, "the number of whom is as the sand of the sea" (an expression, however, not to be pressed too far; see Gen. xli. 49; Judges vii. 12; and 2 Sam. xvii. 11). One may wonder at such success; but the past history of the struggles of the serpent's seed against Christ and his people, teach us to wonder at nothing which he gets liberty to do. The bright latter-day has set; the generations that adorned it have died; and other generations have arisen that "know not Joseph." In process of time they may come to deny that matters were ever much better than they are, and laugh at every assertion of the sort. Impatience of the yoke of religion will in all probability come to be the uniting principle and animating motive of this vast party. "No oppression," says Fraser, "is so grievous to an unsanctified heart as that which arises from the purity of Christianity. A desire to shake off this yoke is the true cause of that opposition Christianity has met with from the world in every period, and will, it is most likely, be the chief motive to influence the followers of Gog in his time."*. Their "going up† on the breadth of the earth," denotes their sweeping all before them in their advances against the Church; while their "compassing the camp of the saints and the beloved city," seems to be an allusion to the close investment of Jerusalem by Sennacherib, king of Assyria. The *Key, ut supra, p. 455. + Grotius notices the military character of this phrase, referring to 1 Sam. xi. 1; 1 Kings xx. 1; and Isa. xxxvi. 1, as parallels. daring and blasphemous assumptions of that heathen monarch and his men of war, their undoubting confidence of success, and their profound and godless security, up to the moment when the angel of the Lord smote the host-will doubtless find their like at this final investment of "the beloved city." "As it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all. Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed."-(Luke xvii. 26–30.) "Yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape."-(1 Thess. v. 2, 3.) "There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming?"-(2 Peter iii. 3, 4.) "When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"-(Luke xviii. 8.) And just as faithful Hezekiah and his people, shut in by an enemy sufficient to overwhelm them, could only "lift up their prayer for the remnant that was left," saying, "This day is a day of trouble, and of rebuke, and of blasphemy; for the children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring forth: incline thine ear, O Lord, and hear; open thine eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which hath sent to reproach the living God," (Isa. xxxvii. 3, 17)—so will the faithful in this final struggle feel their case utterly hopeless but for some signal interposition from on high. Accordingly, they are represented as "crying to him day and night," and because he "bears long with them" (Luke xviii. 7), some will give it up in despair, while the hearts of others will fail them for fear of being left to the will of their enemies. In these circumstances, of confidence on the one side and fear on the other, when the enemy is saying, “I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil," the tremulous cries of the remnant that is left enter into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. "Shall not God avenge his own elect, that cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you, he will avenge them speedily." No manifest sign of interposition, it would seem, will be given. As "the sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar," and "then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven' (Gen. xix. 23, 24), so when the last enemy of the Church shall be ready to swallow up the camp of "the saints and the beloved city," then "fire shall come down from God out of heaven, and devour them." Whether there will be any interval, or of what length, between this act of signal vengeance and the Personal Appearing of Christ, we have not sufficient ground to determine. Fraser, Faber, and those who take their views of "Gog," suppose that the " seven months" which Ezekiel speaks of, as spent burying the carcasses of these victims of justice, are an indication that "the last day will not quite immediately follow" this judgment. Their grounds, however, are not convincing, and the probability is that this will be the immediate precursor of "the last trumpet;" for the final judgment of the devil himself is recorded in the very next verse, and just before the account of the last judgment. Be this as it may, we are now brought-as far as the light of revelation goes to the concluding scene. "Corruption," says Fraser, "following after the purity and happiness of the millennium, serves to prove fully what 66 had been shown partly before, that unsanctified human nature cannot bear prosperity, because it leads men to resist God's authority, to gratify their own lusts at the expense of violating his laws, and defacing the beauty and order of his creation; that all the ordinary means of grace, that all the common and extraordinary dispensations of Divine providence, which the wisdom of God devised, and his longsuffering patience exercised for the reformation of the human race, are ineffectual to reform the whole, and that the malignant distemper of sin requires a more violent remedy. Accordingly, the world now ripe for destruction, and the Church for eternal salvation, God sets his throne for the last judgment." * Then," says Edwards, "will come the time when all the elect shall be gathered in. That work of conversion which has been carried on from the beginning of the Church, after the fall, through all those ages, shall be carried on no more. There never shall another soul be converted. Every one of those many millions whose names were written in the book of life before the foundation of the world, shall be brought in: not one soul shall be lost. And the mystical body of Christ, which has been growing since it first began in the days of Adam, will be complete as to number of parts, having every one of its members. In this respect, the work of redemption will now be finished. And now the end, for which the means of grace have been instituted, shall be obtained. the effect which was intended to be accomplished by them shall now be accomplished. All the great wheels of Providence have gone round-all things are ripe for Christ's coming to judgment." † "EVEN SO, COME, LORD JESUS!" * Key, ut supra, pp. 462, 463. All |