PREFACE. OF one called on to undertake the prefacing of a work like the present, it will be expected that he accord largely with the leading views contained. in it, believing that the author has written truly and seasonably, as well as according to the mind of God. It is even so. My sympathies are strongly with the author, and, in the main, with his sentiments and expositions; at least those bearing upon prophecy, and relating to the characteristics of the last days. Not as if the volume were without a flaw, or claimed authority, or needed not the Berean searching of Scripture, "whether these things are so;" but it embodies such a mass * I cannot, in this Preface, find room to specify the things wherein I differ from him, both prophetically and theologically. This I should like to have done, somewhat minutely (especially in reference to several points in the latter part of the volume, where I differ most), not so much in justice to myself, as in justice to the prophetical views which I entertain, lest they should be identified with, or made responsible for, all the author's views; but the extent to which this would carry me, constrains me to content myself with this brief explanatory statement. of truth, and such an amount of well-aimed admonition and warning; it forms such a minute yet such a masterly commentary upon the age and its characteristics, that it is entitled to take rank among the works specially required in our day, and robbed of which, we should suffer heavy loss. Had it been otherwise, I should have declined being accessory to the reproduction of a work which avowedly takes up no middle nor doubtful position, and which assuredly gives no uncertain. sound. For it is a book respecting which there have been, and are likely to be, but two opinions, no more; and these irreconcileably opposite the one to the other. The author's ground has nothing about it of the mid-way or the neutral; and the thoughts of his readers concerning him will not find utterance in tame and well-balanced words. It is a book either strangely true or libellously false in its pictures of the age; either a most minutely correct portrait, by a most skilful and noble artist, or a scandalous caricature, by a lying, spiteful satirist. It is either wholly obsolete, pointing back to scenes long faded and forgotten; or sadly antedated, hurrying us into days of long futurity, of which no sign has yet appeared; or else it is the mirror of the present age, held up by one widely conversant with the Word of God, and deeply in communion with God himself. Hence it is either a book most suitable and instructive, or else thoroughly unprofitable and unsuitable to the times, fitted only to misinform and mislead; either most sagacious, thoughtful, sober, searching, or else unwise, hasty, extravagant, censorious; either giving utterance to the true voice of the faithful watchman in his warnings of solemn love, or else giving vent to the man-hating tones of some evil spirit, enviously bent upon marring the mirth, and troubling the calm of a joyous world. Yet strong as are my sympathies with the author, I do not identify myself with him or with any class of opinions of which he may be deemed the exponent or representative. It is not needful, nor is it expected, that one, in prefacing a work not his own, should commit himself to all that the volume contains; still less that he should be held responsible for opinions contained in the author's other works. He may differ much from many of these; nay, he may differ much from many of the sentiments uttered in the work which he prefaces; yet, because of the preponderance in it of what is true and excellent, he may recommend and circulate it. It is enough that, in the leading points of the volume, he be at one with the writer, and desire the wider circulation of thoughts that have been of profit to himself and to many; thoughts not only great and true in themselves, but strongly claiming the notice of a needy age,*-an age too needy to be entirely unconscious of its wants, yet too self-satisfied and self-reliant to admit the extent of its poverty and helplessness; too troubled and shaken to feel perfectly at rest, yet too easyminded to search into the causes of this disquietude; too darkly compassed about with judgments not to plead in some measure guilty, yet far too proud to admit the extent and hideousness of those evils which God can no longer bear with, and which He is now so awfully interposing to avenge upon a heedless church and an unready world. Some special things in the volume we might wish unwritten, or written otherwise than they are; but, "take it for all in all," we shall not easily find its like. It is a work of power, but not of effort, giving evidence of a gifted mind, and an observant eye; containing in it much that belongs to the As to the age's neediness the author thus finely speaks:-"I ask, whether these fine multitudinous threads which wove strong and durable the texture of the web of human life be not, many of them, wholly dissolved, and all of them grown so bare as no longer to endure the convulsions of former times, hardly to sustain the tear and wear of life, and surely no longer able to keep warm and comfortable the hearts and souls of men." |