THE COMING OF THE END

Waikato Times, Volume 112, Issue 18803, 26 November 1932, Page 14 (Supplement)

THE COMING OF THE END

VISION AND EXPEOTANCY. * THE TRUE ADVENT. A marked feature of primitive Christianity was the belief of the Church in the speedy coming of the End. St. Paul himself, certainly in the earlier period of his life as a Christian missionary. shared this belief. A temper of expectancy characterises ills Epistles; they ring with a note of urgency. He looks for a great and glorious consummation, and, while the thought sobers him, it fills him with a passionate hope and joy. The day is at hand when struggle will pass into victory, when the power of evil will be broken, when in the new dawn of a clearer revelation life’s riddles will he made plain. It is difficult nearly two thousand years later jio realise what this belief ninst have meant to those first Christians by way of religious comfort and moral stimulus. No belief, however, which has powerfully affected for good men’s character and conduct can be without some abiding kernel of truth. What, then, for this twentieth century is the permanent value of this early belief in the speedy advent of the End? Ever-present Crisis. The belief speaks of the final triumph of goodness and of the survival of the individual who has ranged himself on the side of goodness. It stands for Iho great assurance that the tumultuous movement of Ibis world is not purposeless, but is diroelC d to a goal. More than this, it witnesses to a certain temper and outlook which should characterise Iho Chris I - inn: the temper of vigilance and expectancy, Hie sense that spiritual issues are urgent issues, and that life's true meaning is to ho found in 'conned ion with them. In a word, it reminds us that. God is a Living l.od in active contact with the world, working out Ills purposes and looking for man’s m-oporalion.

It is hardly 100 much to assert that for the prophets of the (Hit Testament. with their vivid consciousness of the Living God every day was a ••day of the Lord,” pregnant with moral and religious possibilities. At times they predicted the near coming of the End, seeing its signs in contemporary crisis. Historically they may have been wrong; spiritually they were right; for there is always a crisis for those whose eye is trained to see It, and eternity is ever breaking through into time.