I was very glad to hear you were getting on happily. As to the question you refer to, it is one which exercised the brethren early in their career, but I think they have all settled pretty positively in the conviction that all the saints will be with Christ at His coming. I cannot object to the statement, that the crown of righteousness is laid up for those who love His appearing, nor that in fact He will appear to those that look for Him. But the parable of the wise and foolish virgins gives me the comfortable assurance, that the Lord will wake up to expect Him those that have oil in their lamps, and even many will be aroused to activity who have not.
There is another thing that, at the time the question was mooted, acted on my judgment: all who are really members of His body must be with Him. You cannot divide the body. Again, if forming part of the bride they must be there, and it is clear that whoever has the Holy Ghost is of the body: "By one Spirit we have all been baptized into one body." Further, I read in 1 Cor. 15, "they that are Christ's at his coming," so those that sleep in Jesus in 1 Thess. 4; and when one thinks of the resurrection, it seems impossible to confine it, for scarce one would be raised. How few saints comparatively have died since the Lord's coming was scripturally preached. If it merely applied to those that are alive at the time, I have no great objection, because I believe God will wake them up. But I cannot believe that the foolish virgins who have no oil in their vessels, and to whom the Lord says, "I know you not," are true Christians. That worldly minded Christians may go through tribulation (not "the great tribulation") to separate them from the world and make them expect Christ is very possible and very probable, but that is only God's faithful care over His children, what is needed for their good and deliverance as such. The great tribulation is either Jewish as in Matt. 24, or over the whole world after the church is gone (Rev. 7); with neither of these has the church to do. The unity of the body seems to me to make the exclusion of saints now and heretofore who have not seen the Lord's coming, from a part in that blessing, untenable; but saying that only those waiting for Him when He comes is not; only that I find that He wakes up the saints in time before He comes, that they may be ready.
Here the doors are wide open, everything breaking up ecclesiastically, and men at their wits' ends as to popery and infidelity—an imbecility in the ecclesiastical governors that is inconceivable. The brethren, thank God, are in peace generally, and their testimony of more importance daily from the state of things. M. is seeking communion; America may have done him good, in making him feel what carelessness as to heresy is.
Your affectionate brother in Christ.
[Date uncertain.]