By Heyman Wreford.
The Spirit of Anti-Christ Abroad on the Earth.
AS we gaze on the great sea of humanity, we notice it heaving and tossing in response to the volcanic storms that are raging underneath it. Elemental forces are at work all over the world, and primitive barbarism is threatening to displace the ordered living which civilization requires.
The root of all this unrest is to be found in the denial of the Father and the Son. It is the spirit of anti-Christ abroad on the earth — the devil ruling in the place of God, and the councils of darkness swaying the destinies of man. Men are looking for the superman, and not to the God of all the earth.
The awful blasphemy that has led a nation to eliminate the Name of God from all its schools is spreading everywhere: “We be gods,” men cry, and acts as devils. The humanizing of God and the deification of man is the spirit of this age. The riot of self-will — everyone doing that which is right in their oven eyes, leads to the awful menace of Bolshevism which is the direct result of the materialism of the present day. There seems to be a collapse of moral energy in the world — the power to do evil is stronger than the desire to do right. The hidden forces of evil in the natural man, which are, to a certain extent, repressed by the obligations of society, show themselves in a variety of ways — sometimes in the quieter forms of unbelief when human credulity is be fooled by so-called devisers, by false mediums, by charlatans who pretend to the gift of healing, by palmists, by fortune-tellers, by crystal gazers, by wizards who pretend to hold mysteries of life and death in thrall, by the atheists who, in their blasphemy speak of “somebody called God” —to the semi-atheist, as we may call them, who, under the guise of religion, sow “doctrines of devils,” the denial of the Father and the Son, in half the pulpits of Christendom. These false witnesses, garbed as Christian men, are the choicest emissaries of Satan, his chosen vessels to poison the minds of men with the specious sophistries of perdition.
Then there is the cult of socialism — a growing force which “teaches and believes the folly that material comfort may come to all under the reign of an omnipotent and atheistic bureaucracy administering the affairs of State.” They build their theories on destruction, and are an unceasing menace to the nations of the world.
All these things spring from the terrible unrest in the world today — a world that is deliberately trying to do without God and His Beloved Son. “The wicked are like the troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt,” and the world is full of the mire and dirt of an unrestful and wicked age. The great strikes that paralyses commerce are the outcome of the forces of the restless unbelief of men and women. The increasing love of pleasure, and the desecration of the Lord’s Day, are the terrible results of the materialism of these times. On Sundays we have the picture palaces and theaters open — bands playing in the parks, and concerts in the large halls. Sunday newspapers have an enormous circulation. All these things lead to a total neglect of the Word of God and a loosening of every moral bond.
From Days of Crisis.