Page 27 - Watchman- What of the Night

far with unprejudiced mind will agree that the more ancient view which we are here

setting forth, held by millennialists from the beginning, is far less involved and
th
difficult than the 19 century intrusion, which has saturated modern eschatology.
We are not merely contending for a correct view concerning the coming of Christ,
and against the erroneous interpolations and hairsplitting distinctions of the prophetic

modernists who have projected the any-moment, secret rapture theory. But we are
contending against what we have found to be the moral and spiritual effects of this
teaching, deleterious in the extreme. There is much talk of the purifying hope of the
―rapture,‖ but we have not observed it to be so. This debilitating eschatology that

teaches that Christians of this age are not to experience persecution or tribulation but
be ―raptured‖ out of it, has developed a psychology of painless Christianity,
destructive to the whole concept of Christian discipleship. It has developed an
immense crop of spiritual ―softies,‖ effete Epicureans, among ―people and priests.‖

Where are the hardy Christian Stoics of the days of the early church and the
Reformation? They loved not their lives unto death because they knew that the Savior
had said: ―In the world ye shall have tribulation‖ and ―The servant is not greater than
his Lord…if they have persecuted me they will also persecute you.‖ And they knew

that the Apostles ―confirmed the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in
the faith, and that they must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.‖
These present-day teachers insinuate that if we allow that God is going to leave the
saints of the last days to suffer in the final culmination of tribulation, we do despite to

His character, and impugn His grace, and make of none effect the cross. We are at a
loss to explain why it would be any more a reflection on His character to allow the
saints of the last days to suffer, than it was a breach of His nature of grace to allow the
thousands through the history of the church to die for His dear Name‘s sake. Why

should the saints of this or a later period be more sacrosanct than those that have gone
on before? We repeat that it is because of the utterly false state of mind it builds up
within present-day Christians, as well as its own inherent error, that we oppose the
nineteenth century rapture theory.

We have been told that the greatest cause of defection and recantation on the part of
Russian Christians at the outbreak of the Red revolution, and when they were
engulfed in the fiery trials of Satanic persecution, was the idea that God had breached
His Word by allowing them to fall into such sore trials. They should have been

―raptured‖ before any such thing struck them, as the British and American
missionaries, propounders of the Darby theory had taught them! Does some one
feebly reply: ―Oh that was not the Great Tribulation!‖ We have an idea that that was
the beginning of it, and it was certainly GREAT TRIBULATION for them, as any one

informed of what took place can readily attest.

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