“THE Serpent would fain give man a garden again. And a happier garden it shall be than God once gave him. He shall have every tree in it. The world shall be a wise world, a religious world, a cultivated world, a delightful place, and still advancing. The man of benevolence, the man of morals, the religious and the intellectual man, the man of refined pleasures, all will find their home in it. And this shall be the world’s oneness. And all who desire their fellow creature’s happiness, and the common rest, after so many centuries of confusion and trouble, will surely not refuse to join the honorable and happy confederacy.
Nothing will withstand all this but ‘the love of the truth’; nothing but faith in that Word which gathers a sinner to Jesus and His blood, and the hopes of a poor world-wearied believer to Jesus and His kingdom. Come what may to you, beloved, though it be moral or refined or religious in its bearing, it is ‘unrighteousness,’ if it be not ‘of the truth’” (2 Thess. 2:1010And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. (2 Thessalonians 2:10)).
J. G. B.