C. T. Russell

“ Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.—By their multitudinous trading in mixed doctrines (merchandise) “for revenue only” thy adherents, demons and clergy, have filled thy following with violence and warfare; and thou hast sinned unto death. ”

“ In the symbolic language of Revelation, the French Revolution was indeed a ‘great earthquake’—a social shock so great that all ‘Christendom’ trembled until it was over; and that terrible and sudden outburst of a single nation's wrath, only a century ago, may give some idea of the fury of the coming storm, when the wrath of all the angry nations will burst the bands of law and order and cause a reign of universal anarchy. ”

“ The diamond is the most crystal clear of stones, and represents the truth in irresistible form. It is futile to oppose the mind of any Present Truth believer, for truth is irrefutable. To those who have it, it imparts the mind of an intellectual giant—the mind of Christ, of God. (1 Cor. 2:16.) Their foreheads are made as diamond. In the light of the sun the diamond sparkles with indescribable beauty. It breaks the sunlight up into its component parts and reflects and refracts in prismatic flashes of rainbow colors. The sun is the Gospel of Divine Love and its embodiment, Jesus Christ. ”

“ Yea, I will make many people amazed at thee, and their kings shall be horribly afraid for thee, when I shall brandish My Sword before them; and they shall tremble at every moment, every man for his own life, in the day of thy fall.—Yea, He will make many nations to marvel at Christendom's fall; and their rulers shall fear and quake on account of her destruction, when they are threatened with destruction by anarchy. Every moment shall every man of them tremble for his life. ”

“ The Pope is a murderer of souls. He destroys the flock of Christ and fleeces it. More savage is he than Judas, and more unjust than Pilate, and worse and more wicked than Lucifer. He has exchanged all the ten commandments of God for this single one of his own, ‘Give me money, money, money.’ The Pope with his clergy are the forerunners of Antichrist, rather than the servants of Christ. ”

“ Because he considereth, and turneth away from all his transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die. Yet saith the house of Israel, The way of the Lord is not equal. O house of Israel, are not My ways equal? are not your ways unequal? Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord God. Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin.—The righteous man who turns to iniquity shall die. ”

“ But ye, O mountains of Israel, ye shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to My people of Israel; for they are at hand to come.—A branch signifies a person born from another; as, Christ was a Branch of David. Here the branches shooting forth from the mountains are the people of Christendom, slain in revolutions and anarchy, springing forth, rising from the dead, to people Christendom again. But you, O nations, of Christendom, your dead shall rise up from their sleep in the dust of the earth, to the earthly restitution—resurrection ”

“ For Thy love—Thy caresses, the repeated assurances of guidance, protection, companionship, love and care.
Is better than wine—Wine is a symbol of doctrine. “They also have erred through wine.” “They are drunken, but not with wine.” “All nations have drunk of the wine.” “I will not henceforth drink of this fruit of the vine.” “Be not drunk with wine.” Although a sound faith is essential, yet of faith, hope and love, the greatest is love; therefore, love is better than wine. The Lord's assurances of love are even more precious to the Bride than the precious doctrines so vital to her happiness. ”

“ And I will call for a sword against him throughout all My mountains, saith the Lord God: every man's sword shall be against his brother.—God will do His dreadful work of ending this present evil world, and will call for the universal arming of mankind with destroying weapons, so that every man's weapons will be against every other man. ”

“ Not a stain of sin mars the harmony and peace of a perfect society; not a bitter thought, not an unkind look or word; love, welling up from every heart, meets a kindred response in every other heart, and benevolence marks every act. Think of all the pictures of comparative health and beauty of human form and feature that you have ever seen, and know that perfect humanity will be of still surpassing loveliness. The inward purity and mental and moral perfection will stamp and glorify every radiant countenance.”—A. 191 ”

“ And they shall take up a lamentation for thee, and say to thee, How art thou destroyed, that wast inhabited of seafaring men, the renowned city, which wast strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants, which cause their terror to be on all that haunt it!—They shall lament; for the great systems of human philosophy shall be destroyed, where abode polished cosmopolitan men of the world (seafaring men) , the renowned system of thought which was strong among all peoples (in the sea) , even in the midst of a world of restless, discontented masses. ”

“ Protestantism longs for the old-time power of the clergy. It has the spirit, disposition, of spiritual fornication, goes to the limit in its efforts to control affairs through local, state, and national governmental agencies, and now is ready and willing to ally itself with liberty-destroying papal ecclesiasticism. It displays its true nature and its indifference to the good of the people in its willing eagerness to unite in any manner with the force which has for centuries throttled liberty, banished the Word of God, and stifled freedom in blood. ”

“ Do we not still pray, ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is done in Heaven?’ The Messiah's coming Kingdom is the key to the world's blessing by Restitution back to human perfection in a world-wide Eden.”—Pastor Russell. ”

“ Behold, in the blessed Times of Restitution, the time for His great love for men to be revealed, He shall cause the people that are left among the Hebrews and in Christendom to talk and pray about their good hopes for the uplift of themselves and all the world to better, higher things. And their hopes shall live again; for God will cause the spirit of life, life-energy, to enter into their hopes and into their dead—those captive in the Adamic death and in the ruin of the great tribulation.—E. 341, 316. ”

“ Violence is risen up into a rod of wickedness; none of them shall remain, nor of their multitude, nor of any of theirs; neither shall there be wailing for them.—Those who rule by violence shall be utterly rooted out of the earth in the Time of Trouble, unhonored and unwept (Jer. 16:4-6) , accursed for the evil they have wrought. The clergy, for whom many would even have died in the past, but who have preached the people into this war and into the world's ruin, will become objects of popular hatred. ”

“ The period in which sin is permitted has been a dark Night to humanity, never to be forgotten; but the glorious Day of righteousness and Divine favor, to be ushered in by Messiah, who, as the Sun of Righteousness, shall arise and shine fully and clearly into and upon all, bringing healing and blessing, will more than counterbalance the dreadful night of weeping, sighing, pain, sickness and death, in which the groaning creation has been so long. ”

“ Thus saith the Lord God to Tyrus; Shall not the isles shake at the sound of thy fall, when the wounded cry, when the slaughter is made in the midst of thee?—The world will be full of revolutionary republics (isles) , devoid of Christian principles and following man-made ideas; these republics shall be shaken to their foundations, when anarchy begins its dread slaughter of men and of systems. ”

“ Protestantism, ecclesiasticism, has been an apt follower of Papacy in suppression of discussion. Witness the systematic world-wide ban on any discussion of Present Truth as presented by God's watchman, Pastor Russell! Ecclesiasticism, priestcraft, had for ages supplanted the worship of God with paganism, and in the Gospel Age has insidiously transformed the Gospel of Christ, has tried to destroy liberty and progress and has built up a gigantic system of oppression and destruction of the friends of the Truth. The most ferocious of the popes are made the “saints” of Satan's church. ”

“ When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.—Pastor Russell saw and revived the teaching of the Word of God that death is death. ”

“ The good things of this world,—birth, rank, wealth, fine clothes and elegant manners,—became worldly perils, and worldly disadvantages. The people waged a war of such extermination with everything established, as to abolish the common forms of address and salutation, and the common mode of reckoning time, abhorred ‘you’ as a sin, and shrank from ‘monsieur’ as an abomination, turned the weeks into decades, and would know the old months no more. ”

“ The question now arises, Why did not God send His Kingdom sooner? Why is Armageddon necessary? We answer that God has His own times and seasons, and that He has appointed the Great Seventh Thousand-Year Day for the reign of Christ. Divine Wisdom has withheld until our day the great knowledge and skill which is breeding at the same time millionaires and discontents. Had God lifted the veil of ignorance a thousand years sooner, the world would have lined up for Armageddon a thousand years sooner. ”

“ Behold, all souls are Mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is Mine; the soul that sinneth, it shall die.—In the earthly phase of the thousand-year probationary Kingdom of God the equal justice of God will be manifest, father and son will be treated alike, no one dying for a parent's sin; but each soul that sinneth shall die for his own sin.—E. 354, 331 ”

“ The minds, wisdom, characters of God's true people are full of manifestations of the shining upon them of the glorious Gospel of the Son of Righteousness—full of the beauty of righteousness. The minds of God's saints are made as the diamond in its excelling hardness and sunlit radiance. ”

“ In the contemplation of the watchers, the faithfulness, unchangeableness of God, is seen shining through the Christ, the firmament, like the [pg 376] soft blue of the sapphire stone. Man is in the image and likeness of God. Reigning over all is One whom men can understand, a Deity whose perfect Justice, Power, Love and Wisdom elicit complete consecration. God is seen to be not a ferocious demon, belying His own command of love, but a just, reasonable, loving God, able to save all the willing and obedient. Jesus, the friend of sinners, was and is the perfect image of the Father. ”

“ Anarchists, Socialists, and hot-headed radicals of every school of reason and unreason, will be in the forefront of that battle. He who has any knowledge of army life knows that a great army is composed of all classes.
“The masses will be restless under their restraints, but will be conscious of their weakness as compared with the kings and princes, financial, social, religious and political, who will then hold sway. The masses have no sympathy with anarchy. They realize truly that the worst form of government is better than none. ”

“ In the end of the Age, the feet members of the Body of Christ will be illuminated by the Truth and will shine forth—not like the Head, but as polished brass. We have shining upon us with almost burning brightness the focused rays of Divine inspiration and revelation from the past 6,000 years. How it should consume in us all the dross of selfishness! ”

“ Pope Martin stated the matter in his own behalf as follows: “All the earth is my diocese, and I am the ordinary of all men, having the authority of the King of all kings upon subjects. I am all in all, and above all, so that God Himself, and I, the vicar of God, have both one consistory, and I am able to do almost all that God can do. In all things that I list my will is to stand for reason, for I am able by the law to dispense above the law, and of wrong to make justice in correcting laws and changing them. ”