Perdition

“ Many tribulations and hardships shall come on this world before its end, and those are the proclaimers of everlasting perdition to evil men, who afterwards for their crimes suffer eternally in the swart hell. ”

“ It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. ”

“ The hungry he hath filled with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away"? If we believe this to be true, who would wish to be found among authorities, for whom so certain perdition is prepared and imminent? ”

“ The invisible world, moreover, with its mysterious attraction and horrible fascination, was ever present and real to every one. Demons were always around him, to smite him with sickness, to ruin his pitiful little cornfield or vineyard, or to lure his soul to perdition; while angels and saints were similarly ready to help him, to listen to his invocations, and to intercede for him at the throne of mercy, which he dared not to address directly. ”

“ Full of life and generous vigor, you bind to your heart a putrefying corpse! You court your own destruction, clinging to a vain belief in privileged orders, in worn-out relics, in the bones of dead men, in mouldering escutcheons and forgotten coats of arms—and yet in your inmost heart you are forced to acknowledge that your brother nobles have deserved their punishment, that forgetfulness were mercy for them! ”

“ When the stunned soul can first lift tired eyes On her changed world of ruin, waste and wrack, Ah, what a pang of aching sharp surprise Brings all sweet memories of the lost past back, With wild self-pitying grief of one betrayed, Duped in a land of dreams where Truth is dead! ”

“ Now therefore to see the world to which we belong destroyed at once—not a single person only, not a particular family only, nor yet a nation (even that which we are most nearly interested in and concerned for) , but the whole world, I say, sinking at once, and no ark provided, no possible way left of escaping for any one from the common ruin, this makes a difference between the desolation that has been and what we yet are to expect. ”

“ To me, as to all of us, life has brought bitter trials. These dark robes tell of the loss of one whom I loved as my own soul, and even at this moment I am threatened with terrible calamity—perhaps with exile, perhaps with death. On all sides, there are terrors and anxieties, and the state of society seems to portend catastrophe and the vengeance of heaven, for wickedness can hardly go to any greater lengths than now. ”

“ Those nations are doomed to death who bury, in the corruption of criminal desire, the awful sense of an existing God, cast off the consoling hope of immortality, and seek refuge from despair in the dreariness of annihilation. ”

“ Over them, we find the wrecks of a former world—once as beautiful, as thickly peopled, but more thoughtless and more wicked than the present, which was hurled into one general chaos, and its component, but incongruous parts, amalgamated in awful mockery by the deluge—that tremendous evidence of the wrath of Heaven. ”

“ May the Eternal grant me to praise thee!
In the present course, dangerous
Our work; destruction is a slight impulse of wrath.
They reckon of the saints a tribe,
King of heaven, may I be eloquent about thee! ”

“ Nothing is left me now, not even the consciousness that I have helped to win the Cause for which I battled. All have fallen into the abyss. The deluge has drowned us all. Everything dear to me which I wished to preserve has been destroyed with my own ruin. ”

“ Think ye that Heaven will long withhold its vengeance from atrocities that cry aloud to it night and day—that the innocent blood ye have spilt will sink, unavenged, into the earth? Fear and tremble, for the hour of wrath and woe is at hand! ”

“ You will recall more clearly than I certain horrible, catastrophic, universal-ruin passages in Revelation—monsters swallowing the universe, blood and fire and clouds and an eternal crash, rolling ruin enveloping all things—well, all that's come. There are, perhaps, ten million men dead of this war and, perhaps, one hundred million persons to whom death would be a blessing. ”

“ And greed, again, and the blind lust of honours Which force poor wretches past the bounds of law, And, oft allies and ministers of crime, To push through nights and days with hugest toil To rise untrammelled to the peaks of power— These wounds of life in no mean part are kept Festering and open by this fright of death. For ever we see fierce Want and foul Disgrace Dislodged afar from secure life and sweet, Like huddling Shapes before the doors of death. ”

“ Sacrifices are made ready and libations poured, with tearful eyes strained towards the far horizon; heaven and earth, nay, the very trees and plants, all seeming to sympathise with their sorrow. And when, in response to prayers and libations, these wanderers return not, where shall their spirits find repose? Verily there shall be a famine over the land, [1] and the people be scattered abroad. Alas! such is life, and such it has ever been. ”

“ So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then {301} shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. ”

“ Death and Devastation are the certain Consequences of Delay; every Moment is infinitely precious; an Hour lost may deluge your Country in Blood, and entail perpetual Slavery upon the few of your Posterity who may survive the Carnage. ”

“ Here the lost are so crowded together that they have no room to move. This is the deepest and widest hell of all, and here the throng of sufferers must endure their torments until that day when a great cloud shall appear in the heavens, announcing the end of the world. ”

“ What thousands thou hast usher'd in
To this sad world of guilt and sorrow;
But whatsoe'er thy faults have been,
Thy reign, old boy, is o'er to-morrow.
So, part we friends, for thou hast dried
The tear from many a weeping eye ”

“ All suffering doth destroy, or is destroyed, Even by the sufferer; and, in each event, Ends:—Some, with hope replenished and rebuoyed, Return to whence they came—with like intent, And weave their web again; some, bowed and bent, Wax grey and ghastly, withering ere their time, And perish with the reed on which they leant; Some seek devotion, toil, war, good or crime, According as their souls were formed to sink or climb. ”

“ No censer with its breath of spice,
No land to mourn your funeral pyre;
King, whose subjects felt your fire,
Now dead, now stone, without a slave,
Unfeared, unloved, you have no grave.
Poor God, who cannot understand! ”

“ In wild sorrow I recognise thy distance from our home, thy hostility towards the ancient glorious heaven. In vain are thy tumult and thy rage. Indestructible remains the cross—a victorious banner of our race. ”

“ How very different is the case with us at the present period. Although in one respect, we have reason to mourn and lament, when we see hundreds of millions of the inhabitants of the earth, rushing down into the vortex of ruin in their wickedness. ”

“ Hunger and sin and temptation, and wider still, that tragic word which includes them all—evil. Forgiveness and defence and deliverance—what sorrows these presuppose! Each step of these latter supplications seems to carry us deeper into the shadow and the darkness, each to present a darker aspect of what human life really is; and now that we have reached the last, we have an all-comprehensive cry which holds within its meaning every ill that flesh is heir to. ”

“ Is it not indeed truly surprising to see this People, which, in the day of its greatest prosperity, and two centuries before its fall, had the fatal foreknowledge of that fall, affirm with the same certainty, now when its ruin is consummated, its approaching resurrection? ”

“ Though now to Death I yield, and am his due, All that of me can die, yet, that debt paid, Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave His prey, nor suffer my unspotted soul For ever with corruption there to dwell ”

“ Everywhere and in all things is the corruption of the dead.
The very air you breathe is dust from the mingled bones of the dead. The earth is crammed with the dead of man and beast. The grain that is reaped and the flowers that bloom grow forth from the fatness of the grave and the impulse of corruption, watered by tears distilled from the heartache of the generations old who have sorrowed above that grave and wept and hoped in vain.
Put your ear to the bosom of old mother earth and you will hear a moaning and lament like unto women in travail who seek to bring to the birth. ”

“ We are dead men, as you see: We shall see you dead men, where Naught avails to take great care. After sins, of penitence. We too in the Carnival Sang our love-songs through the town Thus from sin to sin we all Headlong, heedless, tumbled down;-- Now we cry, the world around. ”

“ But looking at this scripture from the objector’s stand-point, the singular inquiry at once forces itself upon us, Can the immortal soul in its disembodied state suffer tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword!?
2 Cor. 4:16. “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” ”

“ The expression of the greatest distress, even bordering on despair, on the part of the besieged, the fearful expectation of the uncertain issue, and what the victor will determine concerning those unfortunate people, may all be read so plainly, and so naturally in the countenances of the inhabitants, who are imploring for mercy, from the hoary head to the suckling whom his mother holds up, that you quite forget yourself, and in the end scarcely believe it to be a painting before you. ”

“ In the old, feudal days of quick-spilled blood and easy death, there was a certain fateful, epoch-making cry which had power to carry dread or terror through the high ranks of the official world, while it brought to others exultant hopes of desires and ambitions at last to be fulfilled. ”

“ Victory, wealth, authority, happiness—all have departed, though bought by many a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their life and their toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honors, and their errors ”

“ We are called upon on all sides of this ancient quarrel to make what people call sacrifices—sacrifices of inherited predilections, of old-world ideas, and of ancient shibboleths, of perhaps ingrained prejudice. ”

“ But if he hear of our deaths, and what was the cause of it, he will on that account die an immature death; and the reproachful manner of our ruin will hasten his end, and will directly kill him; nay, will bring him to a miserable death, while he will make haste to rid himself out of the world, and bring himself to a state of insensibility, before the sad story of our end come abroad into the rest of the world. ”

“ Lord, I submit myself to Thee and eke to Fate, Content, if so Thou please, to suffer and to wait.
My enemies oppress and torture me full sore: But Paradise at last, belike, shall compensate.
Though Fate press hard on me, I trust in the Elect, [1] The Accepted One of God, to be my advocate.
With this the King turned to him and said, ‘O youth, after having rid me of one trouble, thou addest another to me: but tell me, where is thy wife and where is the wounded slave?’ ‘The slave lies in the tomb under the dome,’ answered the youth, ‘and she is in the chamber over against the gate. ”

“ Full well he knows that the chosen race will shortly have filled up the measure of their guilt, and wrath will come upon them to the uttermost. And as the vision of their ruin rises upon the eye of his spirit, with the long ages of unparalleled tribulation and despair which must succeed the catastrophe of the beloved city, he weeps as only Infinite Compassion can weep, and laments as only an incarnate God can lament:—"Oh that thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong to thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes ”

“ And then the greatest sorrow, the greatest suffering, the greatest poverty is found amongst them; the witness that they are under judgment. Over and over again in every century has solemnly come to pass what their forefathers cried, "His blood be upon us, and upon our children." We shall later point out the startling change which is coming upon them as a nation when the age ends. ”

“ To us it is only given to mourn over so noble a wreck. More than this no one should do. We may contemplate with reverence the mighty ruin; but the mysteries of its decay let no man presume to invade, unless, to use the language of the [476] greatest of our masters, he can tell how to minister to a diseased mind, pluck the sorrows which are rooted in the memory, and raze out the troubles that are written in the brain. ”

“ Till, desperate, he staked all on one cast,
And lost—was ruined—and fell down as slain,
Life, fortune, seeming at a moment past,
Like gambling pledges raked from Earth's rich hoard
By Death's strong hand, whose gains are ne'er restored. ”

“ For here they suffer ceaseless woe,
And dying to destruction go.
With pious care, each solemn day,
Will men their funeral offerings pay:
See, how the useful food they waste:
He who is dead no more can taste. ”

“ Yes, the crimes of the people will ascend to heaven, and remind God of their wickedness, and He will cause their city to become a heap of ruins and ashes, and there shall be death, and mourning, and hunger. ”

“ But, alas! many thus endowed by nature "have waged with fortune an unequal war;" and pining away in poverty and disappointment, have died broken-hearted—and been buried—some in unhonoured, some even in unwept graves! ”

“ Pestilence, famine, and war shall bring thee to utter desolation, until thou lie in heaps. Thy glory shall vanish, thy name become a reproach and a hissing, and the Gentiles shall level thy ruins and dwell upon them. ”