ANTI-CHRIST.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 7, Issue 340, 11 January 1866, Page 1

ANTI-CHRIST.

(From the Spectator.) The Bishop of Oxford spoke the other day with a solemnity which, if sincere, could not be too deep, of “ the miserable voice” which has gone forth to the diocese of Natal, “teaching the heathen to distrust the Word of God.” “ Shall not Cbristam England,” he says, “ drown it in a universal declaration of the truths of Christianity ?” For our parts, we should join with all our hearts to drowu any such “ miserable voice.” There canuot be a more evil lesson either to teach or to learn—a lesson more destructive of the spiritual life of man—than distrusting the Word of God. But we never met with a more elaborate lesson in that perilous and destructive art than the Bishop’s own speech on the coming of Anti-Christ. It is like one of those artificial, glazed pictures on a papiermache surface in which a Bible subject is made incongruous and ridiculous by the coarse, staring colors stamped into the showy cardboard. If any one cau inspire distrust iu the Word of God by using great prophecies for the sake of a palpably false and meretricious rhetorical effect, the Bishop’s solemn avowal that he hears the footsteps of the great Anti-Christ and sees the outriders of his evil pomp, is more likely to produce that distrust than all the errors disseminated concerning the Pentateuch put together. AntiChrist, he says is just upon us, with “ the moonlight of its semi-intelligence.” “ The stream flows on under the moonlight shining of its semi-intelligence with the most delicious smoothness where is nothing to thwart it.” The Bishop of Natal’s and other liberal criticisms on the Bible are “ the precursing atmosphere which comes before his advent.” A “ precursing atmosphere” appears to be an atmosphere cursing us in advance, for it seems that it brings with it all sorts of malaria, moral and physical, especially the infection of critical doubt, and cattle disease, and.the cholera! “Believing as I believe” said the Bishop, “that there may bo upon the wind those footfall echoes of the coming of the great Anti-Christ, and that this we hear whispered here and there, and see spreading we know not how, through the air, is just the precursiug time, if ever the time was, to be up and doing. There seem to me to be many things which ought to warn us that this is a season when the judgments of the Lord are abroad. Is not the mysterious disease which lias attacked our cattle at this moment one of God’s writing, a writing on a nation’s wall to warn us to turn to Him ? Look at the newspapers. They tell us that meu who have studied the subject most cannot teil whether it is an imported or an indigenous disease.” [lf they could, the Bishop of course means the disease would bo iatelli gible, and, therefore, not a writing on the wall.] “ Men of the greatest skill and wisdom tell you to kill at once every diseased subject, and hope for the best. Then, again, there is a whisper of the onward march of the pestilence of cholera now rustling iu the breeze of the evening, and making men’s iiearts ache with tiie fear of what they may find when they wake in the morning. Are not these God’s handwriting on the wall ?” Who does not see the artificial stamp on all this ecclesiastical carving and gilding, with its whispering breezes, its footlall echoes, its precursing atmosphere, its moonlight semiintelligence, and then-—to carry the thing a little more effectually into the region of ordinary men’s thoughts and imaginations—its irrelevant cattle disease, its bewildered veterinary surgeons, whose ignorance specially constitutes the Xinderpesta “ handwriting on the wall,” its terrible antitype of a day of judgment in the heartbreaking recommendation to graziers to kill at once all injected cattle, and finally its rumour of epidemic cholera and possible collapse—ail of course closely connected with those criticisms on the Pentateuch which Anti-Christ sends in their company to prepare his way. Does the bishop wish us seriously to believe that by painting in this animated way bis vision of the coming Anti-Christ, and expressing his affecting readiness, in the absence of collateral evidence of its truth, to accept the Kimlerpest and veterinary ignorance as a confirmation of that anticipation, he is really doing something to counteract “distrust of the

Word of God ?” For our own parts, we never before met with a worse farrago of hollow and artificial pieties under the drapery of the Biblical images. Distrust of the Word of God ! Can any one who ever really attempted to fathom the meaning of the Apostles when they spoke of the manifestation of Anti Christ show a deeper distrust of the Word of God than by pouring forth this stream of meretricious rubbish and borrowing for it the solemnity of prophetic language? Imagine St. Paul inferring a manifestation of “ the man of sin, the son of perdition, who exalteth himself over ail that is called God, or that is worshipped/ 1 from the threefold phenomenon of a laborious and anxious investigation into the historical authenticity of Exodus, a new cattle disease, and a possible plague! “ The “ revelation of the wicked one/ 3 by which St. Paul avows that he means a critical and deadly, if not final outburst of the deepest moral evil in the human heart against the authority of divine righteousness “ the revelation of the wicked one, whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power, and lying signs, and wonders, and all deceivableness of unrighteousness for those that perish because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved/ 3 this it is that the Bishop of Oxford solemnly identifies with a painstaking and most conscientious investigation which, whether it is distinguished by adequate critical skill or not, is certainly distinguished by a simple “love of muh/ 3 of which the right reverend critic is incapable. And because so laborious a work falls rather fiat ou an English assembly as an equivalent fer Anti-Christ, the Bishop throws us in the cattle plague aud possible cholera to deepen his background of artificial awe. When the Apostle spoke of an AntiChrist who was then partially manifested aud fighting the last death struggle with Christ, and whose perfect, manifestation was delayed or “ let,' -3 as St. Paul implies by the better and sounder elements which still lingered in the resisting Jewish law and Roman statesmanship, they were talking of something very real aud visible to their own eyes, as they watched the last healthy life gradually deserting the worn out Jewish and Roman institutions, and transferring to the faith of Christ. The old society, they said, must be worse before it could be better—that is, the good that was left in it must completely desert it, till it became pure and simple AntiChrist—sensualism pride, malice, cruelly, hypoersy, unalloyed, and theu it would fall beneath the arm of the Lord, We certainly should be far from denying that what the Apostles said about “ Anti-Christ” and the *■ man of sin,” as they impersonated the e .il principle which countermined the Christian Gospel, has an application to the present day —though it assuredly was not, when first said, predictive, but descriptive, language. Of course, wherever a thoroughly evil, principle is begginning to come out in its nakedness of evil but is not yet quit of alloying elements of good, then we have a manifestation of Anti-Christ partially begun, but hindered or “ let 33 by the better elements associated with it. So it was, no doubt, in that Southern Confederacy, built on the “comer stone/’ not of Christ, but of slavery, for the virtual success of which the Bishop of Oxford, some two years ago, under the form of a prayer for peace, directed his clergy to pray. If ever in our time there has been a manifestation of Anti-Christ, it has surely been in the deliberate attempt to reconstruct a new society on the basis of cruelty and a sin. But, speaking generally, the language of the Apostles about Anti-Christ cannot have any clear application to states of society in which good and evil are so closely interlaced—intermingled as the wheat and the tares which were to grow together till the harvest—as they are now. The peculiarity of the present state of society, in litis country at least, intellectual no less than moral and social, is that there is no clear field of battle between good and evil, that every such battle is on a small scale, within the most restricted limits, al ways hampered by the danger of destroying good in the ailemptiouprootevil,andwherever successfully fought, preceded, and necessarily preceded, by the longest and minutest studyin order to discriminate the good from the evil elements. Our lime—here ia England

at least—is not a time when any sincere man can profess to be hearing “ the footfall echoes of the great Anti-Christ.lt is the sifting time which so long precedes any such final struggle—and not indeed an advanced stage of that sifting time. If there be any vestige of Anti-Christ at all, it is in the religious insincerity which affects to see him in the anxious labors of honest men to distinguish truth from falsehood in every field, whether that of science, history, or spiritual creed. Ours is an embarrassed and complicated age, ■with young tares amidst the thickest wheat, and young wheat amidst the thickest tares, and the two often very very difficult to distinguish from each other. The only unalloyed evil that we can distinctly discern iu the present day is the insincere attempt to ignore this stale of things, and pretend, with the Bishop of Oxford, that Anti-Christ is at the bottom of all the apparent tolerance, and c aritj l -, and fearless investigation of the present day, simply because these look so little like Anti-Christ and Anti-Christ is so sure todisguise himself. The dogmatists will not see candour or the sincere love of truth, even where it exists anti is conspicuous, and prefer instead to suppose that it is the disguise of some subtle evil. There is no doubt a charm in the clear hand-to-hand conflict with definite evil such as we of the present day, who have a very different task before us, and a much more tasking if much less perilous one, can can only too well appreciate. But this is just what men who talk like the Bishop of Oxford do not feel. As a poet of our. day has writte ' : Oh. that tha armies indeed were arrayed! Oh jay of th« onset! Sound thou trumpet of God ! Come forth, Great Cause, to array us; Kin? and leader appear! Thy soldiers sorrowing seek thee! Would that the armies indeed were arrayed! Oh, where is the battle ? Neither battle I see, nor arraying, nor King in Israel, Only infinite jumble, and mess, and dislocation. BaoXcd by a stlemu appeal, “for God's sake, do not stir there!” —Those who wish to persuade themselves that the Bishop of Natal, Dean Stanley, and the rest are of the train of Anti-Christ, do not. really feel this charm. These rhetorical flourishes are the artifices hy which they attempt to steel themselves and their adherents to the clear evidence of what is candid and earnest in their opponents’ creeds. If they did nut stimulate themselves hy getting up fictitious panics—which they know to be fictitious—of the " footfall echoes of the great Anti-Christ,” they would be obliged to look closer at their opponents thoughts, and to admit that much therein is very true and worthy to be known. If they believed what they say, if Dr Wilberfurce genuinely held that an honest belief on the evidence of the late growth of the Pentateuch into its present shape is a pure lie of the great Deceiver’s in league with evil men, would he not set about exposing the lie, and showing the wicked motives closely linked together in its publication, instead of talking about “ moonlight semi-intelligence,” “ footfall echoes,” and “ handwritings on the wall ?” There is no more hollow and ordinary clerical affectation than this of attributing Satanic guile and fraud to everything that looks simple and charitable, as an excuse for not fighting wbh it hand-to-hand. Those who cry out “AntiChrist” directly they sec something they do not choose to encounter, are nearer to tha spirit of delusion, of which they speak so freely, than they are aware. No one who makes Anti-Christ a rhetorical climax for something personally offensive to himself can enter for a moment into that Apostolical spirit which wished to see the evil stripped bare only that it might better know it for evil, and secure the triumph of good. An equally truthful spirit applied to our present world, would recognise at once that no passages of the Bible have less that is suitable to our day than these about Anti-Christ — that ours is a day of small tilings, of confused good and evil, of evil at the heart of good, of good at the heart of evil, of faith iu doubt aud doubt, in faith, of purity iu sensualism, and sensualism in purity, of selfishness in self-denial, and self-denial in selfishness—in short, one of the days of trial, and not yet a day of judgment.