CHAPTER X 1. An incurable optimist at the front. 2. I knew we were to be punished by the stripes of men. 3. "But we have forgotten God! We are too proud to pray to the God who made us." 4. Isaiah's message to the Brith Colony of Hebrews in the British Isles. 5. Gentlemen of the cloth cannot sidestep or duck this question. 6. Westminster coronation stone was Israel's throne and house of God. 7. A new world brewing; the new era. 8. Where unionism falls down. 9. Why the Turk is Edom of the Bible. 10. General Allenby's campaign was foretold three thousand years ago. 11. He lead God's battle axe in Palestine. 12. Will university professors be selected as fishers of men. 13. Higher critics fail to get "my goat." 14. What the old lion and the young lions did in Palestine in answer to prayer. 15. Armageddon is coming soon. 16. The world has to reap what the world sows. 17. What H. G. Wells does not know about our Bible. 18. Business men with their good horse sense will see God's plan. CHAPTER X. Do you wonder that during the late warwhen almost everyone at times lost heart and felt that we were nearly at the end of our tether-I never for one moment felt that we would not win! I was the incurable optimist! At the Front a half-brick diet was my more or less constant companion, mostly deserved for breaking rules and the King's regulations while endeavouring to push on with roads. One compliment paid me I remember. After the Armistice, when every officer's record, ability, capacity, and usefulness had to be placed on paper and sent to the War Office, my record was sent to a certain majer-general, and he endorsed on it: "A splendid organizer of Labor, That was going pretty strong for a regular soldier not given to sprinkling sugar on your army rations. But the main thing was "Constant in Adversity," and I could be constant in adversity, because I believed the God-inspired words spoken by the prophets, and I believed God meant just what they said He did. Goodness knows, there was room for a few optimists in the fall of 1917 at Paschendale and in the spring of '18 in front of Amiens! I knew Israel was to be punished in measure by the stripes of men, and we certainly got an overflowing dose, but no more than we deserved, and no more than was necessary to bring all the nations of Israel to their knees in prayer and humiliation, asking for the help of the Almighty God. From that time on we went forward until we won. However, we still worship idols and golden calves, idols of wealth and idols of fashion and popularity; idols of ease and comfort and the movies! We nationally waste much substance in more or less riotous living; we have food almost to burn, while sections of Europe and Asia are dying by the millions, without causing us to turn a hair; yet they are our brothers. Abraham Lincoln in a proclamation to the American nation, in 1863, after describing the benefits bestowed upon his nation, said: "But we have forgotten God! We are too proud to pray to the God who made us." I wonder what Lincoln would say to-day, could he see the nation he was chief executive of fiftyeight years ago. If it was true then that you had forgotten God, then how much more true it is today, with the mad hustle and bustle of life in your big cities, and the Lord's Day given over largely to golf, motoring, and pleasure, while the churches with their few hundreds languish. Well, gentlemen, don't forget that you will have to pay the bill and will continue to do so, if you do not mend your ways, as you did in the sixties; and the judgment for you and your sons and daughters is as surely being ground out by the mills of God as it was sixty years ago before your Civil War, when Lincoln saw it and made no bones of plainly telling you about it in his proclamations to your nation. As Boss Tweed once remarked, when caught with the goods, what are you going to do about it? For these and other national sins and shortcomings and because of our failure to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God, as your martyred President, Abraham Lincoln, did during his years of service to America, and as George Washington did before him, we will require another term of many years of war to purify our nation and yours, and we will surely get it in Armageddon which still has to be fought; but it will be won as was the late war, with God's help, by His battle axe and weapons of war, with which He promises to smash nations and kingdoms, i.e., by Israel, His chosen servant, "in whom and by whom he will yet be glorified." 1. Listen, O isles [British], unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far [U.S.A.] 3. Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified. 6. And he said, It is a light thing that thou [O isles and people from far] shouldest be my servant [what for?] to raise up the tribes of Jacob [why the isles if the Ten Tribes were not in them?], and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee [isles, or Israel] for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth. (Isa. 49:1, 3, 6.) Now, to every preacher I submit that as the end of the earth is not yet with us, somewhere is God's chosen people Israel who are the lightbearers to the Gentiles. Gentlemen, where are they? Are they in Russia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Africa, or Iceland, or where? This same people must possess all the other marks of Israel, among which are the following: They must keep the Sabbath. They must be invincible in war. They must possess the gate of their enemies,-the sea. They must be not the least, but the chiefest of nations. They must possess Joseph's blessings, now in the hands of Britain, U.S.A., and the other Anglo-Saxon nations. They must have ruling over the nation or company of nations, a King, of the Royal seed of David. Who are the light-bearers to-day to the Gentile heathen nations? Surely it is none other |