ing God, and in Jesus' name proclaims, "_I am the resurrection
and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he
live_;" and, amid the very ruins of destroyed cities, and the crumbling
heaps of their perished memorials, beholds the assurances that Satan's
rule of ruin shall not be perpetual, anticipates the day when the course
of sin and misery shall be reversed, and teaches Adam's sons to face the
foe, and chant forth that heaven-born note of victorious faith, "_Oh,
thou enemy! destructions are come to a perpetual end._"

Come forth, trembling skeptic, from the cave of thy dark invariable
experience of death and destruction, and from the vain sparks of thy
misgiving hopes of an ungodly eternity to come less miserable than the
past, and lift thine eyes to this heavenly sunrising on the dark
mountain tops of futurity, the like of which thou didst never dream of
in all thy Pantheistic reveries. Search over all the religions of the
world--the hieroglyphics of Egypt, the arrow-headed inscriptions of
Assyria, the classic mythologies of graceful Greece and iron Rome, the
monstrous shasters of thine Indian Pundits, or the more chaotic clouds
of thy German philosophies--in none of them wilt thou ever find this
divine thought, _an end of destructions--a perpetual end_. Cycles of
ruin and renovation, and of renovation and ruin, vast cycles, if you
will, but evermore ending in dire catastrophies to gods and men--an
everlasting succession of death and destructions--is the fearful vista
which all the religions of man, and thine own irreligion, present to thy
terrified vision. But thou wast created in the image of the living God,
and durst not rest satisfied with any such prospect. Now I come in the
name of the Lord to tell thee, that "God so loved the world that he gave
his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him _should not
perish, but have everlasting life_;" and I demand of thee that thou
acknowledge this promise of life everlasting to be the word of that
living God, and to show cause, if any thou hast, why thou dost
relinquish thy birthright, and spurn the gift of everlasting life which
is in Christ Jesus our Lord?

But, if thou hast no sufficient cause why thou shouldest choose death
rather than life, then hear, and your soul shall live, while I relate
the promise which God hath made of old to our fathers, and hath
fulfilled to us, their children, by raising up his Son, Jesus Christ,
from the