Nations and kingdoms rise and fall, sometimes by God's immediate direction and through the instrumentality of men foreordained to the occasion, sometimes by Divine permission or allowance incident to the exercise of individual or national agency. I cannot believe that God ever planted the noisome fungus of tyranny or kingly despotism. Nevertheless it has been permitted to flourish rankly in the soil of ignorance and false tradition; and its spores have been surreptitiously scattered even in the fields of fair freedom's flowers. With God as with man there is a time of seeding and a time of harvest. Only now has the world been even measurably prepared for government based on the consent of the people, for the kind of government that shall yet be established in other lands as it has been already developed in America. Fifty, twenty, aye, even ten years ago, to have attempted forcibly to uproot the weeds of autocracy would have endangered the precious wheat of real democracy. There is a dominant element of timeliness in all the works of God. Verily He doeth all things well, and in propitious season. Have you never read that in the last days all things shall be in commotion? We live in the predicted time of shaking, when every unstable structure shall totter, and only such as are established upon an eternal foundation shall stand. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews so understood, as witness his admonitory precept: "See that ye refuse not him that speaketh." The reference is to Christ. "For if they escaped not who refused him that spake on earth, much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven: Whose voice then shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." (Heb. 12:25-27.) The things of God are not to be shaken even by the boom of man's heaviest artillery; they shall abide in spite of bomb and shell. But the works of human craft shall be shattered. Not only so as to material structures, but likewise man's sophistries, erroneous theories, conjectures, philosophy, and such science as is falsely so called. Institutions of human origin may persist long years, but shall surely come to an end. In and after the resurrection they shall have neither place nor name. Institutions established by the authority of heaven alone can endure.