These are stern truths which it is well for us to bear in mind amidst the terrible scenes which are now being enacted in the present war. The New Testament begins with promises of peace, and it ends with a vision of peace and glory in which God will wipe away all tears from our eyes; but the warning is conveyed to us, through the mouth of the last Apostle, that this blessed condition cannot be reached except through a manifestation of Divine justice and Divine wrath, which will bring upon earth and upon all mankind inconceivable miseries. The sins of men must be brought into judgment. The Divine righteousness must expose their real character by the consequences they naturally involve. The truth must be manifested that there is a Judge of all the earth, Who brings every work of man into judgment, whether it be good or whether it be evil; and the evil in the works of men is so deep and far-reaching that its judgment must needs involve the most terrible suffering. In proportion as God takes to Himself His great power and reigns, the first result must be seen in these agonies of human nature, and must culminate in the disruption of the very elements of nature itself. It is well we should remind ourselves how fearfully these pictures of the Apostle of love have been fulfilled in the history of the world since his time. It was not long after he wrote, when a series of persecutions broke upon the Christian Church, which were at length avenged by terrible intestine wars between the heads of the Roman Empire, and in due course of time, by the overthrow of that Empire itself in a long series of wars and devastations, which can only be fitly described in some of the vivid language of the Apocalypse itself. It would be appalling if we could realize the extent to which Europe was filled with “blood and fire and vapour of smoke” during the five or six centuries which elapsed between the overthrow of the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages. Then followed the incalculable miseries and untold bloodshed involved in the contest between the Christian and the Mohammedan world, throughout the long period of the Crusades. Add to this all the intestine wars between Christians themselves during the Middle Ages, and the fearful devastation of which the East was the victim in the course of Mohammedan conquests and revolutions, and you have before your eyes a picture not adequately described elsewhere than in this terrible Book. The Reformation was followed by a long series of wars, during which a great part of the surface of Europe suffered the most cruel devastations; and even to the present day the whole world open to our observation has been suffering from almost continuous bloodshed in one part or other of its surface.