T HE K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S 145 and Isaiah tells us that this shall be accomplished by means of an earth quake, (Isa. 29:6) : “ Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earth quake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.” If you will read the fourteenth chapter of Zechariah, you will get the full details of the time and condition. Is Jerusalem to be a seaport, and the Dead Sea a great harbor for the commerce of the world? The Lord is a great engineer and He has great things in store for the Land and the People. A little more- Bible reading will help us all, and we commend it to civil engineers, college professors and preachers.^T. O. H. sfe afe S O M E Metkodists W k o Dare , A prominent Methodist minister of Los Angeles, being embarrassed for want of a text from which to preach, recently chose the “ Bible Institute of Los-Angeles” as the theme for a morning sermon. At the root of his dislike for Bible Institutes, it developed that the teaching of the second coming of Christ was a particularly sore spot. Said he, “ Any man or group of people who take advantage of an era like this to foist an enthus iastic and extreme doctrine of the second coming of Christ upon ill-taught people, Who are cultivating the expectation that Jesus is coming back in physical presence to sit on a throne for a thousand years, while the devil is chained and the wicked dead lie in their graves, such people,.I- say, are natural enemies to men who are committed to a long-distance program of human betterment.” Among the “ ill-taught” men who believe in the second coming of Christ are the'following Methodist scholars: Dr. L. W. Munhall, the greatest evangelist the Methodist church has had in America, says: “ I have known personally every prominent evangelist in America and Great Britain and Ireland in the last fifty years, and every man of them with possibly a single exception, was an ardent premillennialist. There is no such incentive to evangelism as an intelligent Scriptural belief in the personal premillennial advent of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” Dr. Bartholomew of the First Methodist Church, Mt. Vernon, N. Y., who has the largest men’s Bible class in the country, says: “ The great truth regarding the second coming came to me and I began to preach it. I was just enough, of a theorist to say, ‘The proof of a thing is what it does.’ I preached it. A new spirit came into the church. I began to teach it to men— began with ten men in a Bible class. Today I have fourteen hundred men in the largest Bible class in this country. I began to teach ft to women. We started with twenty. We now have seven hundred women studying the Scriptures. Talk as you please, Jesus as the pre-eminent Lord, as the eternal, in carnate, perfect Man and very God shall come and reign.” Dr. W. E. Blackstone, .Methodist preacher and author, says: “ Christ’s return will be premillennial. The time ,of it is uncertain and im minent (Mt. 24:42). The blessed hope begets a purifying separating power in the heart, winning men unto holiness, love and service. If the Holy Ghost deemed it so important, is it not worthy of our attention?” Dr. Lincoln A. Ferris, pastor First Methodist Church, San Diego, Cal., and noted lecturer, says: “ I believe in a pre-existent Jesus, a divine Jesus, a humiliated Jesus, a cruci fied Jesus, an exalted Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, a Jesus who shall come again in His glory with all His holy angels, and sit on the throne of His glory.”
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