Chapter IV.

This Age and the Satanic System.


It may also be concluded from the study of the ages that God has not
been pleased to meet the presumptuous claims of Satan or of man by a
simple denial of those claims; He has chosen, rather, to bring
everything to an experimental test. One advantage of this method is
obvious: every mouth will be stopped, and the entire universe of beings
will see clearly the utter folly of that which might have been
arbitrarily denied. Man can no longer claim that his conscience is
sufficient to guide him to his highest destiny; since the whole race,
when standing on that basis before God, so utterly failed that their
destruction, by a flood, was necessary: in like manner, by the history
of a most favored people in the age preceding the first advent of
Christ, man has demonstrated his own inability to do right or to keep
the law. In the present age, man proves his separation from his Creator
by his spirit of self-sufficiency and positive rejection of God. The
present issue between God and man is one of whether man will accept
God's estimate of him, abandon his hopeless self-struggle, and cast
himself only on God who alone is sufficient to accomplish his needed
transformation. All Divine love, wisdom, and power have wrought to make
these conditions open to man; and when this last and supreme effort of
God has been rejected, the final pleading with man must be forever
past, and the long delayed judgment upon sin be executed in
righteousness.