with the workings of God's providence here and now. For though the
characteristic of that providence as we see it is merciful forbearance,
yet we are not left without many a premonition of the mighty final 'day
of the Lord.' For long years or centuries a nation or an institution
goes on slowly departing from truth, forgetting the principles on which
it rests, or the purposes for which it exists. Patiently God pleads with
the evil-doers, lavishes gifts and warnings upon them. He holds back the
inevitable avenging as long as restoration is yet possible--and _His_
eye and heart see it to be possible long after men conclude that the
corruption is hopeless. But at last comes a period when He says, 'I have
long still holden My peace, and refrained Myself, now will I destroy';
and with a crash one more hoary iniquity disappears from the earth which
it has burdened so long. For sixty times sixty slow, throbbing seconds,
the silent hand creeps unnoticed round the dial and then, with whirr and
clang, the bell rings out, and another hour of the world's secular day
is gone. The billows of the thunder-cloud slowly gather into vague form,
and slowly deepen in lurid tints, and slowly roll across the fainting
blue; they touch--and then the fierce flash, like the swift hand on the
palace-wall of Babylon, writes its message of destruction over all the
heaven at once. We know enough from the history of men and nations since
Sodom till to-day, to recognise it as God's plan to alternate long
patience and 'sudden destruction':--

'The mills of God grind slowly,
But they grind exceeding small';

and every such instance confirms the expectation of the coming of that
great and terrible day of the Lord, whereof all epochs of convulsion and
ruin, all falls of Jerusalem, and Roman empires, Reformations, and
French Revolutions, and American wars, all private and personal