THE

GOSPEL MAGAZINE

AND

PROTESTANT BEACON.

66 COMFORT YE, COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE, SAITH YOUR GOD."

ENDEAVOURING TO KEEP THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT IN THE BOND OF PEACE."

JESUS CHRIST, THE SAME YESTERDAY, AND TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER. WHOM TO
KNOW IS LIFE ETERNAL."

W. H. COLLINGRIDGE, 117 To 119, ALDERSGATE STREET, E.C.

1866.

PREFACE.

THE flight of time becomes to us increasingly a matter of surprise. By comparison, it seems as though a year sped in the same time in which formerly it took a month to pass. Of course, this is to be ascribed, instrumentally, to occupation, and the conviction that each receding year must necessarily leave one the less.

But there is another fact connected with the flight of time which must not be overlooked; it is the very rapid development which marks the period in which we live. If biographers or historians were to dwell on characters or events at the same length, or in the detail which has marked the writings of bygone days, we had nearly said a volume would be needed where a page or two now suffice. Men's minds appear, in the age in which we live, to assimilate to our mode of travel. Instead of the seven or eight miles an hour in the old coaching days, some forty to fifty must be got over in the same time, or the traveller is not satisfied. He betrays a restlessness and an impatience which were scarcely perceptible in a bygone age. In like manner, we say, there is an unsettledness in the minds of men. Whilst events rapidly succeed each other, and the most remarkable changes are continuously occurring, socially, politically, and nationally, men in general are, notwithstanding, looking for still greater changes and yet more remarkable events. We believe that this very expectation upon the part, not merely of God's people, but of mankind generally, is among the significant signs and tokens that still greater events are at hand, and that a crisis is near.

That God's judgments have visited our land, who dares deny? What means the failure of some of our staple commodities, the cattle plague, the cholera, the wars and rumours of wars, which have marked the progress of the now-receding year? What have all these been but God's sore judgments on our own land and on neighbouring nations? Who but Jehovah Himself spoke in reference to the confusion and enthralment and gigantic commercial frauds that have, during the present year, brought ruin into thousands of households ?