l
Christian living, this reincarnation of Christ in daily experience,
this translation of His character, this manifestation of His guiding
and ruling presence, not by the fact that we must die and appear
before God, but by the fact the Lord Himself is coming, may come at
any time, that any moment we may meet Him at His judgment seat.

In all the universe of God there is nothing so impressive as the
thought that you, that I, that we must give a personal account to
God for the manner in which we have used our time, our talent, our
opportunity and substance; and when we are told--as we are told in
Holy Scripture--that any moment we may be summoned to give an
account of our stewardship, and that without dying, just suddenly,
without a moment's warning, translated bodily and with all the sense
of the daily life we have been living upon us into the presence of
Him whose name we have been professing--impressiveness has reached
its ultimate and exhortation the fullest leverage of appeal.

And he who says the Coming of Christ considered as a doctrine, as a
truth or a motive, is not intensely practical and all-compelling to
Christian devotion and service, is either blindly and excuselessly
ignorant of the Word of God or brutally and perversely guilty of
denying a truth that flashes like lightning from one end of the
Bible to the other and illuminates every hortative passage in the
Word of God.

When thus you are face to face with the indisputable fact that every
basic doctrine of the Christian faith, every outshining promise of
hope, of comfort, of consolation, of abiding peace, every appeal to
the noblest and purest life as a Christian, every demand that the
Christian shall unceasingly be the light of heaven in the spiritual
darkness of earth is bound up inextricably with the fact of the
Second Coming, it carries with it the inevitable corollary that the
Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ as a certified and imminent
event is the very sum and substance of all available motives that
can lead to a life of practical service to God and man.

III

Only at the Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ Will Redemption be
Complete and the Blood of the Cross be Justified

OUR Lord Jesus Christ did not come into this world that He might go
through the unspeakable horror of the cross; He did not hang on that
brutal and torturing instrument of death as the criminal of the
universe; He did not receive the down sweep of the essential