God’s witnesses testify not only against antichristian errors, but also against infidelity and the immorality it occasions.  When he ceases to have witnesses there will be none to testify against either the one or the other.  The world must then be deluged in infidelity and atheism.  This agrees with the representation given by the apostle; who describes the enemies of God as refusing graves to his slaughtered witnesses, and causing their dead bodies to lie exposed to public view, that they may rejoice over them, and congratulate one another on their deliverance from the company of those who had disturbed them in their sinful indulgences; and such as continuing to be the state of “the people, and kindreds, and tongues, and nations,” till the witnesses are raised from the dead and ascend to heaven in the presence of their enemies; when Christianity will revive, and Christ’s reign on earth begin.

These representations may be designed to intimate that the term in which infidelity will appear to be universal, will be so short that the warnings of the faithful will not be forgotten—­that they will be kept in mind by the exultations occasioned by deliverance from the fears of religion, and from the presence of those who had excited those fears, by exhibiting proofs of religion which they could not refute.  And how natural and common are such exultations, with those devoid of religious fear?  But agreeably to the view given by the apostle, when such shall have become the state of the world, and the nations shall be thus felicitating themselves in full persuasion that all religion is a dream, and death an eternal sleep, the signals of Christ’s coming to take the kingdom, will be given, and witnesses of the truth of Christianity, which cannot be disputed, suddenly arise, to the surprize and confusion of scoffing sinners; multitudes of whom will be swept off by desolating judgments to prepare the way for “the people of the saints of the most high, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom.”  For that desolations are to close the sad scene of apostasy, and prepare Christ’s way is clearly foretold; particularly by St. John, who beheld, in vision, “the kings of the earth, and of the whole world, gathered to the battle of the great day of God Almighty;” and saw such an effusion of their blood, that “the harvest of the earth might be considered as reaped, the vine of the earth as cut and cast into the great wine press of the wrath of God, whence flowed blood to the horses bridles.” *

Thus from the general tenor of prophecy it appears that infidelity will have overspread the world when the Son of man shall come to reign upon it:  And as this agrees to no other coming of his foretold by the prophets, there can be no reasonable doubt what coming is intended in the text.  If we keep these things in mind, we will not wonder at the declensions of religion and prevalence of infidelity.  They will remind us of the remark made by our Savior to his sorrowing disciples just before his sufferings, “these things have I told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them.”