What those awful words may mean I cannot say.  But this I say, that the Apostle would never have used such words, conveying so plain and so terrible a meaning to anyone who has ever seen or heard of a battle-field, if he had really meant by them nothing like a battle-field at all.

It may be that these words have fulfilled themselves many times—­at the fall of Jerusalem—­at the wars which convulsed the Roman empire during the first century after Christ—­at the final fall of the Roman empire before the lances of our German ancestors—­in many another great war, and national calamity, in many a land since then.  It may be, too, that, as learned divines have thought, they will have their complete fulfilment in some war of all wars, some battle of all battles; in which all the powers of evil, and all those who love a lie, shall be arrayed against all the powers of good, and all those who fear God and keep His commandments:  to fight it out, if the controversy can be settled by no reason, no persuasion; a battle in which the whole world shall discover that, even in an appeal to brute force, the good are stronger than the bad; because they have moral force also on their side; because God and the laws of His whole universe are fighting for them, against those who transgress law, and outrage reason.

The wisest of living Britons has said,—­“Infinite Pity, yet infinite rigour of Law.  It is so that the world is made.”  I should add, It is so the world must be made, because it is made by Jesus Christ our Lord, and its laws are the likeness of His character; pitiful, because Christ is pitiful; and rigorous, because He is rigorous.  So pitiful is Christ, that He did not hesitate to be slain for men, that mankind through Him might be saved.  But so rigorous is Christ, that He does not hesitate to slay men, if needful, that mankind thereby may be saved.  War and bloodshed, pestilence and famine, earthquake and tempest—­all of them, as sure as there is a God, are the servants of God, doing His awful but necessary work, for the final benefit of the whole human race.

It may be difficult to believe this:  at least to believe it with the same intense faith with which prophets and apostles of old believed it, and cried—­“When Thy judgments, O Lord, are abroad in the earth, then shall the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.”  But we must believe it:  or we shall be driven to believe in no God at all; and that will be worse for us than all the evil that has happened to us from our youth up until now.

But most people find it very difficult to believe in such a God as the Scripture sets forth—­a God of boundless tenderness; and yet a God of boundless indignation.