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Not to-morrow, nor to-morrow, nor to-morrow, but the next day. And so our Father has always begun by showing us the next day. He came to Abraham and said,
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Get thee out of thy country, and I will make of thee a great nation. He did not tell him that Egypt and the desert and the Jordan lay between. If He had, his steps would have been paralysed on the threshold. Did you ever ask yourself what is the earliest revealed doctrine of the New Testament? Is it justification, sanctification, effectual calling, the perseverance of the saints? No, it is none of these: it is the second coming of Christ--the completed glory of redeeming love. When Paul sat down to write his first epistle to the Thessalonians--the earliest book of the New Testament--he began at the end. He let the world hear the final bells ringing across the snow. He concealed the snow; he veiled the intervening years; he said,
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To-morrow. He did not tell that a Red Sea of trouble and a desert of visionless waiting lay between. And he was right. Men heard only the bells, and the bells lured them on. They helped them to tread the snow; they nerved them to cross the sea. They sustained them to meet the desert. They sounded nearer than they were; they rang ever the one refrain,
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Christ is coming
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Say not that the former days were better than these is a counsel wise and true. But it is none the less wise and true that to the eye of the old man the past ought to be _glorified_. It ought to be glorified because it _needs_ to be glorified. The past never got justice while it was passing. Childhood ignored it; youth disparaged it. The hour laid gems at our feet which we did not see, or which, seeing, we despised. We kept asking when Elias would come; and Elias had come already. To us, as to Moses, the hand of God was laid over the face while God was passing by; we did not discern the actual blessings of the day. Are we never to discern them here below? Must we go hence without seeing the world in which we dwell? Shall we be sent forth to gaze on things unseen before we have looked at the objects which have been actually in our hands? God says
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No.