It is remarkable, that at a time when the fear of pestilence has agitated the people of this country, and when the tottering fabric of society threatens to hurl down upon us as dire a confusion as that which has surrounded our brother, in a country hitherto regarded so remote from all comparison with our own; at a time when the records of the seasons at which the terrible voice of God has sounded loudest in our capital, are republished as appropriate to the contemplation of Christians at the existing crisis;[5]--this volume should have been brought before the Public, by circumstances quite unconnected with this train of God's dealings and threatenings to our land. The Christians of Britain ought to consider, that there is a warning voice of Providence, not only in the tumults of the people, and in the terrors of the cholera around them, but even in the publication of this Journal. It is not for nothing that God has moved Mr. Groves, as it were, to an advanced post, where he might encounter the enemy before them. The alarm may have, in a measure, subsided,[6] but if the people of God are to be ever patiently waiting for the coming of their conquering King, this implies a patient preparedness for those signs of his coming, the clouds and darkness that are to go before him, in the very midst of which they must be able to lift up their heads because their redemption draweth nigh. To provide for the worst contingencies is a virtue, not a weakness, in the soldier. That Christian will not keep his garments who forgets, that in this life, he is a soldier always. No army is so orderly in peace, or so triumphant upon lesser assaults, as that which is ready always for the extremest exigencies of war.
To those who are looking for the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, this volume will exhibit indications of the advancement of the world towards the state in which he shall find it at his coming. The diffusion in the east of European notions and practices; the desire on the part of the rulers to possess themselves of the advantages of western intellect and skill; and on the side of the governed, the conviction of the comparative security and comfort of English domination; the vastly increased intercourse between those nations and the west, and the proposals for still further accelerating and facilitating that intercourse: all these things mark the rapid tendency, of which we have so many other signs, towards the production of one common mind throughout the human race, to issue in that combination for a common resistance of God, which, as of old, when the people were one, and had all one language, and it seemed that nothing could be restrained from them which they had imagined to do,--shall cause the Lord to come down and confound their purpose. Already has this unity of views and aims, with marvellous rapidity, prevailed in the European and American world; the press, the steam-engine by land and water, the multiplication of societies and unions, portend an advancement in it, to which nothing can set limits but the intervention of God: and now it appears that the mountain-fixedness of Asiatic prejudice and institution shall suddenly be dissolved, and absorbed into the general vortex.