Excerpt from Sermons of Sunrise The final scene represents the triumph of the Lamb, the victory of that pure love which is in the midst of the throne and at the heart of God. But this triumph is really an eternal defeat; for it does not abolish sin and misery, nor cleanse the universe of evil, it thrusts them out of sight into a realm of darkness. It confirms the enemies of Christ in unpardoned and unpardonable sin. It shuts them up in a prison-house of torment or casts them into a lake of fire. Against all the wicked - the false and the foul and the unbelieving - the wrath of the Lamb burns with eternal vengeance. Thus the Creator of the world sweeps the old order into the bottomless pit, like so much rubbish, and makes all things new. The cursed old Babylon perishes with the cursed old Jerusalem, where the Lord was crucified; and a holy city - the New Jerusalem - comes down from heaven to the purified earth, to be the home of the saints, and to shine in splendor as a matchless manifestation of the glory of God. All this passes like a panorama in a swift succession of Visions, - a series of revelations given one Sunday to the writer in a trance, by the glorified Christ, through the mediumship of an angel. It is presented as a prophecy and warning of the things that must shortly be done, for the time is at hand. So the book may be regarded as one record of the excited expectations of the Christian Church at the close of the first century, or soon after. In the earlier letters of Saint Paul, we find him teaching that the Lord Jesus was about to descend from heaven in flaming fire to destroy the wicked, to raise the righteous dead, to change the living believers into the likeness of his own glorified form, and to bear them all aloft in the air, that so they might be ever with the Lord. He looked for these things to happen in that generation. These apostolic writings give us one more proof of the Vitality of truth, even when mixed with error. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.