Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

[147] existence outside of Christ's kingdom is thereby proved guilty of infidelity.

3. By the same authority I know that the nations are to be dashed in pieces before the Kingdom of God can come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The present governments stand in the way of God's kingdom, just as Colonization once stood in the way of Abolition. They occupy the ground, without effecting the object.

4. I regard the existing governments as bearing the same relation to a dispensation that is to come, as that which the Jewish dispensation bore to the Christian—that is, they are preparatory forms of discipline, fitted to the childhood of the race—‘shadows of good things to come,’ which are to be taken away when the substance appears.

5. By the foregoing considerations I am authorized not only to hope for the overthrow of the nations, but to stand in readiness actively to assist in the execution of God's purposes.

6. The Son of God has manifestly, to me, chosen this country for the theatre of such an assault—a country which, by its boasting hypocrisy, has become the laughing-stock of the world, and by its lawlessness has fully proved the incapacity of man for self-government. My hope of the millennium begins where Dr. Beecher's expires—viz., at the overthrow of this nation.

7. The signs of the times clearly indicate the purpose of God to do his strange work speedily. The country is ripe for a convulsion like that of France; rather, I should say, for the French Revolution reversed. Infidelity roused the whirlwind in France. The Bible, by anti-slavery and other similar movements, is doing the same work in this country. So, in the end, Jesus Christ, instead of a bloodthirsty Napoleon, will ascend the throne of the world. The convulsion which is coming will be, not the struggle of death, but the travail of childbirth—the birth of a ransomed world.

I have stated to you only in the letter the principal things which God has urged upon me by his Spirit, and by which he has moved me to nominate Jesus Christ for the Presidency, not only of the United States, but of the world. Is it not high time for abolitionists to abandon a government whose President has declared war upon them? I cannot but think that many of them hear the same great voice out of heaven which has waked me, saying, ‘Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins and of her plagues.’ You said your mind was heaving on certain momentous subjects, and you only waited to set Anti-slavery in the sunshine before you turned