Publisher's Synopsis
From the INTRODUCTION.
This is a powerful book. It needs no introduction from other sources than its own. Its great strength lies in its facts. These are collated with rare skill, and verified by the testimony of men and of documents whose witness is authority. The book will speak for itself to every man who cares enough for the welfare of our country to read it, and who has intelligence enough to take in its portentous story.
It is worthy of note that almost all the thinking which thinking men have given to the subject for the last fifty years has been in the line of the leading idea which this volume enforces-the idea of crisis in the destiny of this country, and through it in the destiny of the world. The common sense of men puts into homely phrase the great principles which underlie great enterprises. One such phrase lies under the Christian civilization of our land. It is "the nick of time." The present hour is, and always has been, "the nick of time" in our history. The principle which underlies all probationary experience comes to view in organized society with more stupendous import than in individual destiny. This book puts the evidence of that in a form of cumulative force which is overwhelming.'
Fifty years ago our watchful fathers discerned it in their forecast of the future of the Republic. The wisest among them even then began to doubt how long the original stock of American society could bear the interfusion of elements alien to our history and to the faith of out ancestry. The conviction was then often expressed that the case was hopeless on any theory of our national growth which did not take into account the eternal decrees of God. Good men were hopeful, only because they had faith in the reserves of might which God held secret from human view.
Those now living who were in their boyhood then, remember well how such men as Dr. Lyman Needier, of Ohio, and Dr. Wm. Blackburn, of Missouri, used to return from their conflicts with the multiform varieties of Western infidelity to thrill the hearts of Christian assemblies at the East with their pictures of Western greatness, and Western perils. Those were the palm ydays of "May Anniversaries." The ideas which the veterans of the platform set on fire and left to burn in our souls were three: The magnitude of the West in geographical area; the rapidity with which it was filling up with social elements, many of them hostile to each other, but nearly all conspiring against Christian institutions; and the certainty that Christianity must go down in the struggle, if Eastern enterprise was not prompt in seizing upon the then present opportunity, and resolute in preoccupying the land for Christ. Again and again Dr. Beecher said, in substance, on Eastern platforms: "Now is the nick of time. In matters which reach into eternity, now is always the nick of time. One man now is worth a hundred fifty years hence. One dollar now is worth a thousand then. Let us be up and doing before it is too late."
