(Revelation - Part 6): Reign of Christ a Divine Imperative — A.W. Tozer

I am to speak to you, as has been announced, on the theme, The Reign of Christ, a Divine Imperative. And I want to read from the scripture. Let's turn to the second psalm, Psalm 2. Why do the nations rage?

I'm almost amused to read in the margin, the word rage means tumultuously assemble. I call that a summit conference now. Why do the nations tumultuously assemble? And the people imagine a vain thing. The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord Jehovah, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sword his pleasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

I will declare the decree Jehovah has said unto me, Thou art my son this day, have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the nations for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. The first nine verses of Psalm 2. Then in 1 Corinthians 15, now is Christ risen from the dead and become the firstfruits of them that slept.

For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive, but every man in his own order. Christ the firstfruits, afterward they that are Christ's at his coming.

Then comeeth the end when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign till he hath put all enemies under his feet.

And the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For he must reign, says the Holy Ghost. Now there has been a big change in the public mind since the first world war. Matters having to do with prophecy have been pushed into the margin of our thinking, and even those who believe in the Lord's return, I feel, have not the certainty and the urgency that they had during and after the first world war.

The Decline of Prophetic Urgency and Confidence

The second world war did not arouse the hope of the coming of Christ that the first world war did. Now there are causes for this. It is now almost necessary to explain, if not apologize, in evangelical circles when we talk about the coming of our Lord.

You have to put your hands up and say, Now just a minute, I don't mean, I do mean, I do mean, I don't mean, in order that somebody won't classify and pigeonhole you. And there are reasons for this shift.

One of them I will give is this, a reaction from extreme teaching by irresponsible men. I remember, after the first world war, doing it and after it for quite a long while, until the depression made it economically unfeasible, there was a great deal of teaching on prophecy, a good deal by sincere and honest men, but also a good deal by irresponsible men who exploited the truth of Christ's coming for popularity and cash.

And then another reason that there has been such a turning away from the hope of his coming is that a growing doubt has arisen of the soundness of the popular interpretation. Fr. B. Schor this morning told us of the man who, in 1927, said that Mussolini was the Antichrist.

And, of course, when Mussolini got hung up by the heels there with his girlfriend, you remember, in that garage, something happened to the Antichrist right there, and it was a big shock to a lot of prophetic teachers.

But I was telling them at dinner tonight that there was one prophetic teacher that he wouldn't down. He went around teaching that Mussolini was dead, so what? Mussolini is going to rise from the dead and be the Antichrist just as Christ rose from the dead and was the Christ.

Well, this kind of thing, the popular interpretations, what gets me down with this whole deal is that there are so many people who know more about it all than Daniel does. And John the Beloved is a poor second-rater compared with some of the brethren, and you've got to take what they say without any reason.

They just say it, and if you don't believe it, you're not a fundamentalist anymore, you're an Amillennialist. Well, I am not an Amillennialist, and I am a fundamentalist, if by fundamentalism you mean believing everything the Bible says.

Then there was quite an upset in the schedule growing out of the Roman Empire. I do well remember when the Roman Empire had risen, and we were just about, the Lord was about to come, and that blew up during the Second World War.

Then there is the rise of a doctrine called Amillennialism. The word A is a prefix of Millennialism, and the word A, of course, is a negative. You put A on in the Greek and it means, not so. Just as we say, none this and none that, they said, Ah, we have Amillennialism, that is, those who do not believe there is going to be an Amillennialism at all and what's all the fuss about?

Christ’s Reign in Psalm 2 and 1 Corinthians 15

Well, the text shows that Christ is going to reign, both the texts. In the 2nd Psalm, I don't know how we are going to escape it here, the nations of the earth are gathered tumultuously together and the people, Jewish people, are imagining a vain thing, that is, a thing that there is no meaning in at all.

And the kings of the earth, themselves, and the rulers, they take counsel together, and it is found to be against Jehovah and against his anointed. And they are saying, Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us.

I just read in the paper last night that Khrushchev had said in his speech, he was being funny, he thought he was a Bob Hope. And while he was making a very saber-rattling speech, he introduced this, he said, We've had our man up there in orbit around the earth, and we haven't found any angels or anything like that.

We've come to the conclusion there aren't any. Well, they say, Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us. Well, now the scripture says, He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.

This is the only place in the Bible where God is said to laugh. Here is the terrible laughter of the great God. He shall have them in derision, and he shall speak to them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

Then he declares, Yet will I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. And he says to that king, Now ask me, and I will give thee the heathen, the nations, for thine inheritance in the uttermost parts of the earth, for thy possession.

I think that this text shows that Christ is going to reign, and in the 15th chapter of Revelation, or of verse 4, from which the text is taken, he must reign, this chapter goes back and under all the plan of God for the future, to complete universal redemption when death must be abolished, and to abolish death, Christ must reign.

Now I want to talk to you a little, for I'm not going to give a lot of details tonight. That is, I'm not going to interpret so that I can take you to Time magazine and say, Well, now here's what they said in Time magazine, and this piece of land over here, somebody said something.

I'm not going to do that, but I'm going to get above the whole thing and look down and tell you why Christ must reign, and the qualifications of the reigning one, and why Jesus Christ fits those qualifications.

I'm going to do that, and then that will be my sermon for tonight. A reigning one is required. I remember as I told you one time what Mark Twain said about the nations of Europe in the time of the Middle Ages.

He said that the nations of Europe were so divided up and were so small that when a king lay down to sleep, he couldn't stretch out without a passport. And I have been looking over the map for these last days, and particularly in Africa, and I've noticed that some of those little countries, the tall boys, if they dare not lie down, they'll lop over into the next country.

And of course, they would have to have a summit conference to settle what to do with these feet. But the nations of the earth are needing somebody. I want to give you six things, or it would be seven if I were a good fundamentalist, I suppose, or a good schoolfield Bible addict.

It ought to be seven, but I sometimes only can find six. And I have a sneaking idea that some of those boys divide number six up into two parts in order to get seven. But anyhow, here are six. The weak must be delivered from the oppression of the strong.

Deliverance of the Weak from Oppression

Now, the scriptures teach this. In the 72nd Psalm it tells us plainly, Give the king thy judgment, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king's son. He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment.

The mountain shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills by righteousness. He shall judge the poor of the people. He shall save the children of the needy. He shall break in pieces the oppressor.

They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure throughout all generations. And he shall come down like rain upon the moon grass, as showers that water the earth. In his day shall the righteous flourish, and the abundance of peace as long as the moon endureth.

He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth. They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him, and his enemies shall lick the dust. And the kings of Tarshish and the Isles shall bring presents, and the kings of Sheba and Sebal shall offer gifts.

The All-King shall fall down before him, and all nations shall serve him. For he shall deliver the needy when he crieth, and the poor also, and him that hath no helper. He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy.

And he shall redeem their souls from deceit and violence, and righteous shall their blood be in his sight. That's only a sample of what the Bible teaches about a time that is coming when the oppressed people shall go free and the weak shall be delivered from the storm.

Deliverance from Sin, Oppression, and Spiritual Evil

Then the race must be rescued from the tyranny that we call sin. Sin is not only a crime that man commits against God, sin is a monster that rides mankind to exhaustion. And according to the Bible, all through the Bible, the race has got to be delivered from this tyrant.

And then thirdly, Israel must be delivered from her ancient tormentors. And I wonder if we can ever hope that while Satan roams loose in the earth and Israel is at the mercy of her Gentile neighbors, she'll ever be delivered from her ancient tormentors.

And then number four is that the world must have a perfect leader. Its problems have gotten beyond any of us and the power of any of us. And then fifthly, the evil spiritual powers must have a master, and death must have an executioner.

You know that Welch song that says, "'Death of death and hell's destruction, bear us safe on something, O Jordan's sand?'. Well, that we take and change. But he says, death of death. Jesus Christ has got to be the death of death.

He's got to be the executioner of death, and that hasn't happened yet. In order to have a reigning one to do these six things, to deliver the weak from the oppression of the strong, to deliver the human race from the tyranny of sin, to deliver Israel from her ancient tormentors, to deliver the world from her problems and to have thus a perfect leader, we've got to have someone with these qualifications.

Qualifications of the Coming World Leader

Let me give them to you. The qualifications of the world leader that's coming. Our Brother told us there would be a world leader, and the qualifications of the world leader that finally comes. Now there will be a lot of world leaders, and there have been, and the Lord warned us there would be, who claim to lead in the Lord's name.

But the first thing, the one who brings about this wondrous golden age, he must be a native of the earth. For the human race is inextricably united with the earth. You and I are sons of the earth, whether we like it or not.

We are born in a sanitary hospital under glass, and we walk around on sidewalks most of our lives and die again in a hospital two floors down, 30 or 40 years later, and get put away in a memorial park without any sign of death around at all, except the dead man, he's dead enough.

But in spite of that fact, we're still a pretty earthy people, for the earth is our mother. From her we took the very body we have. The earth is our nourisher. This earth we live in provides us with nourishment for our bodies.

This is our home, this earth, and I don't want to go to the moon. Do you want to go to the moon? I don't want to go to the moon. I have nothing in common whatsoever with that hunk of clay and ashes that's roaming around up there reflecting the light of the sun.

It can stay up there as far as I'm concerned. God put it there, and I'm going to leave it there. And if you wait for me to volunteer to go to the moon, I don't intend to volunteer. I don't want to go.

The earth is my home, and apart from sin and death, I haven't a thing against the earth. I don't like sticky weather, but on the other hand, I don't like cold weather. So we're adjusted so we can take it.

Nobody will die as a result of this sticky weather. You just feel as if you would. But anyhow, the earth is our home, and the earth will finally be our grave. When her boys and girls get old and tired, Mother Earth calls us back to her arms again, and we lie down and sleep in the bosom of the same earth from which we sprung.

And that earth in the meantime has been our battleground, our playground, our field, our home, our all in all as far as this world is concerned. And then, God, if he's going to bring peace to the earth, he's going to have to have somebody who qualifies as belonging to the earth.

He doesn't want to send an archangel. If the archangel Gabriel were to come down to Washington or Ottawa or Berlin, he wouldn't know what to say except that he'd been instructed by the Lord, for he would have no sympathy at all with the earth.

He wasn't born here. He's spirit, not mortal, not flesh. He knows nothing about being born and growing up in school and stubbing your toe and getting the measles. He knows nothing about that. He knows nothing about the troubles that we people go through down here.

But Jesus, our Lord, knew, and that one who comes must be able to say, I am of the earth. I was born here in the earth. And then, God won't send us a stranger of that, I'm certain. He won't send us a stranger here.

You wouldn't like somebody to come from Accra or Washington, D .C., or Buenos Aires, here to Toronto, and say, Here, I'll solve your problems. You'd say, Who, you and who else? You don't know anything about our problems.

And I had him. Of course you would. You'd want somebody that's Canadian. You'd want somebody that knows your people, that knows them well, grew up among them. And when you mean been, you say been, just like any other good Canadian.

And you'd want somebody that has your accent and your language and your background and your love of country and all the rest. You'd want that kind of person, and that's the kind of person I'd want you to have.

I don't want somebody coming from London to Washington and trying to run the United States, and you don't want somebody to come from Washington and try to run Canada. And so we don't want any archangels or seraphim coming down here to this earth, where we've stumbled along in the darkness and watched the sun rise and the moon come up, and have watched people die and seen them born and grow up.

And we've learned to love the earth and to fear the earth and to respect the earth. We want somebody that knows our people, that knows us human beings, that knows us, red and yellow, black and white around the world.

Somebody that's tempted in all points like as we are, and yet without sin. Somebody that bears our lineaments and looks like us. And that one, of course, is Jesus Christ, our Lord. Christ is the Son of Man, and Christ is the native of the earth.

He is God. He was before the earth was, before the world was, he was. And he was in the beginning with God, and all things were created by him. And the same earth that was his birthplace and his playground and the place of his crucifixion and the place of his resurrection was also made by him.

He is a man of the earth, he knows the earth, and he knows earth's people. And in Hebrew they tell us that as the high priest was taken out from among the Jews in order that they might know the Jews, so Jesus Christ was born among us, one of us, that he might know us.

He understands us. And he received his body from the earth, and he walked on the earth, and he drank of the water of the earth, and he rode on her lakes, and he walked her highways, and he washed the dust of her lanes off his feet.

He lay down to sleep on her bosom at night, and when he was dead they took him away in a quiet place in her bosom, from which God raised him the third day according to the scriptures. So he is part and parcel of the earth, and he is of the stuff of which the earth and the world and humanity is made.

Archangels couldn't claim that, nor neither seraphims could claim it, no strange creature from another planet could claim it. We wouldn't have them around, they are not people, they are something else if there were any of them there.

But he is a man, he is one of us. The second thing of qualification that this reigning one must have, he must have unspotted holiness. A holy God must have a holy King, and Jesus Christ is the Holy One of God.

The enemies and the ages have found no spot in him. Even the fiercest and severest enemies of Christianity bow their heads in silence when the name of Jesus comes up, because they know he was a holy man.

Even the devil had to flee from his presence, and the enemies admit that this man was surely the Son of God. Then he must have unchallenged right to reign. Now, Jesus Christ, our Lord, is both God and man, and so he can reign for God over men.

He is the only one in the universe that can do that, that can reign over men for God. If somebody had merely been a man, he couldn't reign for God over us, because he would not understand God's side. If he had been only God, he couldn't have reigned, because we'd say, how does God know our problems?

But he is both God and man, and so as God, he reigns over mankind because he is himself man and knows both God and man. And he came in line with the ancient scriptures. He's got to have unchallenged right, and Jesus Christ came in line with the ancient scriptures.

Two thousand years of scripture, of prophecy, had gone ahead on Jesus Christ, our Lord. And the predictions were so minute and so detailed that nobody else in the world could possibly fulfill it. I read where some fellow had said, look in this mirror and you see God.

He had been looking in the mirror and thought he had been seeing God, and he was only seeing his own mortal countenance. But he had wrote that over the mirror. He had forgotten somebody else would follow him and look in and think he was God.

But nobody can say, I am the Christ. For the simple reason that nobody can prove it. He stood up and said, I am the Christ, and then could go straight to their scriptures and prove it. And you friends of the Jews and Brother Nielsen, you well know that the best possible, I was going to say, weapon, you don't take weapons when you go out to win men, what do you take?

You take reasonable arguments. The best possible argument for the Messiahship of Jesus Christ, our Lord, is the very scriptures which the Jews own to be their own scriptures. You can go to the scriptures.

I remember a man told me that he had gone out with a Jew into the meadow, and they had spread a blanket down so they wouldn't lie on the grass among the bugs. They had spread a blanket down there. One of them had the Old Testament, and one of them had the New.

They said, Now we go to the Old Testament. And the brother of the Old Testament said, Now here is what the Messiah has to be. So he turned over to the New Testament in red, and here is what he was. They did that for five hours.

At the end of five hours, the Hebrew man got up off the blanket where he had been stretched out, got down on his knees, and accepted Jesus Christ as the Lord and Messiah, for he said, This Old Testament of mine is perfectly fulfilled in this New Testament of yours.

It is the only possible approach you can make that is valid, and it is a valid approach. For two thousand years these prophecies went before the Messiah. They said he would be born at a certain time and a certain place, of a certain line, of a certain race, of a certain family.

And so when he came, he came born of that line, of that race, of that family, in that place approximately at that time. Nobody else can claim that. Buddha couldn't, he came too soon. Muhammad couldn't, he came too late.

And Father Divine couldn't, he came of the wrong race. And no Jew could, no other Jew could, because he came of the wrong family. You know they kept the genealogical tablets in Israel until Christ was born.

Everybody went in and registered his baby boy when he was born, so everybody could trace it back and back and back and back and back. Plato, Abraham, everybody knew what line he came from until Christ was born.

Then a few years after that, Titus came in and destroyed the city, and now nobody knows where those tablets are. And you can't prove that you belong to any particular tribe, therefore nobody can come along and say, I am the Messiah.

That was fulfilled in Jesus Christ the Lord. He has unchallenged right to claim that he is the one about whom God spoke in the Old Testament prophecies. Then this man has to be faithful both to man and to God.

And as a man in God, he can reign, as I have said, as God over man. Scripture says he must reign. I accept that, my brethren. The details I am going to leave to those who know more about it than I do.

All the small details I knew 30 years ago, and know less about them now. I am at the place where I believe more strongly in the coming of Christ than I ever did in my life, but have less dogmatic views of the details than I ever did in my life.

Now, that will shock some of you out of at least one year's growth, but I hope you will make it. But I must talk and say what is true tonight, that the details I leave to those who are still able to figure them out.

But I believe there is a reigning one coming, and I believe that he is to reign and that the Lord will give him the nations of the earth and he will reign over them and rule over them, and that he will right what is wrong and that he will do what they are claiming to want to do in the world today.

He will reign in righteousness and he will bring peace and he will judge the poor and he will break in pieces the oppressor, and he will have dominion all over the earth, and he will deliver the needy when they come.

And redeem the souls of the people from deceit and violence, and precious shall their blood be in his sight. Now, I believe that. Now, he must reign till. Notice it says, he must reign till. He must reign till the riddles of the earth are solved.

Why Human Governments Cannot Solve the World’s Problems

I want to insist, as I have said several times before, don't let us get arrogant in our attitude toward our rulers. Those who reign or who rule over us who have been elected to office, let's not get too arrogant with them.

Of course they make mistakes, of course they make promises they don't fulfill, of course they do. I don't think they ought to make promises they know they can't fulfill, but I think that when they make a promise they think they can fulfill, and then when they get there and find they can't, I think we ought to be awful patient with them.

I remember when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was running for the presidency. I heard him one night. He was being interviewed by newspapermen, and they said, Mr. Kennedy, you have been critical of the farm policy of the present administration.

That was the Eisenhower administration. Now, you were critical of it. If you were to get into office, what would you do? And he snapped back immediately. It didn't take a minute. He had the answer. He said, I'd simply bring supply into balance with demand.

That's the way you do it, brother. And now that he's in there, he finds out you can't bring supply into balance with demand. There's always something out of balance in the world, and nobody knows how to straighten it out, even if they wanted to.

We have world politics. I was a younger man. They said that we were all going to get together and outlaw war. And some of the liberal preachers used to make big speeches saying, I'm against war because, I'm against war because.

And they said there wouldn't be any more war. Right after the first world war, they said nobody would ever again, nobody would ever again go to war. And they said the women now have the vote. I was down in the states.

They said the women have the vote, and if the women have the vote, they'll never vote for war. Let me ask you, whoever asked you to vote whether you wanted a war or not, brother, you will just get a notice if you're young enough saying that your country needs you.

Please appear at Brewer and something else at a certain time and you will appear. All right. You never cast a vote, but the big men who make the wars, they don't ask us. All those notions were just childish notions, but they said there would be no more war.

There would be world politics. We'll all become one. They said we'd get together and everybody'd love everybody else. It was that simple. Well, we hate each other worse now than ever since the beginning of the world.

I don't suppose there ever was a time in human history when more people say meaner, nastier, most abusive and horrible things about more people than now. This is the day when liberalism and pedagogy and all the rest have taken over.

They have cast God's cord from them and broken his bands of thunder, and the nations have tumultuously assembled and imagined vain things. And they said, Christianity is old-fashioned, why do you want to believe in Christ?

The Lord says he'll laugh at them. But anyway, then there are the racial antagonisms. I don't like to bring up these unpleasant things, but after all, we do have race problems, you know that. We have them all over the world.

They have them in Canada, and they have them in the States and in South Africa, and they have them now in England. I remember a great English preacher came to the States, and he said, I don't know a thing about the race problem.

We have no race problem in England. I've been hearing on the radio about their riots over there and their race problems, they sure do have them. And they have them everywhere, the race antagonisms. Just as long as you have less or more pigmentation than I have, you are going to be suspicious of me.

And just as long as your nose is differently shaped from mine, or your eyes slant otherwise round over the wall, we are going to stand and glare at each other across rivers or across imaginary lines. Race antagonisms will continue.

Then there is economics. I don't know too much about economics, and in this I am quite in line to be elected Minister of the Interior down in Washington, because nobody knows anything about it down there, either.

All I know is that nobody knows anything about it. I know how to change dollars into dimes and so on, and make out my tax and say, you added it up wrong, you owe me $13, and then I send them $13. But I know about that much.

But that's just about all I know. But that's about all anybody knows. You remember when they were plowing under little pigs down in the United States? Plowing under little pigs. And all over the world people were hungry for just one pork chop, but they were plowing under little pigs.

Then they got their economic ledger domain all mixed up, and here was a pile of beautiful golden wheat that God had given them, pile a whole pyramid of beautiful golden wheat. And they said, if we dump that wheat on the market, we'll upset the economic balance.

So they poured gasoline on it and burnt it. I wasn't for that, but I couldn't help it. Nobody asked me whether they were going to touch a match to wheat that people of the world need. They did it. Brought a lot of watermelons along, truckload after truckload, well, boxcar loads of watermelons and dumped them in the river.

I'd like to have been downstream a bit myself. But they did that rather than give them away. They said, if we give them away, we'll upset the economic balance. Well, somebody has got to come who knows something about this, and nobody does up to now.

Then disease, disease. We're conquering diseases, but every time we conquer one, another one breaks out. Highest living standards in the world we have in Canada and the United States. These two countries on this God-blessed continent eat more fat than all the other countries in the world put together, and we also have more heart attacks.

So when we manage to push one thing up, another one is like trying to put twins to sleep. You get one twin to sleep, and by that time the other one wakes up. Then you rock him to sleep, and by that time the little yelp wakes the first one up, and so there you are, caught between.

And if we get one problem solved, another problem comes up. We get one thing whipped, another one comes. The problem comes. We've got them. Somebody has got to come who knows something about this, and I don't know where to look for him.

I don't know where to look for him in among men. No genius has ever been equal to these problems, how to handle world politics, how to make people love each other, how to keep peace in the world, how to settle race antagonism so that people of different colors and shapes don't hate each other and try to kill each other, how to solve the economic problems so that there are not strikes and wars and people being beaten up, and how to solve the disease problem so we can walk around on the earth without diseases.

No genius has ever been equal to this. Now, there are three things necessary to solve this problem. First, you've got to have a heart that wants to do it. Second, you've got to have the knowledge of how to do it, and third, you've got to have the power to do it.

There's nobody like that. I think Lincoln was a man, maybe, and he's adopted by the whole world now. He's no longer an American. He's a member of the human race. The whole world has adopted Lincoln, and I think Lincoln had a heart big enough to want to do this, but Lincoln didn't have the knowledge of how to do it nor the power to carry it through if he'd known how.

Most politicians don't want to do it. They don't care. But if you could find a man who had a heart big enough, whose love for mankind would make them want to bring peace to the world, they wouldn't have ability.

Christ’s Compassion, Wisdom, and Power to Reign

But when Jesus Christ came to the world, he had all the infinite compassion of God, for he was God. And all the infinite compassion of God was in his heart. And he never looked at a blind man without grief and sorrow in his heart.

He never looked at a deaf man unable to hear the sweet sounds of nature but what there was grief in his heart. He never looked at a man with a withered hand or a man with crippled feet or a dead girl being carried out on a bier.

Never. But what there was sorrow in his heart. He loved people. As I've said a thousand times, Jesus loved people. He didn't love populations only, he loved people. He loved the look of them and the sound of them and the warmth of them and the eyes of them.

He loved people, Jesus did. And he loved them so much that he gave everything he had, even to his life itself, for them. So he had the heart to do it. But then these leaders that we're talking about, if they raise a leader who has a heart big enough to want to bring peace and prosperity to the world, he must have wisdom to know how to do it.

I frankly admit, I don't know how to do it. I just wouldn't know how to do it at all. Personally, I think that in history will show that the end of the United States began in 1913 when they put the income tax on.

I don't say that to sour grapes because they booked me and reamed me for income tax. I say it because it seems to be the hour when America began to decline. I believe that she'll tax herself to death if she doesn't tax herself so weak that Russia can shake her like a plum, as she's threatened to do, and shake the right plum off the tree.

But if you ask me how I could run a country that big without an income tax, I'd have to say, excuse me, I've got an appointment. I don't know. I don't know. I have the faintest notion, and I don't know anybody else that does.