Chapter 9 - Page 2

Mr. Bodiham
wanted to jump down from the pulpit and shake him into life,--
times when he would have liked to beat and kill his whole
congregation.

He sat at his desk dejectedly. Outside the Gothic windows the
earth was warm and marvellously calm. Everything was as it had
always been. And yet, and yet...It was nearly four years now
since he had preached that sermon on Matthew xxiv. 7: "For
nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom:
and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in
divers places." It was nearly four years. He had had the sermon
printed; it was so terribly, so vitally important that all the
world should know what he had to say. A copy of the little
pamphlet lay on his desk--eight small grey pages, printed by a
fount of type that had grown blunt, like an old dog's teeth, by
the endless champing and champing of the press. He opened it and
began to read it yet once again.

"'For nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against
kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and
earthquakes, in divers places.'

"Nineteen centuries have elapsed since Our Lord gave utterance to
those words, and not a single one of them has been without wars,
plagues, famines, and earthquakes. Mighty empires have crashed
in ruin to the ground, diseases have unpeopled half the globe,
there have been vast natural cataclysms in which thousands have
been overwhelmed by flood and fire and whirlwind. Time and
again, in the course of these nineteen centuries, such things
have happened, but they have not brought Christ back to earth.
They were 'signs of the times' inasmuch as they were signs of
God's wrath against the chronic wickedness of mankind, but they
were not signs of the times in connection with the Second Coming.

"If earnest Christians have regarded the present war as a true
sign of the Lord's approaching return, it is not merely because
it happens to be a great war involving the lives of millions of
people, not merely because famine is tightening its grip on every
country in Europe, not merely because disease of every kind, from
syphilis to spotted fever, is rife among the warring nations; no,
it is not for these reasons that we regard this war as a true
Sign of the Times, but because in its origin and its progress it
is marked by certain characteristics which seem to connect it
almost beyond a doubt with the predictions in Christian Prophecy
relating to the Second Coming of the Lord.

"Let me enumerate the features of the present war which most
clearly suggest that it is a Sign foretelling the near approach
of the Second Advent. Our Lord said that 'this Gospel of the
Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a