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