as gone; the Puritans (as we were wont to call them) are
gone; and we know now--now that it is too late for those of us who are
'left'--that they have been 'caught up' into the air, to be with their
Lord forever."

He glanced down at the white-draped communion table, as he continued:

"Our church officer has performed his usual monthly office, and has
spread the Table for the Lord's Supper, but it dawns upon us, friends,
how useless, how empty is the symbol since it was only ordained 'until
He should come.' He has come, and we, the unready, have been left
behind."

"Tommy Rot!"

The expression came angrily, sneeringly from the man in the gallery,
the man who cracked that nut, and who had laughed so boisterously a
moment ago.

Many eyes were turned up to the man, but no voice of reprimand came, no
cry of "shame!" or of "Turn him out," was raised.

All that had happened during the days of the past week, had served to
fill many of the people gathered there that morning, with a curious
mingling of doubt, hesitancy, fearsomeness, and uncertainty, as well as
an unconscious growth of a new strange skepticism, and a carelessness
that almost amounted to recklessness.

"As it is with many more here, this morning," the Secretary went on,
"some members of my family have gone, been caught up--"

"Aviated!" laughed a ribald voice, and this time it came from another
part of the building.

Disregarding the interruption, the secretary went on:

"My wife has gone--" His voice shook with the deep emotion that
stirred him, and for a moment he was too moved to speak. Then
recovering himself with an effort he continued:

"My daughter, too, who against my wish had offered herself as a Foreign
Missionary, has gone. Both wife and daughter lived in the spirit of
expectancy of the Coming of Christ into the air. Now they are with
Him, to be with Him for ever."

The ribald voice that had last interrupted, again broke into the
Secretary's touching words. This time the interrupter roared out a
stanza or two of a wretched song:

"Will no one tell me where they're gone,
My bursting heart with grief is torn,
I wish I never had been born,
I've lost, I've lost my vife."

A hundred or more voices roared with laughter. The devil of blasphemy
was growing bolder.

But in the silence that immediately followed the laughter, the
Secretary went on again:

"I have been a deeply _religious_ man, even as Nicodemus and Paul w