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 witness unto all nations; and then shall the end
come.' Although it would be presumptuous for us to say what degree of
evangelisation will be regarded by God as sufficient, we may at least
confidently hope that a century of unflagging missionary work has
brought the fulfilment of this condition at any rate near. True, the
larger number of the world's inhabitants have remained deaf to the
preaching of the true religion; but that does not vitiate the fact that
the Gospel HAS been preached 'for a witness' to all unbelievers from the
Papist to the Zulu. The responsibility for the continued prevalence of
unbelief lies, not with the preachers, but wi