pers of our day is one which
fills its columns with absurd guesses and forecasts concerning those
very "times" and "seasons" of which Christ has told us that it is not
for us to know. Christ has given us no detailed map of the future, and
when foolish persons pester us with little maps of their own making, let
us to see to it that they get no encouragement from us. Let us dare
always to be faithful to our ignorance.

But if there is much we do not know, this we do know: the Lord will
come. And, alike on the ground of what we know and of what we do not
know, our duty is clear: we must "watch," so that whether He come at
even, or at midnight, or at cock-crowing, or in the morning, He shall
find us ready. Christ's solemn injunction left an indelible mark on the
mind of the Early Church. "Yourselves know perfectly," St. Paul writes
in the first of his apostolic letters, "that the day of the Lord so
cometh as a thief in the night ... so then let us not sleep, as do the
rest, but let us watch and be sober." As St. Augustine says, "The last
day is hidden that every day maybe regarded." But what, exactly, is the
meaning of the command to "watch"? It cannot be that we are to be always
"on the watch." That would simply end in the feverish excitement and
unrest which troubled the peace of the Church of Thessalonica. The true
meaning is given us, I think, in the parable of the Ten Virgins. Five
were wise, not because they watched all night for the bridegroom, for it
is written "they _all_ slumbered and slept," but because they were
prepared; and five were foolish, not because they did not watch, but
because they were unprepared. "The fisherman's wife who spends her time
on the pier-head watching for the boats, cannot be so well prepared to
give her husband a comfortable reception as the woman who is busy about
her household work, and only now and again turns a longing look
seaward."[56] So Christ's command to "watch" means, not "Be ye always on
the watch," but, "Be ye always ready."

Spurgeon once said, with characteristic humour and good sense, that
there were friends of his to whom he would like to say, "Ye men of
Plymouth, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? Go on with your work." He
who in a world like ours can sit and gaze with idly folded hands--let
not that man think he shall receive anything of the Lord. A lady once
asked John Wesley, "Suppose that you knew you were to die at twelve
o'clock to-morrow night, how would you s