be within sight of the scene where Christ had
first taken His earthly sceptre and should take it again. After all, it
would not be the first battle that Megiddo had seen. Israel and Amalek
had met here; Israel and Assyria; Sesostris had ridden here and
Sennacherib. Christian and Turk had contended here, like Michael and
Satan, over the place where God's Body had lain. As to the exact method
of that end, he had no clear views; it would be a battle of some kind,
and what field could be found more evidently designed for that than this
huge flat circular plain of Esdraelon, twenty miles across, sufficient
to hold all the armies of the earth in its embrace? To his view once
more, ignorant as he was of present statistics, the world was divided
into two large sections, Christians and heathens, and he supposed them
very much of a size. Something would happen, troops would land at
Khaifa, they would stream southwards from Tiberias, Damascus and remote
Asia, northwards from Jerusalem, Egypt and Africa; eastwards from
Europe; westwards from Asia again and the far-off Americas. And, surely,
the time could not be far away, for here was Christ's Vicar; and, as He
Himself had said in His gospel of the Advent, _Ubicumque fuerit corpus,
illie congregabuntur et aquilae._ Of more subtle interpretations of
prophecy he had no knowledge. For him words were things, not merely
labels upon ideas. What Christ and St. Paul and St. John had said--these
things were so. He had escaped, owing chiefly to his isolation from the
world, that vast expansion of Ritschlian ideas that during the last
century had been responsible for the desertion by so many of any
intelligible creed. For others this had been the supreme struggle--the
difficulty of decision between the facts that words were not things, and
yet that the things they represented were in themselves objective. But
to this man, sitting now in the moonlight, listening to the far-off tap
of hoofs over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was as
simple as an exact science. Here Gabriel had descended on wide feathered
wings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost had
breathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Mary
folded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal. And
here once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess--yet he
thought that already the running of chariot-wheels was audible--the
tumult of the hosts of God g