And when the fellow cries "Bless God!" this honest man will exclaim
"Damn God!"

No doubt the priests would burn that honest man alive if they had the
power. But his logic and his feelings will be better than theirs. He
will abhor selfishness even in the disguise of piety, and he will argue
that if God is to be credited with the lives of those who are saved,
he should also be debited with the lives of those who are lost. And how
would the account stand then?

JUDGMENT DAY.

The end of the world has been a fertile and profitable theme with pulpit
mountebanks and pious adventurers. Ever since the primitive ages of
Christianity it has served to frighten the credulous and feather the
nests of their deceivers.

In the apostolic days the Second Coming of Christ was generally and
constantly expected. According to the twenty-fourth of Matthew, Jesus
predicted that the end of all things would soon arrive. The sun and moon
were to be darkened; the stars were to fall from heaven; and the Son
of Man was to come through the clouds with great power and glory, and
gather the elect together from every quarter of the earth, According to
the twenty-fifth of Matthew, this wondrous scene was to be followed by
a Great Assize. All the nations were to be judged before the heavenly
throne, and divided into two lots, one destined for heaven and the other
for hell. And Jesus significantly added, "Verily I say unto you, this
generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled."

St. Paul also, in the fourth chapter of the first of Thessalonians, said
that the Lord would "descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of
the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall
rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up
together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air."

Nothing of the sort has happened. There is no sign of the Lord's
coming, and he is already eighteen centuries behind date. "Behold I come
quickly"--"Surely I come quickly." Such was the announcement. But, like
many other divine promises, it has been falsified. The only orthodox way
out of the difficulty is to say that the Lord does not reckon time as
we do; with him a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a
day.

The general public, however, eighteen hundred years ago, did not
know how long the prophecy was to remain unfulfilled, and it had an
extraordinary power over them. Being mostly very