any man to enter.  And it is our duty to be faithful to our ignorance as well as to our knowledge.  There is a Christian as well as an anti-Christian agnosticism.  To pry into the secret things of God is no less a sin than wilfully to remain ignorant of what He has been pleased to make known.  The idly inquisitive spirit which is never at rest save when it is poking into forbidden corners, Christ always checks and condemns.  “Lord,” asked one, “are there few that be saved?” But He would give no answer save this:  “Strive to enter in by the narrow door.”  “Lord, and this man what?” said Peter, curious concerning the unrevealed future of his brother apostle.  But again idle curiosity must go unsatisfied:  “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?  Follow thou Me.”  “Lord dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” But once more He will give no answer:  “It is not for you to know the times or seasons which the Father hath set within His own authority.”  And yet, strangely enough, that which Christ has seen good to leave untold is the one thing concerning His coming on which the minds of multitudes have fastened.  It says little, either for our religion or our common-sense, that one of the most widely circulated religious newspapers 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.”