It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed,
but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end
of all things earthly. The gates of hell shall
not prevail: when Rome falls, the world falls;
and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power.
For himself, he imagined that the end was not far
away. When he had named Megiddo this afternoon
it had been in his mind; to him it seemed natural
that at the consummation of all things Christ’s
Vicar should dwell at Nazareth where His King had
come on earth—and that the Armageddon of
the Divine John should 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