it may have for him.  It would profit him nothing to win it, if he lost his own soul.  That prophecy about the destruction of nature springs from this attitude; nature must be subservient to the human conscience; it must satisfy the hopes of the prophet and vindicate the saints.  That the years should pass and nothing should seem to happen need not shatter the force of this prophecy for those whose imagination it excites.  This world must actually vanish very soon for each of us; and this is the point of view that counts with the Christian mind.  Even if we consider posterity, the kingdoms and arts and philosophies of this world are short lived; they shift their aims continually and shift their substance.  The prophecy of their destruction is therefore being fulfilled continually; the need of repentance, if one would be saved, is truly urgent; and the means of that salvation cannot be an operation upon this world, but faith in another world that, in the experience of each soul, is to follow upon it.  Thus the summons to repent and the prophecy about destiny which were the root of Christianity, can fully retain their spirit when for “this wicked world” we read “this transitory life” and for “the coming of the Kingdom” we read “life everlasting.”  The change is important, but it affects the application rather than the nature of the gospel.  Morally there is a loss, because men will never take so hotly what concerns another life as what affects this one; speculatively, on the other hand, there is a gain, for the expectation of total transformations and millenniums on earth is a very crude illusion, while the relation of the soul to nature is an open question in philosophy, and there will always be a great loftiness and poetic sincerity in the feeling that the soul is a stranger in this world and has other destinies in store.

What would make the preaching of the gospel utterly impossible would be the admission that it had no authority to proclaim what has happened or what is going to happen, either in this world or in another.  A prophecy about destiny is an account, however vague, of events to be actually experienced, and of their causes.  The whole inspiration of Hebraic religion lies in that.  It was not metaphorically that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.  The promised land was a piece of earth.  The kingdom was an historical fact.  It was not symbolically that Israel was led into captivity, or that it returned and restored the Temple.  It was not ideally that a Messiah was to come.  Memory of such events is in the same field as history; prophecy is in the same field as natural science.  Natural science too is an account of what will happen, and under what conditions.  It too is a prophecy about destiny.  Accordingly, while it is quite true that speculations about nature and history are not contained explicitly in the religion of the gospel, yet the message of this religion is one which speculations about nature and reconstructions of history may extend congruously,