Page:God and His Book.djvu/174

164 looked for him. He is now more than 1800 years over due. Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly!

It must be kept in mind that punctuality was never a characteristic of the Lord. Perhaps it was for lack of this valuable quality he had to give up the respectable calling of carpentering to take to lay preaching. He took "no note of time." He prophesied that he would remain in the grave three days and three nights (seventy-two hours), and he remained in it at most twenty-nine hours and a half. He prophesied that he would come back to the earth before the demise of the then generation. That generation passed away eighteen centuries ago, and Christ has not yet come! Well may he be expected to now "come quickly."

He has, to this day, dupes who believe in his prophecy, and who possibly have a cab constantly standing at the nearest railway station "waiting for the coming of the Lord Jesus." It is admitted that the world is not yet quite prepared to receive him. Perhaps this is the reason he has not yet come. All the kingdoms of the earth were to be his when he came; but, should he come to-morrow, he would find only a small number of the kingdoms his. He has allowed his Gospel leaven nearly 2,000 years to work, and yet many millions of the human race upon the face of the globe to-day have never heard of him, and millions more who have heard of him reject him.

This being so, it is no wonder he does not "come." The world is not nearly ready for him, and, what is worse, it is getting more and more unready every day. He should have come in the dark ages: he would have found much more Christianity in existence then than he could possibly find now. The Christian countries were then really Christian; now they are little more than nominally so. All the Christianity that to-day exists outside the Salvation Army has been explained away into a kind of conventional formula bowed and scraped to by Hypocrisy; while, wherever earnest Honesty erects his head, the so-called Christian countries are riddled with more or less openly-avowed "Infidelity."

Christ is eighteen hundred years too late, and had better not allow himself to be nineteen hundred years