mean imminency and are not to be accepted by the Church as teaching imminency, then language is meaningless, words are a confusion, all promise is a lie and Scripture, instead of being a revelation, is a misrepresentation, a bundle of childish incoherencies, or devil-inspired fooleries.

If Jesus Christ and His apostles do not teach His imminent Coming, then He and His disciples were the most mistaken of all men, or of all men most guilty of insincerity and deception. If they were mistaken in one respect they might have been mistaken in others. If they were insincere, they were cool and predeterminate deceivers and both the Lord and His disciples must be completely and forever set aside.

In the nature of the case, seeing the Lord is very and essential truth itself, and what His disciples and apostles said were the inspiration of the truth He gave them, no conclusion as to the insincerity or intent of deception on the part of the Lord and His disciples can be accepted for a moment. On the contrary, the statement and ex

hortation of the Lord and His apostles must be accepted as absolute, and infallible truth.

The Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ must therefore be received as a promised and always imminent event.

To this fully proclaimed and overwhelmingly demonstrated and proved Scriptural doctrine of imminency, it is objected that our Lord revealed to Peter that he should die, and some years later appeared in a vision to Paul, assuring him he should go to Rome and there testify in His name.

Since Peter was to die before the Lord should

come, and a future experience of Paul must be fulfilled before the Lord could come, these two announcements ought to be sufficient, so it is said, to prove that neither in Peter's day nor in Paul's day was the Coming of the Lord imminent. This flat contradiction, and by the Lord Himself, removes this doctrine of imminency and all attempts at the construing of Christ's Coming as such from the field, not only of acceptance, but even of consideration.

The answer to this subtle suggestion is simple and direct.

The statement to Peter and the commission to Paul contain within them an unexpressed but well understood contingency.

That contingency is, always, the Lord's Coming.

Nor is this begging the question by mere assertion, or by impracticable and unwarranted principle of action. Go down the streets of the city to-morrow. You will find them packed with the thronging crowds. Every man, every woman there has a plan or some degree of intent and purpose. You yourselves here have plans for tomorrow or next summer, or it may be ten years from now. But you have no guarantee of tomorrow. You do not know what a day may bring forth. Give you a week! What do you know about a week? In less than that time you may die, be buried out of sight and forgotten by the hurrying crowd. David said there was but a step betwixt him and death. He told the truth. It is true of you. God has only to withdraw His finger from your pulse, your heart stops, you are gone and all your to-morrow's plans fall out of your dead hand, break to pieces and are blown

away as when so much dust is blown by careless winds. By every law of your body, by the sentence that is upon you, by your helplessness to avoid the ruthless germ, the unexpected blow, death is always imminent for you and human kind. And yet plans for the building of houses are taken out, journeys are planned, trips over mountains and across the seas. You and people say, "I expect to go here and go there. I expect to do this and do that." All the time the contingency of death is understood. We shall do certain things. We shall go into certain places. We shall take certain journeys-if we do not die. That is understood all over the world and by every human being.

say,

That is a contingency which remains as a silent understood factor in every detail and plan of life.

This principle of understood contingency is illustrated in the message of the Lord to Jonah and in the subsequent result of that message.

The prophet was commanded to announce to the idolatrous city that in forty days it should be

destroyed. Jonah delivered the warning in clear and unmistakable terms, as it is written:

"He cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall he destroyed."

But more than forty days passed and Nineveh was not destroyed.

Nineveh was not destroyed because the people repented and turned to the Lord. And this fact of repentance was a contingency foreseen and inwrought as an inclusive part of the Lord's state ment that Nineveh should be destroyed.

Like the contingency of death, like the contingency of repentance as noted, the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ is an abiding contingency. Since it is a proclaimed imminence it is always an interior and understood contingency, lying back of, and ready as a factor in, every circumstance, every planned and proclaimed event.

Peter would die and Paul would go to Rome -if the Lord did not come.

This Coming was always possible. It was possible at the moment when Peter faced death. It was possible when Paul contemplated Rome.