"There shall be signs in the moon and in the stars, roarings of the sea and the waves; men's hearts failing them for fear shall look with trembling to the events about to happen. The powers of heaven shall be shaken; and then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with great power and majesty. Verily I say unto you, the present generation shall not pass away till all this be fulfilled." We do not dissemble that unbelievers upbraid us with this very prediction; they want to make us blush for our faith, when we consider that the world is still in existence. The generation, they say, is passed away, and yet nothing at all of this is fulfilled. Luke, therefore, ascribes language to our Saviour which he never uttered, or we must conclude that Jesus Christ Himself was mistaken, which would be blasphemy. But we close the mouth of these impious cavillers by observing that this prediction, which appears so false in its literal meaning, is true in its spirit; that the whole world meant Judæa, and that the end of the world signified the reign of Titus and his successors. St. Paul expresses himself very strongly on the subject of the end of the world in his Epistle to the Thessalonians: "We who survive, and who now address you, shall be taken up into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air." According to these very words of Jesus and St. Paul, the whole world was to have an end under Tiberius, or at latest under Nero. St. Paul's prediction was fulfilled no more than St. Luke's. These allegorical predictions were undoubtedly not meant to apply to the times of the evangelists and apostles, but to some future time, which God conceals from all mankind. _Tu ne quaesieris (scire nefas) quem mihi, quem tibi_ _Finem Dii dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios_ _Tentaris numeros. Ut melius, quicquid erit, pati!_ --HORACE i. ode xl. Strive not Leuconoe, to pry Into the secret will of fate, Nor impious magic vainly try To know our lives' uncertain date. --FRANCIS. It is still perfectly certain that all nations then known entertained the expectation of the end of the world, of a new earth and a new heaven. For more than sixteen centuries we see that donations to monkish institutions have commenced with these words: "_Adventante mundi vespere_," etc.--"The end of the world being at hand, I, for the good of my soul, and to avoid being one of the number of the goats on the left hand.... leave such and such lands to such a convent." Fear influenced the weak to enrich the cunning. The Egyptians fixed this grand epoch at the end of thirty-six thousand five hundred years; Orpheus is stated to have fixed it at the distance of a hundred and twenty thousand years.