‘I was going to say,’ said Buxton, ‘until interrupted in this unmannerly manner, you are enthusiasts, I am not. I doubt the dream of a new heaven and a new earth. It has done good in its time, I admit. It was the thought of the Messiah that was to come that nerved the heart of the Jew as he sat by the waters of Babylon and wept as he remembered Zion. Paul and the Apostles expected the new heaven and the new earth before they laid down their lives as martyrs for their inspiring faith. Upheld by the same living hope, tender and delicate maidens have gone to the grave exulting, and have glorified God at the stake or in the dungeon or on the scaffold. “The end of all things is at hand,” is ever the cry of the churches. It was that of Luther in his day, and is that of the Evangelicals in ours, who, if an earthquake destroys a town, or a deluge sweeps over the land, or the cholera breaks out in the East, or there are wars and rumours of wars, tell us these are the dread signs to mark the coming of the Son of Man with His saints to judge the earth. I feel rather inclined to believe with old Swedenborg that that day is past. The talk of a Millennium makes me sick. It is a delusion and a sham. Such men as Dr. Cumming, with their long array of dates and their wild dreams of the fulfilment of prophecy, make men like myself sceptics. It is clear to us that the odds, at any rate, are against the Christian.’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘But this is a business scheme. We are not in search of the Millennium.’ CHAPTER XXXI. CHIEFLY ABOUT THE LAND. For three months an Englishman sits in sackcloth and ashes. The matter-of-fact reviewer will tell me this is not so; and he is right and so am I.