We have heard him say, that it was a mercy for the young, that, being thoughtless and without experience, they did not see the harm caused by the scandals, “else they could not endure to live.”[933] And, that the world could “not possibly last long.” Its hours are numbered, for, thanks to me, “everything has now been put straight. The Gospel has been revealed.”[934] “Christ said, that, at His coming, faith would be hard to find on the earth (Luke xviii. 8). That is true, for the whole of Asia and Africa is without the Evangel, and even as regards Europe no Gospel is preached in Greece, Italy, Hungary, Spain, France, England or Poland. The one little bright spot, the house of Saxony, will not hinder the coming of the Last Day.”[935] “Praise be to God Who has taught us to sigh after it and long for it! In Popery everybody dreads it.”[936] “Amen, so be it, Amen!” so he sighed in 1543 in a letter to Amsdorf alluding to the end of the world. “The world was just like this before the Flood, before the Babylonian captivity, before the destruction of Jerusalem, before the devastation of Rome and before the misfortunes of Greece and Hungary; so it will be and so it is before the ruin of Germany too. They refuse to listen, so they must be made to feel. I should be glad to console ourselves both, by discussing this thought [of the contempt of the Papists for us] with you by word of mouth.” “We will leave them in the lurch” and cease from attempting their conversion. “Farewell in the Lord, Who is our Helper and Who will help us for ever and ever. Amen.”[937] “Under the Pope,” we read in the Colloquies, “at least the name of Christ was retained, but our thanklessness and presumptuous sense of security will bring things to such a pass that Christ will be no longer even named, and so the words of the Master already quoted will be fulfilled according to which, at His coming, no faith will remain on the earth.”[938] As to the circumstances which should accompany the end of the world, he still expected the catastrophe to take place most likely about Easter time, “early in the morning, after a thunderstorm of an hour or perhaps a little more.”[939] Here he no longer gives the world “a bare hundred years more,” nor even something “not more than fifty years”;[940] he almost expects the end to come before the completion of his translation of the Bible into German.[941] The world will certainly not last until 1548, so he declared, “for this would run counter to Ezechiel.”[942] He is not quite sure whether the Golden Age begins in 1540 or not, though such was the contention of the mathematicians; but “we shall see the fulfilment of Scripture,”[943] or at any rate, as he prudently adds elsewhere, our descendants will. But before this can come the “great light” of faith would have to be dimmed still more.[944]