The perusal was listened to in breathless silence. It was like his voice speaking across the generations from the urn containing his ashes and standing there in their midst. When the President had finished, he laid the sheets down again and said-- “Thus the eye of the Master, looking across the years which separated his day from ours, has seen one gleam of light, one ray of hope piercing the black pall of desolation which is about to fall upon the world, and it is for us to follow where he has pointed the way. “I have now discharged the first part of the solemn and terrible duty which has devolved upon me. It is now for you to communicate the tidings you have heard to your families, a task which, however awful it may be for loving parents to be charged with, you will yet find strength to perform, even as your children shall find strength to hear their inevitable doom from those lips which will best know how to soften the tidings of death to them. “When you have done this we will set about making the choice of those who, if it shall please the Master of Destiny, shall be the Children of Deliverance and the parents of the new race that shall repeople the earth when cosmos once more succeeds to chaos. “If that shall be permitted, then we, who shall never see the new world, may yet go down to the grave knowing that we shall live again in our children, for these will be the children, not only of a few families among us, but sons and daughters of Aeria, the most perfect flower of our race, and in them, if we choose them wisely, the world, purged by fire of the dross of human wickedness, will find a new destiny, and the Golden Age shall return to earth once more.” As the President finished speaking, he held up his hands as though in blessing, and once more every head was bent. Then the great doors of the temple swung open, the assembly divided into four streams, and passed silently as a congregation of shadows out of the building. That night the story of the world’s approaching doom was told in every home in Aeria. Children on the threshold of youth learnt that for them youth would never come; youths and maidens on the verge of manhood and womanhood learnt that the bright promise of their lives could now never be fulfilled; and lovers just about to join hands for life saw the grave opening at their feet, and parting them in their earthly personalities for ever. That they would meet again upon a higher plane of existence was the first and most firmly held article of their faith, but so far as the affairs of this world were concerned the end was in sight. In a less highly developed, a less perfectly organised, state of society, the almost immediate result would have been the end of all control, and the dissolution of all but the most elementary bonds of interest or affection that exist between men and men.