He knew, for instance, the day on which the world, as regards its present dispensation, was to end. Susannah Walcot had given her word for it; but hitherto the Council of the Second Adventists had decided not to publish it,--to keep it till their position had become more absolutely assured, and the world psychologically ready to receive it. But it was very difficult for Mr. Trimblerigg, when a whole continent was rushing into a state of conversion, and millions listening fervently to his daily orations, it was very difficult to keep back, in moments of inspired utterance, a declaration which would give the _clou_ to the whole movement, letting organized society know in definite terms how brief, how startlingly brief, was its time-limit, before that great cataclysmic change which would take and turn it upside down. And so one day, in a moment of effervescence, Mr. Trimblerigg let it out. And having done so, there was no going back on it. With many millions already declared converts, and at least as many more hovering upon the brink, waiting for the deciding push, Second Adventism in that act of inspired indiscretion revealed its weakness and its strength. Western civilization (the East staying strangely unmoved, sceptical, slightly amused) received a shock comparable to a renewed outbreak of war. It was as though a half of the world had leapt to its feet in startled amaze, then staggered and plunged. For then on all the stock exchanges the wildest rush for reinvestments began that had ever been known, and mainly for shares in the vast co-operative concerns of New Jerusalem Ltd. which had been set going before his departure to America by Mr. Trimblerigg. A city designed to hold a million souls--self-governing, self-supporting, with its own trade-tokens for currency, and closely encircled by an agricultural combine exclusively supplying its needs from day to day--was now being rushed into being before the astonished eyes of a metropolis which had hitherto regarded itself as the biggest thing of its kind in the world.