Peace I never knew before.”
“Not all translated then?” began the leader of the Stock Exchange band, addressing her.
There was nothing flippant, nothing sneering in his tone or manner.
The girl essayed a reply, but at first it ended in a sob only. Presently she recovered herself enough to say:—
“No, we’re not all translated! You see, sir, the Army, as a body, never quite admitted the truth of this Second coming of our Lord. It has always preached that we, as an Army of Salvation, were raised up by God to get all the world converted. A lady in the train, as I came up to business, only yesterday——”
The girl sighed wearily, as she interpolated, “Yesterday seems as far off as Wesley’s times. But, only yesterday, this lady, in the train talked to me about the ‘Lord’s near return’—that is how she put it—and said, ‘God is undoubtedly using the Army in evangelizing the distant heathen, and thus allowing them to fulfil His purpose in calling out those who are to form the Bride of the Heavenly Bridegroom—but, believe me, my dear, the world will never be converted before Christ comes for His Church.’
“She talked to me very beautifully, and simply, only, as she said, one could only grasp these truths in proportion as one kept clear in their minds the things which belonged to the separate dispensations.
“‘If,’ she said, ‘The Lord came to-night’—how little she or I dreamed that He actually would—‘this dispensation would be closed, and a new one would begin to-morrow.’”
The girl looked around in a bewildered way, almost as though she was looking for something she had lost.
“I have never known anything about the dispensations, and their bearing on the Bible,” she went on. “The Army has always taught us that we should all die, lie in our graves until “the last Day,” then appear before the Great White Throne, and be judged according to our lives, and all that. The lady who spoke to me yesterday—yesterday? oh, how far off it seems—explained to me, from the Bible, that true Christians would never appear before the Great White Throne.