It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed, but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end of all things earthly.  The gates of hell shall not prevail:  when Rome falls, the world falls; and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power.  For himself, he imagined that the end was not far away.  When he had named Megiddo this afternoon it had been in his mind; to him it seemed natural that at the consummation of all things Christ’s Vicar should dwell at Nazareth where His King had come on earth—­and that the Armageddon of the Divine John should be within sight of the scene where Christ had first taken His earthly sceptre and should take it again.  After all, it would not be the first battle that Megiddo had seen.  Israel and Amalek had met here; Israel and Assyria; Sesostris had ridden here and Sennacherib.  Christian and Turk had contended here, like Michael and Satan, over the place where God’s Body had lain.  As to the exact method of that end, he had no clear views; it would be a battle of some kind, and what field could be found more evidently designed for that than this huge flat circular plain of Esdraelon, twenty miles across, sufficient to hold all the armies of the earth in its embrace?  To his view once more, ignorant as he was of present statistics, the world was divided into two large sections, Christians and heathens, and he supposed them very much of a size.  Something would happen, troops would land at Khaifa, they would stream southwards from Tiberias, Damascus and remote Asia, northwards from Jerusalem, Egypt and Africa; eastwards from Europe; westwards from Asia again and the far-off Americas.  And, surely, the time could not be far away, for here was Christ’s Vicar; and, as He Himself had said in His gospel of the Advent, Ubicumque fuerit corpus, illie congregabuntur et aquilae. Of more subtle interpretations of prophecy he had no knowledge.  For him words were things, not merely labels upon ideas.  What Christ and St. Paul and St. John had said—­these things were so.  He had escaped, owing chiefly to his isolation from the world, that vast expansion of Ritschlian ideas that during the last century had been responsible for the desertion by so many of any intelligible creed.  For others this had been the supreme struggle—­the difficulty of decision between the facts that words were not things, and yet that the things they represented were in themselves objective.  But to this man, sitting now in the moonlight, listening to the far-off tap of hoofs over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was as simple as an exact science.  Here Gabriel had descended on wide feathered wings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost had breathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Mary folded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal.  And here once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess—­yet he thought that already the running of chariot-wheels