vista terminates the projects of their philanthropy, just as their own death is to them the end of the world.  Meantime, it appears, you would be tempted to neglect the practical little you could do, because you could not do more than for a century or so!  Pray, which is really the more benevolent?  Moreover, as not one man in a million can or does think of benefiting any but his immediate generation, you ought, upon your principles, still to sit down inactive; for they for whom alone you can work will soon pass away too.  But the whole argument is too refined.  No mortal—­ except you or Mr. Newman—­would be wrought upon by it.”

“Well, but,” said Fellowes, “as to the mistake of the Apostles, there can be no doubt of that; it really appears to me grossly disingenuous”—­looking towards me—­“to deny it.  What do you say, Mr. B.?” repeating his assertion that the Apostles clearly thought that the end of the world was close at hand,—­in fact, that it would happen in their generation.

I told him I was afraid I must run the risk of appearing in his eyes “grossly disingenuous”; not that I deemed it necessary to maintain that the Apostles had any idea of the period of time which was to intervene between the first promulgation of the Gospel and the consummation of all things; for when I found our Lord himself acknowledging, “Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, not even the angels, nor even the Son, but the Father only,” I could not wonder that the Apostles were left to mere conjectures on a subject which was then veiled even from his humanity.  I said I even thought it probable that their vivid feeling anticipated the day,—­that the interval between, so to speak, was “foreshortened” to them; but that I could not see how the question of their inspiration, or the truth of Christianity, was at all involved in their ignorance on that point; unless, indeed, it could be proved that they had positively stated that the predicted event would take place in their own time.  This, I acknowledged, I could not find,—­but much to the contrary; that the charge, indeed, had been so often repeated by the infidel school, that they had persuaded themselves of it, and spoke of it as if it were a decided point; but that as long as the second Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians remained, in which the Apostle expressly corrected misapprehensions similar to those which infidelity still professes to found on the first Epistle, I should continue to doubt whether Paul did not know his own mind better than his modern commentators.  I told him that we do not hear that the Thessalonians persisted in believing that they had rightly interpreted Paul’s words after he had himself disowned the meaning they had put upon them; that this was a degree of assurance only possible to modern critics; and that I was surprised that Mr. Newman should have quietly assumed the alleged “mistake” in his “Phases of Faith,” without thinking it worth while even to state the opposing argument from the Second Epistle.  I added, that the repeated references which both Paul and Peter make to their own deaths, as certain to take place before the dissolution of all things, sufficiently prove that, however their view of the future might be contracted, they did not expect the world to end in their day, and ought to have silenced the perverse criticism on the popular expression, “Then we which are alive and remain,” &c.