Chapter I: Front Matter

“IN THE
TWINKLING
OF AN EYE”

By Sydney Watson

_Author of_

“The Mark of the Beast”
“Life’s Lookout”, “Wops, the Waif”,
Etc.

Copyright 1918

THE BIOLA BOOK ROOM
BIBLE INSTITUTE OF LOS ANGELES
536-558 South Hope Street
Los Angeles, Cal.

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

Some years ago, I received from an important Southern town, a letter from a Ladies’ Temperance Committee, to this effect:—“Sir, We, the undersigned, are a committee of Ladies, who, for many years, have purchased your “Stories for the People” in very large numbers, for free distribution and loan; always assuming that you were to be thoroughly relied upon as an upholder of strict Total-abstinence principles. But your latest story has sadly undeceived us, as regards your usefulness as a worker in the great cause we are pledged to uphold and further. On _pp_ —— of your last story, you make your hero, returning from a day’s run with the hounds, come upon a woman lying in a lonely place, who has been injured in a trap accident. You say, speaking of your hero’s prompt help to the woman, that “taking his hunting flask from his pocket, he forced a few drops of the brandy between the woman’s lips, etc.” Now, sir, we contend that had you had the cause of Total-abstinence fully at heart, you would have made that huntsman’s flask to have contained _water_.”

So much for the letter. The moral of it lies on the surface. There are some persons who seem unable to see anything from the side of _real, actual_ life—that Ladies’ committee could not—whose vision is narrowed down to the tiny slit of their own cramped, cabined life and thought, they have no true _out_look upon life, as a whole.

I preface this foreword with the above incident, because I am perfectly certain that the standpoint from which I have written this book will be utterly, absolutely misunderstood by many earnest, loving-hearted people, whose eyes, with my own, have caught the _up_ward gaze “from whence we look for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

I would at once acknowledge that the inceptive idea of writing such a book as this was born within me from reading “Long Odds,” that wondrous little half-penny booklet written by the late General Robertson, I believe, a booklet that has been so marvellously “owned and blessed.”

For five or six years the idea for this present volume has been simmering and seething in my mind. The first and only real problem I had to face in the matter was that of the _principle_ involved in using the fictional form to clothe so sacred a subject (for, to me, the near Return of our Lord is the _most_ sacred of all subjects.) But the problem of the _principle_ was speedily settled, as I remembered how wondrously God had owned and blessed “Long Odds,” in which the fictional is the vehicle of the teaching.

Then, too, there are, I know, myriads of people into whose hands “Long Odds,” could never, by any chance, fall—for there are multitudes who will not so much as glance at, or touch a tract, while a volume will easily win its way among all classes. There is an enormous percentage of attendants at our churches and chapels, and many otherwise very earnest Christian workers, to whom the whole subject of the Lord’s Second Coming is an absolutely unknown realm of Truth—and these I would fain reach and arouse with the message of this book.

To those Christians who are looking for the Return of the Lord, to whom the subject is the most tenderly sacred of all subjects, who will at first sight condemn the use of the fictional element, the dramatic colour in this book—and many good people will, I am assured—I would say, first, that the book is not written for them, and second, that, our Lord Himself, speaking of His own Return, used two very remarkable illustrations from life’s strangest dramas. First, “_As it was in the days of Noah, even so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until THE DAY_, etc.” Now, think what a myriad _dramas_ were being enacted when the flood came. And had the disciples asked their Lord, privately, after His utterance, to explain more fully what He meant, what thrilling stories He _could_, He _doubtless WOULD have sketched_. If any Christian cavils at the dramatic in this book, I would refer him or her to Christ’s own pointing in the picture of Noah’s time, then bid them fill out, by help of the feeblest, simplest imagination, the picture of the myriad dramas that were being enacted when that flood came, of old time. Then, if the objector is honest, and is _capable_ of the least imagination, he will say “I see! and, now that I see this fact, my wonder is _not_ that there is a certain dramatic freedom in this book, but that the writer has kept so powerful a restraint upon his pen.”

Again, Christ said:—“_As it was in the days of LOT_,” etc. Now think over _this_ saying of our Lord’s, and remembering what is actually recorded in Genesis, of the _vice_ and _crime_ of Sodom, (and how, alas! even when saved from the doomed city, Lot and his daughters brought away much of the vicious, criminal essence of the place with them,) think how the Return of our Lord, presently, will mean the snatching away of many of His own out of scenes infinitely more awful than anything I have used herein, or ever hinted at. A book written on the subject here chosen, and written in the vein our Lord Himself suggests in the two passages referred to above, could not have been written in any other way—to be true to life, and to the subject.

Should any reader object to the expository lectures of Major H——, as the chief vehicle for the doctrinal teaching, I would say that personal experience has proved the style to be infinitely more acceptable to readers than that of the dialogue mode.

I have purposely placed special emphasis on the Jewish side of the subject, since the Jewish question is infinitely more closely enwrapped with the fact of our Lord’s near return, than many speakers and writers give prominence to.

SYDNEY WATSON.

“THE FIRE,” VERNHAM DEAN, HUNGERFORD, BERKS.

CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I.—TAKEN AT THE FLOOD 11

II.—“THE COURIER” 20

III.—FLOTSAM 26

IV.—“I ONLY REAPED WHAT I SOWED” 33

V.—“LILY WORK” 38

VI.—AN INTERESTING TALK 44

VII.—“COMING” 55

VIII.—REVERIE 64

IX.—A THREAT 75

X.—IN THE NICK OF TIME 82

XI.—“LONG ODDS” 93

XII.—THE CENTER OF THE EARTH 101

XIII.—A DEMON 110

XIV.—MAJOR H—— ON “THE COMING!” 118

XV.—THE ADDRESS 124

XVI.—HER CABIN COMPANION 136

XVII.—CASTING A SHOE 142

XVIII.—TOLD IN A CAB 154

XIX.—TOM HAMMOND REVIEWING 164

XIXa.—“MY MENTOR” 176

XX.—THE PLACARD 185

XXI.—WAS HE MAD 189

XXII.—FROM THE PROPHET’S CHAMBER 195

XXIII.—PASSOVER! 200

XXIV.—“THIS SAYING SHALL COME TO PASS” 209

XXV.—FOILED! 218

XXVI.—A CASTAWAY 221

XXVII.—A STRICKEN CITY 226

XXVIII.—“HALLELUJAH LASS” 232

XXIX.—IN ST. PAUL’S 238

XXX.—CONCLUSION 246

“IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE”