I'm waiting for the Rupture, when all the dead folks will be raised up bodily.

Sure is gonna be crowded.

Don't worry about the world coming to an end, wars and rumours of wars, stars falling from the sky, great beasts with 666 on their foreheads trotting around, or any of the rest of it.

I have it on excellent authority that no one knows the day or the hour.

                   Channel Firing

             That night your great guns, unawares,
             Shook all our coffins as we lay,
             And broke the chancel window-squares,
             We thought it was the Judgment-day

             And sat upright. While drearisome
             Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
             The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
             The worms drew back into the mounds,

             The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No;
             It's gunnery practice out at sea
             Just as before you went below;
             The world is as it used to be:

             "All nations striving strong to make
             Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
             They do no more for Christés sake
             Than you who are helpless in such matters.

             "That this is not the judgment-hour
             For some of them's a blessed thing,
             For if it were they'd have to scour
             Hell's floor for so much threatening ....

             "Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
             I blow the trumpet (if indeed
             I ever do; for you are men,
             And rest eternal sorely need)."

             So down we lay again. "I wonder,
             Will the world ever saner be,"
             Said one, "than when He sent us under
             In our indifferent century!"

             And many a skeleton shook his head.
             "Instead of preaching forty year,"
             My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
             "I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

             Again the guns disturbed the hour,
             Roaring their readiness to avenge,
             As far inland as Stourton Tower,
             And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.