the medieval sects that Cohn describes. The strong emphasis on the Book of Revelation, the looming proximity of the end, the strict division between the faithful remnant who keep the Sabbath and those who join the ranks of the fallen. Of the Anti-Christ identified with the Pope, whose title Vicarius Filii Dei, Vicar of the Son of God, apparently had a numerical value of 666. I mention Hiram Edson's morning after master stroke to illustrate the adaptability and resilience of end-time thought. For centuries now, it has regarded the end as soon, if not next week then within a year or two. The end has not come and yet no-one is discomforted for long. New prophets and soon a new generation set about the calculations and always manage to find the end looming within their own lifetime. The million sellers, like Hal Lindsey, predicted the end of the world all through the 70s, 80s and 90s and today business has never been better. There is a hunger for this news and perhaps we glimpse here something in our nature, something of our deeply held notions of time and of our own insignificance against the intimidating vastness of eternity or the age of the universe, on the human scale there is very little difference. We have need of a plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in the flow of things. In the sense of an ending, Frank Commode suggests that the enduring quality, the vitality of the Book of