But the end of all things is near. Therefore be of sound mind, self-controlled, and sober in prayer.
Is it not exceedingly likely, therefore, that this is what the apostles intended as the meaning of these passages?  That this is true is further implied by a fact, that being the ability of the first generations to have dropped these expressions from the New Testament; but they were not dropped; they were still believed late in the second century at the time of the formation of the New Testament canon; and thus it is obvious that they believed them in exactly the sense of Barclay's quotation above.  It is not therefore the true meaning of the apostles that troubles people; it is the false meaning imported into such texts by the grossly literal fundamentalist modernists who, like the Pharisees of old, pervert every spiritual statement in the New Testament to support their evil insinuations.  Their purpose in perverting the meaning of these is to support their false claim that Christ and the apostles were ignorant in thinking that the end of time (with Christ's coming) was an event to be expected speedily.  When Jesus said of Jairus' daughter, "The child is not dead but sleepeth" (Mark 5:39), the blind Pharisees in their fundamentalism took it literally.  When Jesus said, "Except ye eat my flesh and drink my blood, ye have no life in you" (John 6:53), the fundamentalist multitude forsook him.  When Jesus said, "I go away and whither I go ye cannot come" (John 8:21), the fundamentalist Pharisees took it literally, saying, "Will he kill himself?."  It is merely an example of the pot calling the kettle black when the modernist fundamentalists of our own times decry what they call "fundamentalism" in others, while they themselves are guilty of literalizing half of the New Testament in order to suit their own intentions.  There is no excuse for taking the expressions at the head of this paragraph in the grossly literal, restricted meaning.  The saints of all ages have understood them, as they were intended, to be warning inducements to readiness for the appearing of the Lord whenever he may come, his coming for every one of us, in the personal sense, being indeed imminent and speedy for us, and therefore fully justifying the texts as they stand.