Sadly, there was no room for this paragraph in the sermon for Sunday the 21st.

Throughout history various groups, religious and otherwise, have predicted the end of the world and hitherto all have been wrong. Going down the rabbit hole of the various end time predictions this week led me to an Australian politician, Walter Moffitt Marks, who won the Sydney Federal seat of Wentworth for the National Party in 1919. In a parliamentary speech on the third of November 1921 he predicted that Armageddon would be fought in 1934 when the British navy would collect the Jewish people to form a great nation in Palestine. It was described by the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘a remarkable speech,’ in an article that ended: ‘The general opinion that the next war will be in the Pacific was declared by Mr Marks to be at variance with the prophecy of the Bible, which clearly defined that it would be in the Mediterranean. The Japanese would not invade Australia. They and the Chinese would go with Christ to Palestine.’ Despite spending way too much time looking, I could not find a reaction from Mr Marks to Armageddon not being fought in 1934.