Good sirs, you are both wrong. The Narrator is telling you to pray for the plague of the earth to be cleansed by floods, whether or not via war (to remove it of evil do-ers). We so easily welcome darkness into our lives and as a result are consumed and become a bearer of the plague. The purpose of the life we lead becomes lost and forgotten as we are consumed by the plague, that which forces upon the world an evil nature, possessing us to do things we couldn't normally do. Pray for something in the void of nothingness (this existance). A person who is trapped in hell is being offered a safe path through it by the narrator. The people who believe in the words of liars are doomed, possibly a political referance because it is 'the end of an age'.