When?
Fear deferred maketh the heart sick.
When the loved one, the one lover, lies in peril, the clutching dread that precedes is crueller than the long sorrow that follows.
And as terror of things to come is more than all grief for things gone past, so time, whether past or to come, is more terrible than space, Eternity more awful than the abyss. Who would not rather know—rather not know—when he will die than how or where he will die?
And as for ourselves and our beloved, so likewise with our qualms for the world. Man has ever concerned himself more passionately with the hour than with the way of destruction.
Which problem, if it holds greater interest, holds also greater difficulty. Surmise now moves from the humdrum sphere of matter into the wild realm of number, there to cower among kabbalistic patterns of fixed dates and patternless rows of cold zeros, or among the terrors, beyond all designs and digits, of the dateless zeroless Everlasting. How? was a hard query with many answers. Each of these adds its own complications to the questions When? Soon or late? What notice? At what stage of humanity’s career? Each several mode of the world’s ending brings several guesses at its time. The possibilities are added and multiplied, like the Biblical sums and astronomical ciphers themselves.
This Year
The end has endlessly been predicted for a given year, named and numbered.
Such predictions cannot altogether be classed with those of a near end rather than a distant, because the predicted date has not, when predicted, always been a near one. From another standpoint such predictions must be classed apart: in their support, almost alone, arguments from physical science are not invoked; today, as in the past, they are the unaided work of those in fee to the magic of numbers, whom if Science is not called upon to help, nor can she hinder. At the ultimate hour, when the fatal (say) star is upon us, enemy aid will doubtless be welcomed—if it chooses to confirm the chosen date. The astrologers then will allow the astronomers, in humble confirmation, to calculate the star’s mass and class, its composition, its rate of advance. Till then the date-givers will ignore their rivals, and continue to pore over their abacuses and swanpans and horoscopes and sibylline books. Till then the scientists will denounce their rivals as charlatans, and continue to pore over their equations and test-tubes and microscopes and statistical charts.
The Great Sacred Number of the Babylonians was 12,960,000, giving a date similar to some yesterday’s estimates of the sun’s life. Buddhism, early and late, has had many notational guesses. Jewish Apocalyptic, a stream from the waters of Babylon, flows from the Captivity to far beyond the Dispersion with a ceaseless glitter of Rabbinical numbers.
The stream flowed through into the nascent empire of Christianity, which it watered abundantly. Hardly had He uttered it, ere Jesus Christ’s “at hand” was fitted to figures. One year after another of “this generation” was proclaimed the Dies Irae.
When the Twelve had gone to their expectation above without seeing it realized here below; when Paul of Tarsus, his imminent hope fast dwindling through his Epistles, had been martyred for the Lord Whose Second Coming, like the First, he saw not; when the Great Persecution had raged over, and the Holy City fallen, and all the signs been accomplished save only the End—then the new religion had to fall back on other explanations and on other dates.
For a while the year 195 stood favourite. Write the name of the Urbs: PΩMH. Give the Greek value for each letter:
P
=
100
Ω
=
800
M
=
40
H
=
8
948
Deduct the Year of the Foundation of the City:
948
753
195
—the number of the Year of the Destruction of the City, and all else besides.
What proportion of the people held by this prophecy we have no worthy evidence. Certain it is that before that date and, when it turned out to be wrong, for more than eight centuries after it, all other numeral years, such as 365 the Year of Days, 6,300 the Grand Climacteric, and the giant numbers of First Chronicles Twenty-One, were swallowed up by the only figure specified in the New Testament itself: the χίλια ἔτη of Revelation Twenty. Other theories were brought into line. Christ’s “this generation” meant this millennium, this chiliad. The year One Thousand was The Year.
Christianity, still a persecuted creed offering no hope of present triumph, needed some such faith in not too distant punishment, and in not too distant reward and joy, to enable it to increase its strength and maintain its courage. For if what was down to happen at the Thousand spelt doom for the unbeliever, the prospects held out to the believer were correspondingly bright. The end of the world—surely. But only as incidental to the Parousia, the Second Coming, the New Earth, and Christ’s millennial reign upon it great and glorious, which only His children would share. Millenarianism, seconding martyrdom, proved most successful of recruiting sergeants. The Christians grew rapidly.
Tertullian was a chiliast, and Commodian; also Cerinthus, Apollinaris, Julius Africanus, Nepos of Egypt, Methodius of Tyre. Many ardent sects, chiefly on the still uncertain borderline between Judaism and Christianity, Ebonists and Montanists and others, made chiliasm their main tenet. Soon, however, the opposition showed itself more powerful. The Alogi, the Gnostics, the neo-Platonist mystics were all anti-millennial and, after some early famous wavering, Saint Augustine. By this time the catastrophic atmosphere was clearing away. Bishops reconciled to the Empire found it impolitic, when not impossible, to consider its thousand years a thousand years of sin ending in fire and doom; to allow Rome Galilean no better portion than Rome Capitoline. Self-interest, re-christened commonsense, forbade them to think millennially. Only madmen, sorcerers, Asiatics, could believe in such Rabbinical vapouring. Only heretics; after Augustine chiliasm was proclaimed a heresy.
No longer necessary as a propagandist tenet, a bait to the sensual-minded, the millennial belief gradually changed in character. The optimistic element, the watchers for the glorious new kingdom on earth, dropped away; the pessimistic element, the waiters for the inglorious end of the old kingdom of earth, only remained. Chiliasm was left to the catastrophists; the Year would be the Year of Doom unqualified.
The generations passed. The time drew near. The last century, the last year, the last hour. …
What happened?
What indeed? There are not four problems in all post-Classical history where views so flatly opposite are so flatly asserted and denied.
The millennial terror was the one universal terror Europe has ever shared.—It is a pure invention of later historians.
The whole world trembled and waited; a thing condemned to death, counting the mad hours.—There’s no trace of those tremblings. A few stray zealots may, as in every later generation also, have harboured such notions. Even of these there is scant record.
The great men of the age announced it, such as Bernard of Thuringia.—Great men such as: who else? And who, pray, was he?
There is a lease of 971 preserved; it is for twenty-nine years exactly.—The usual period; there are leases of 981 and 990 for the same term.
Appropinquante mundi termino begin fearfully the wills of that time.—A mere pious opening flourish, commoner moreover through the eighth and ninth centuries than in the tenth. Chronicles, as freer from stock-phraseology, bear surer witness than wills, and not all the rich chronicles of the period, from monastery by Rhine or Po or Danube, convey one slenderest hint.
The Council of Trosly, in 909, declared the Thousand.—The Council of Poitiers, in 999 (a more pressing, more impressive date), declared a few new punishments for bawdy clerks.
The Crusades were at rock-bottom but cringings, to acquire merit against the imminent end.—Pope Sylvester, in his letter of 999, has no allusion.
Gifts of piety, the twin-brother of fear, the Donations were specially frequent in the last generation before the Thousand.—They were specially infrequent.
The later nine-hundreds witnessed a frenzy of church-building, propitiatory and significant.—This was but one symptom of the recovery of all the arts. Was then that glorious Palace of the Doge a palace of God? Could that new ceremony, wedding his city with the ring and high splendour as Bride of the Adriatic, have been reconciled with a belief that the Bridal Hour of God was for the morrow?
Of the signs of the Dies Irae not one was wanting. Wars from country to country, from castle to orgied castle. Feudal barons, feudal bandits, invading Christ’s churches to fill them with horrible songs; raiding holy nunneries to fling Christ’s sisters into dungeons, chained there for outrage; treading the common man Christ had come to save down everywhere under heel and sword. Christ’s Vicar himself on impious knees before Astarte. Everywhere robbing, sacking, murdering, suffering; highways troubled, forests filled with violence. Huns from over the Alps, Saracens from over the Straits, Vikings from over the north waters. Everywhere famine and pest: for food men hunted men, or stole into the churchyards and dug up dead men for their nourishing; of the black plague of the nine-nineties none died but with loathsome face and in pain more loathsome. Dragons in the sky, stars falling that were tears for man’s fate, rain of blood, rivers of blood. Church bells ringing out in the unseen night, tolled by unseen hands—or by the beasts, as when in Orleans Cathedral a black wolf caught the rope between tooth and claw. Devils abroad in the perishing countryside, Antichrists rising up in every province, wolves storming the cities and witches the altars; cruelty and darkness over all lands.—True, the hour was gloomy. But what hour of human history is not?
The arguments balance without tilting. The belief was universal; it was nonexistent.
The facts tilted. The Year came; the end of the world came not.
Though discouraged, the chiliasts were not dismayed. There had been a slight miscalculation; it was not the year One Thousand, but the one thousandth year from Christ’s mission, Passion; and so 1030 and 1033 offered new chances. These proved not less illusory. The millennial fear lay down beside the millennial hope, buried together.
Disaster of avoided disaster shook the Church awhile. Magic raised its apostate head. Witches’ sabbaths rivalled holy Sundays; off minster towers the gargoyles elbowed the angels. Name ousted Number, Antichrist not End governed recovering religion’s next centuries of expectation.
The close of the Middle Ages saw a revival. Pseudo-Methodius, rediscovered, proved a rich date-mine; also the Sibylline Leaves. St. Vincent Ferrier counted the verses in the Psalms and plumped for 2537, yet to test. 1496, a year with much sound astrological backing, opened auspiciously when they fished out of the Tiber a monster with donkey’s head, maiden’s body, stag’s right foot, griffin’s left, and old grey face instead of rump—but ended like every other year, without the end. Stoffler chose February of 1524, and by flood, as Saturn, Mars and Jupiter would then be together in the Fishes. Doctor Auriol with his ark made ready; it was the driest February known. Stoffler tried again. Hostile contemporaries, with a sneer, note 1588 as unusually barren of happenings; surely an exaggeration, for the waters covered, if not the earth, at least the Great Armada.
In the Roman Church itself, numerical prophecy has had slightest renewal; it was into the hands of the Rabbis and the Protestants, witches of Endor and warlocks of England, that the game now passed. The Fifth Monarchy Men excelled in it, and cruel Cromwell and cynical Charles excelled each other in harrying them. The Rabbis revelled in one pseudo-Messianic year after another: apostates like Sabbatai Zevi, Sabbataic quacks like Mordecai of Eisenstadt, and sincere and frantic visionaries unlike either, proclaimed Antichrist born in Babylon almost every year, and each was to be the last. Even 1666, the Beast’s, the Neronic, though with London in flames it stood not signless, ended tamely; by merely ending.
The nineteenth century revival was relative only; the fact that such beliefs were making headway again had no more effect on the century’s triumphant march than its belief in Christianity itself.
In England the number of folk so convinced of this date or that as on the whole to order their lives in accordance with their conviction may now and then have reached seven figures; the number who went further, and in view of the worldly end sold all their worldly goods, can rarely have reached two. If the quality of the enthusiasts must, by the ordinary snobbery of social standards or the extraordinary snobbery of intellectual ones, be put lower than the quantity, that matters little: most of what Science teaches is as silly, and much of what dukes believe. If their enthusiasm was sorely tried, that mattered less; failure never deterred the prophets from beginning over again, and new prophets from beginning afresh, and old ones from being disinterred.
Mother Shipton, for instance, was dragged in splendour from her merited obscurity. Our school stood near her cave, but we entered it rarely, as the revival of her reputation had raised the admission-fee to the (for some of us) unmanageable sum of threepence. In the eighties she did good work:
The world to an end will come
In eighteen hundred and eighty-one.
Spring passed, the fatal season, spring in which earth was created and, as most think, shall be decreated; and autumn, and the last of December. Through half England, in north and west, in the three widest shires most widely, villagers had spent whole nights in the fields confessing their sins to the dark skies and crying for mercy. Crying wasted: for nothing happened.
Ah! ’twas a trifling error, a minor misreading of the text, reliance on a corrupted version. The true version ran:
The world at an end we’ll view
In eighteen hundred and eighty-two.
This was a falling off. There was a falling off also in the night attendance in the fields, so discouraging indeed that Mother Shipton was put to grave again, and none went to the trouble of inventing
—at an end we’ll see,
—at an end, be sure!
—at an end will arrive …
as hopeful variorum readings.
On the European Continent, even in Germany and disastrous Russia, such fears have counted for less; in the United States of America for much more, where great sects have arisen, like those in the Early Church, with the millennial hope and fear as their main source of inspiration, recruitment and income. One year the fear became almost nationwide. Its protagonist was William Miller.
William Miller was a simple New Englander. He had served against Britain in the Canadian War, and after that one experience of the wider world settled down to farm life in the country. There he got religion, and religion him. He became a student of the Prophets, especially of Daniel, in whose apocalyptic pages God suddenly showed him the Secret: in the year 1843 the world would stop.
William had no fear for himself; only fear that the time might be too short for him to spread the tidings to those who were chosen, and for them to prepare their souls for the day of destruction they alone would escape. He seems to have been a disinterested man, desiring neither power, admiration nor money. It was the activity of certain rivals which spurred him to action—Harriet Livermore was proclaiming 1847; Joseph Wolff, of Jerusalem, was waiting for the end in Jerusalem; Captain Saunders, of Liverpool, was waiting for it in Liverpool. William asked and obtained leave from heaven, and publicly announced his revelation to some friends:
Calculation I
From the date of the commandment to rebuild Jerusalem, BC 457, to the Crucifixion of Christ: 70 weeks. A “week” equals 7 years
490
From the Crucifixion of Christ to “taking away the daily Abomination,” or Paganism
475
From the taking away of Pagan rites to the setting up of the Abomination of Desolation (Papal Civil Rule)
30
From the setting up of the Papal Abomination to the end thereof
1260
From the taking away of Papal Civil Rule to the first resurrection and the end of the World in 1843
45
2300
The clue number was thus 2300. Proceeding:
Calculation II
From
2300
Subtract 70 “weeks”
490
1810
Add to this the term of the Saviour’s life
33
End of the World in
1843
The proof was irrefragable.
But God in His Word had heaped up proof upon proof:
Calculation III
From the Crucifixion to taking away the daily Abomination (item of first calculation)
475
Add our Saviour’s age, 33, and Daniel’s number, 1335
1368
End of the World in
1843
Calculation IV
For the full term of the vision as before exemplified
2300
Subtract date of the commandment to rebuild Jerusalem
BC
457
End of the World in
AD
1843
Calculation V
The house of Israel are to be punished yet “seven times” for their sins; Leviticus xxvi, i.e., seven years of 360 days. Equals
2520
Subtract date of first captivity in Babylon
BC
677
End of the World in
1843
And so on.
The exact day, though based on proofs less profuse, was also revealed; it would be the Vernal Equinox. No more world by midnight on March 21st, 1843.
Faith, hope and self-charity combined to win for the prediction an immediate and all-absorbing place in hundreds of souls. Within a few months the Millerites had become a sect, spreading rapidly throughout the Bay State and beyond its borders. Wild camp-meetings were held at night, when fervency of expectation inspired to Pentecostal utterance and unutterable joy.
If there were believers, there were also exploiters. William Miller was a poor stick—so thought Elder Joshua V. Hines—a humble illuminé quite unfit to look after the business side, and the brass-band side, of what was already a mighty Movement. Joshua would do that. Joshua did. A big organized campaign was launched: “End of the World for ’43.” The combination of prophet and salesman proved a fruitful one; the Millerites waxed. Nor need the Elder’s complex soul detain us. Hypocrites are fewer than alleged, and deceivers most often self-deceivers; the movement was a splendid one to be in; Joshua derived pathological delight from its excitements, delicious pride from its leadership and (it was whispered) ample booty from the openhandedness of its adherents. Besides, it might all be true.
If there were exploiters, there were also enemies. Orthodox pulpits denounced these pernicious doctrines, so harmful to their own. More malignant tongues averred that the Millerite tabernacle would not be ready for dedication till the May of ’43, some weeks after the Equinox; it was replied that only the year was a revelation, there being a “margin of error” for the actual day. Really nasty folk alleged that the building was insured for seven years; this was denied, and to clinch their sincerity the Millerites pointed to the furniture they had given away, the farms they had sold, the orchards they had cut down, the crops they were abandoning.
Then came the Comet. The most terrible and triumphant of modern times, three hundred million miles long, a svelte sword straight and unwavering, cutting the night-sky in two. The Sign! William was faint with ecstasy. New believers flocked forward; unbelievers wavered. The 21st dawned. Last preparations had been made. Before evening armies of men and women were seen moving out from Boston into the open country and up on to hillocks, whence heaven could receive them most conveniently. Thousands more followed to watch them, and maybe also … The sun dropped; the stars came out. As earth’s last darkness fell, some shivered; then joined the others in shouting Hallelujah till midnight and the trump of doom. Pandemonium and paroxysm reigned.
The hour came.
And went.
Nothing happened. Nothing. In misery of beaten hope, through the dawn of March 22nd the crowds moved homewards crushed and silent, or weeping.
In another place a group waited in white ascension-robes; a suggestion of Elder Joshua’s, though when these wedding garments proved ineffective he promptly denied it. One man fitted a turkey’s wings to his shoulders, and tried to fly; he fell and broke his arm. At Westford, Mass., the local Millerites had assembled in their farmhouse headquarters, proposing to spend earth’s ultimate evening together in prayer and praise until, just before the midnight hour, they would move out into the open for their ascension. Now Crazy Amos, the local drunk, was not a believer. Knowing the Millerites were all safe indoors, he stole out on to the village green hard by, and blew a great blast on a great horn that was his cherished toy. The listeners heard, in a body rushed out, madly jostled each other as they fought for the best places to be caught up from. Standing aside in the discreet darkness, Crazy Amos put his horn to his mouth and blew a still more fearful blast, and another, and another. Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! they shouted, raising their arms with almost unbearable yearning to heaven. A few actually rose in the air, the Second Ascension had literally begun, when others, whom faith had not prevailed to carry off their feet, spied Amos blaring away. The reaction of shame, disappointment and fatigue was terrible. Like a flock of scared sheep they shambled indoors, Crazy Amos jeering after them: “Fools! go dig your potatoes! For the Angel Gabriel he won’t go a-digging ’em for you.”
So everywhere the night had come and gone; the prophecy was a delusion, William and Joshua deceivers.
But saints, like scientists, have rich subterfuge in modification that laymen must envy them, and a hold on their followers that most naked defeat does not lightly relax. Some of these did indeed drop away, for whom the emotional recoil was too violent, or the rage at finding themselves without their chattels. For the most part they held fast, gobbling up with a greed of sincerity equalling William’s own the new subtleties—and new dates—he was discovering. The Year was all he had ever announced as part of the revelation proper; that gave them nine months yet, till the last day of December. Ill in body and soul, he started a still more intensive study of the Prophet. At once he perceived his mistake, his foolish impossible mistake! The year of course was the Jewish year, so the end was for the spring equinox of forty-four. The faithful grasped gladly at these straws, and new crowds, diminished in size but not certainty, went forth to the hills again when March again came round.
Nothing happened. Nothing. But only when the last outside hope—December 31st, 1844, the last day of the Christian year in which the Jewish year ended—proved also vain, when the ultimate twists and tricks of re-modification and reinterpretation had been exposed and exploded by inexorable fact, did the movement peter finally out. It was the end also of old William Miller, who died brokenhearted; but not of the world.
No latter year of fate has had quite such a following. The 1917 prophecy, based on fresh researches in Revelation, connected up with the marks of the Beast (the Kaiser), and made known throughout England by showers of pamphlets that once or twice disquieted the Censor, appears to have left the nation quite unmoved; which cared less about the end of the world than about the end of the war.
Nor more successful this last decade’s fatal choices—’21 (April), ’24, ’28—culled by new desperate subtlety with the Book of Daniel and the Great Pyramid, and grounded on calculations connected with the final overthrow of the Pope’s temporal power, which was not perhaps quite so final as its enemies fancied, the subversion of Rome, which may mean whatever you like, and the conversion of the Jews, which is still proceeding rather slowly.
For the immediate future there is 1931, next year as I write. The Prophetical Society of Dallas, Texas, the most powerful catastrophic organization in the world, which exercises much influence through the length and breadth of the Bible Belt of the United States of America, and even far outside that intemperate zone, has assembled the facts, and they are many, and dispelled the doubts, till they must be few. Perhaps in spring, perhaps in the autumn, rather more probably at Christmas. Every sign has indeed been accomplished: famines and pestilences and earthquakes, nation rising up against nation and kingdom against kingdom, the gospel preached at last in All the world for a witness, and the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place—though whether Dux or Pontifex be the abomination is left doubtful, and even diplomatists are not sure for which of the two the Lateran trumpets sounded victory. Every prophecy concords: Apocalypse with Apocrypha, the Pyramid corridors with Daniel’s chronology; Kemal’s inauguration is Antichrist’s World Coronation, Ismet’s number (count it) the number of the Beast, the Red Tsar the Scarlet Woman.
For our children and children’s children there are the 2000 and, two years before it, the 1998. One is the Thousand years twice told, the pre-ordinate and decretory termination of the six thousand years of this vision; the other both the magical three times the magical number of a Man (3 × 666 = 1998) and the Passionate numeral of the Son of Man Himself, Who was crucified in the 1998th week of His human life.
Nobody heeds. Faintly heard by this earthbound tumultuous century amid its fevers of industry, politics and progress, whose dark fear is personal poverty not world disaster, whose high hope is for the Golden City here below not in heaven hereafter, these manifold menaces attract little attention and inspire less terror. The received prophets of today, when not the political economists, are the physical scientists; and among these latter the stray eccentrics here and there who think, or can be represented as thinking, that geological or astronomical probabilities imply an early natural end include not one who fits his fancy to the Procrustean bed of precise number. Even if the end be natural and near, they do not know the date.
If it be supernatural, nigh or far, their numeralist rivals do not know the date. They have none commanding general agreement or any wide adherence whatsoever; they disagree too much among themselves, and have too often been shown wrong.
All of which proves, as it disproves, nothing. Number, as long ago the Pythagoreans saw, is bound up with the inmost nature of reality; is nearer reality than time or space, which our teachers are now discarding. Number they cannot discard: three is three, seventy seventy, at any speed, in any frame of reference, under any theory of post-Einsteinian space-time. It is a first constituent of being. It is a lost sense, still stirring faintly in our blood and brain, stirring like music, whose soul it is; a true mode of the mystery, rejected, forgotten awhile; a dweller in the innermost, perhaps the Innermost Itself.
Of all mysteries it is the most mysterious. 256 is two to the eighth power, 257 prime and powerless. 142,856 is nothing, 142,857 a magician that no other till the thousands of the trillions can equal—take a pencil and his secrets enkabbalize the paper. … Of all phenomena it is the most flawlessly infinite. One, two, three—and a hare is started that runs to Eternity, off on a path that transcends the universe, for the universe may be finite but the number of numbers is not. Count forever and you reach no last number, which is beyond forever. … Two and two make four. Is it only a jargon, answering to no reality? Two things added to two things do not make four of the same things, no two things being the same, neither worlds nor men, neither grains of sand nor galaxies nor human hopes. Or, not a quality of things nor relation between them, but a symbol corresponding to the reality behind them; a being on its own, before and after reality? In contemplation of numbers, abstract and concrete, ordinal and cardinal, and of all the half-glimpsed harmonies they dominate—music, music of the spheres, the chemical elements, the physical atoms, arithmetic, astronomy, the signs of Satan, the wounds of God—sometimes we are transported to a mood, a place, where the mystery invades and transforms; we see the other, the ultimate existence around us, in sane moods unguessed at. Our hearts cannot bear the beauty of terror; we fall back into the dream, into life.
The chiliasts and the Rabbis and the Bible-delvers were poor bungling workmen; but their principle is surely right. One day the astronomers, now so disdainful, will complete the work they were not equal to, and vindicate the principle. When the exact past motions of all the stars shall be known, when the whole prehistory of heaven shall be revealed, cosmologists will calculate far backward till they find in what year and what hour the star our father struck or passed tidally by; the year and the number of the beginning. When the exact future motions of all the stars shall be known, when every fact about sun’s, moon’s and earth’s movement and mass, tempo and temperature, shall be garnered and verified, then they will calculate far forward till they find the clock-moment of the crash or cold; the year and the number of the end. Number will be seen, in a mode half-comprehended, as existence itself, deciding the fate of each phase of existence. We are beads on the abacus, digits in the cosmic sum. God has fixed the magical number of the world; not yet have we the clue to find it.
Next Year
Aside from the named year, early or late, stand the two chief temporal expectations, broadly grouped and broadly contrasted. The end of the world is at hand; it is very far off.
The former has been the faith of many peoples; of savages who have attained to thinking on such matters, of the classic nations of antiquity, of the Hebrews, and inheriting from them of the early Christians, from whom we of the West inherit our ideas on last and first things.
Fear prompted this faith. Man dreaded the end; therefore he believed it near, as he believed all his enemies near, and as usually they were: want and plague and tribal foes none of them lurking far away. As fear diminished the end receded. But the decline of corporate fear being a mark of only the very latest generations on the earth, there is no reason to think that it is permanent, or that the Optimist Age is not already departing. If we are still awhile under its bright, or cynical, beams, and unlike men of other ages gaily postpone the inevitable and like ostriches of all ages bury our heads in the solacing sands of time, it was not always so; nor will be again.
Seconding and sanctifying fear, revealed religion encouraged the early expectation. Organized religion enforced it, as useful to God’s ministers, giving them power over the flock.
Reason bore religion out. A few thousand years had sufficed to run up the zenith of time; a few thousand more would suffice to touch nadir. It was illogical to assume the length of the world’s future disproportionate to its past. And the length of the past was known. The Almighty was great, and Archbishop Ussher was His prophet.
That prelate, more locally and more culpably celebrated as the Irishman who goaded James the First to crueller persecutions of Irishmen, having secured national renown through his kindly apothegm “Toleration is a grievous sin,” went on to earn cosmic fame by laying it down once and for all “The world was created in 4004 BC” He did but set the fashion of precise chronological margins that persisted to the Family Bibles of our childhood, did but nail down to a year what Christendom already believed to a year or two; most men before him, and (until the new geology) since, held that the past of the world was of the six-thousand-year order. Why should its future be any longer?
Reinforcing this commonsense deduction from the Ussherian interpretation of Biblical chronology, stood the whole tradition of Christianity, which, from the lips of its Founder, the writings of its first propagandists and the experiences of its earliest days, had received deep impress of belief in adjacent catastrophe. Jesus said: “Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.” St. Paul wrote, “The ends of the world are come”; St. Peter, “The end of all things is at hand”; St. John of the Revelation, “Behold, I come quickly.”
No subject that has ever engaged the minds of men has been more thought about or more written about than the words of Christ and the letters of His Word, those bearing on the future most of any. Interpretation is therefore legion, in each age unabated from the earliest Fathers to the Highest Critics. It has been said that Jesus, an unlettered Jew, merely took over the popular eschatology of Jewish Apocalyptic, adding a special niche for Himself as hero of the Second Coming; it has been answered that, Son of God, He foretold the end as men now know it will be, the darkened sun and lightless moon and falling stars of heaven—“this generation” being a symbolical phrase for that particular aeon of eternity which will in fact be concluded when this world concludes. It has been asserted that He believed literally in the literal disasters, as in Matthew Twenty-Four, that He foretold, and in their literal nearness; it has been replied that His language was throughout figurative, to every phrase a secret seraphic meaning behind the plain one, and further that His thoughts as recorded for us have been coloured by His more material-minded reporters. This last view curiously confirmed by an examination, in the four gospels one by one, of all eschatological words attributed to Him. They are most frequent, most physical and most fearful in the first gospel, fewest and least disastrous in the last, the second and third being respectively about one-third way and two-thirds way in between; which graduated rarefying of the catastrophic atmosphere corresponds with oddest exactitude to what little is known of the four evangelists, from Matthew the orthodox Hebrew through practical Mark and professional Luke to John the Hellenized philosopher.
Both views seem to contain truth. Jesus saw what He said, and believed what He saw: the darkness of destruction that the end will be. But in Him, as in all who see the Terror, and in Him more than all others, the intensity of His vision transcended the illusion Time. In His mind’s eye the trillion years shrivelled to pinpoint, and He described them as what they are: “this generation” of Eternity.
The Synoptics and the Apocalypse, however, which took the time-phrases literally, had greater sway over the first centuries. None of the portents was lacking. That was an hour, more than most in the horrible pages of history, of evil and signs of evil; of cyclones and floods, famines and plagues, eclipses and comets, eruptions and earthquakes, wars and rumours of wars. Lust reigned in Rome; and sorcery; and ruinous fire. Earth trembled and reduced Philadelphia to ashes; under his ashes Vesuvius buried Herculaneum and Pompeii. In one week the inundation drowned twenty thousand in the Delta, in one year the pestilence slew thirty thousand in the Urbs. Through the wide oecumene the legions were slaughtering: Boadicea and her Britons in the island West, Teutons in the boundaried north, Parthians in Parthia, the Chosen People in their chosen land, till, after the cruellest siege we have word of, when without the walls was death and within them was death, when men tortured each other for a morsel of bread or of offal and Mary of Bethezub ate the child at her breast, the city that had destroyed the Redeemer herself was destroyed, the Temple of Solomon delivered at last to the flames and Mount Zion to the sword and the vulture. Lord of the World was Antichrist: “Strike the womb which bore Nero!” cried Agrippina, the dead womb he came to peer at and to mock; at brotherly table young Britannicus was killed with treacherous wine-cup; of Octavia each innocent vein was opened ere he flung her into the burning bath, and her fair head carried to Poppaea (soon herself, though with womb living, to be kicked to death)—who, self-crowned with the quadruple tiara of prolicide, uxoricide, fratricide, matricide, aspired to deicide also when he turned on Christ in the person of His Saints, crucified them, drove stakes through them from middle to mouth, wrapped them in lion-skins to be torn by the devouring dogs, resinously trussed them as live torches to illumine the night’s imperial gardens, drove his laughing chariot down the aisle of human candles as they flamed, calling on Christ and calling him Antichrist. His successors, four in one year, swam through each other’s red blood to the purple; one hacked to pieces, one slain with his own hand, one knived on the Gemonian Stairs, one living awhile to encompass the downfall of Jerusalem. Rapine and cruelty ruled the earth, whose heart spewed cruelty and rapine.
Such were the days in which our religion began. No syllable of the Messianic Woes was lacking. Expectation of earth’s speedy judgment filled Christianity from its cradle.
A special form of that expectation was the millennial; when the calendar gave this the lie, the more general anticipations of an early end flagged also. By the end of the Middle Ages, side by side always with the numerical, they revived somewhat. When
A Castilla y á Leon
Nuevo mondo dió Colon,
though that new world turned out to be only America, he had discovered it in mistake for Paradise; which he thought lay eastward of India, for which he set sail ere it should be too late. Martin Luther hurried also, to finish his Bible in time. For a while again every comet, every least change in the constellations, was taken for a sign of the approaching day. Though with dwindling force, and dwindling effects on life and conduct, the belief, like its dated variant, persisted as a wide and serious one through two or three centuries more. As late as the last it enabled Juliana—the von Krüdener—to bedevil Tsar Alexander as he sobbed in her arms, and to inspire his Unholy Alliance.
Then came the scientific revolution, since which (despite which) those in the West who still cling to early expectations—such as our Plymouth Brethren and other literalists, the Adventist denominations in America who by avoiding fixed dates avoid frequent disappointments, the catastrophic sects of Russia whom neither Tsar nor Soviet has abashed, and plain men without labels here, there and everywhere—are no longer, if ever they were, those who have the main influence on its thought.
This is now guided by the physical scientists. And they are for Far, not Near. Their prophecies will be set forth in due place; but here, where the end proximate is contended for, the basis and general principle of their prophecies must in advance be questioned. The principle is Probability.
What is Probability?
Invoke that simian typist. Seated at his machine, seated there for a thousand years, is it probable that he will ever—his uncomprehending paws roving all day and all night over the keys—by sheer Baconian accident thrum out the works of Shakespeare, from Ferdinand’s first exordium to Fame to Prospero’s last plea for indulgence? Perhaps not. But fetch a million monkeys, set them before a million Remingtons, allow them a million years; might not just one of them, in his chance strumming on the keyboard, at long last produce the works of—Galsworthy? Perhaps.
Revive those roulette contentions. Could the same even chance, black or red, pair or impair, manque or passe, go on continually repeating itself? Twenty-nine times running is the highest in recorded gambling, and that two hundred years ago; is it probable that during the next two hundred years another twenty-nine sequence will occur? It is not. But increase the years; multiply, centuplicate them; allow two hundred centuries of centuries. Then may not the twenty-nine sequence come again, and more than twenty-nine, and more than again? It may; it will.
Ransack our own memories. A dozen men around a green table. Only two or three of them punting on single numbers, only one of these staking each time the maximum. Is it probable that he alone will get a pleno three times running, the only three times running of a year of months? Yet we saw this happen at the Jockey Club in Barcelona in April of 1921—month and year with best recent end-of-the-world backing. Was it probable that through almost the whole gambling day of twelve hours, three noon to three morn, one of the (sacred) thirty-seven numbers should not turn up a single time? Yet we saw this happen that same night at that same table. Three minutes to three. The minds of the inveterate pale sitters-on one curling vision of the serpent shape of 8, and their purses in sacrifice emptier. Heletha; in the Sphinx sorceries, Absolute Justice; number of the Names of Siva and of the Saints of Florence; holy day of the Vedic month, eightfold Path of Buddha; eight-hours day also and Eights week and pieces of eight; Serpent of the Universe swallowing his own tail, coiled Eternity—mysteries few and poor compared to those of the great sisters: 3, God’s favourite and England’s; 7, parthenous, parthenogenetic; 9, the ultimate … Yet soon I was hoping she’d outstay the clock. Then, three minutes to three on that April morning, at last we saw, and heard the two croupiers, who were twins, boom in excited unison together an Ocho Negro! over a number now empty, having taken all the substance of our world in revenge for her small share of the other’s …
Probability, in short, is a law of averages; at any moment the law may be infringed, the first ape at the first typewriter type Shakespeare the first week, only black never red turn up next season twenty-nine times twenty-nine, Ocho Negro lie uncalled not for a day but a generation. It is based on a logical theory of the world; the naturalists themselves are coming to see that matter may be illogical, anarchical, able at any moment to disobey. Above all, it is a rule that holds good over short periods only; the periods of the universe are long.
When, pursuing Probability, the calm apostles of distance proceed to base When on How and, selecting this way or that way for the end, posit each in its most absolute, its remotest form, they use another fallacy. It is a fundamental fallacy. For a light touch of each way or any could suffice. A ten percent rise in the sun’s temperature, no need for a hundred. A billion-mile passing of the star, not full percussion. One short cold snap, not final winter. Every new glacial period is colder; the next one may be too cold for life to live through. Every new inter-glacial period is shorter; the next one bids fair to reach not fifty centuries. Not the extreme hour of the frost eternal sounds our knell, but the first frost of autumn. We are well through the summer.
If soon, sudden.
While the end remote implies oftenest, though not obligatorily, that it will come snail-pace, the idea of early conclusion comprises usually, though not necessarily, the notion of short notice or none. Surat of the Troops: The trumpet shall sound. St. Peter: As a thief in the night. St. Paul: As travail upon a woman with child. Whether man’s almost universal instinct that he shall be cut off suddenly is the result of Bible or Coran in childhood or whether Bible or Coran is the result of that instinct all-powerful through the childhood of the race, almost universal indeed it has been. And still is; save only (here again) for the latter-day saints, the scientists.
Who, reluctantly concurring to this extent—that any spurt extreme enough or eccentric enough, in whichever the process, might possibly defeat prevision—otherwise stand adamant for long foreknowledge.
They base their hope, principally, on future scientific methods made much more powerful and more accurate than now. But what telescope of tomorrow could give a hundred years’ notice of a comet moving at only a hundredth the speed of light; what super-seismometer full warning of the total plutonic outbreak; what thirtieth-century theorem due inkling of all sudden spurts in the sun’s heat or the star’s speed? One flaw in the instrument uncorrected, one irregularity in the event unallowed for, one weakness in calculation or deduction, one sharp drop in the ice age thermometer or rise in the sun’s, and all plans for preservation go agley.
They base it also on expectation of a future race well able to exploit those methods. But man may move backwards not forwards intellectually, or aside up some pudding-bag of futile and feckless being. He may know less than we do now, or quite different things—that show him the future in a light too bright or too dark for our eyes, or for his. All present facts may be seen as strange fancies, nightmare guesses of a race of dolls, by our sons the supermen; or blankly forgotten, by the beasts we shall breed. This only is certain: that, if there are still any, the living things on the planet a few thousand or few million years from now will be lower than gods and not lower than stones; creatures who may have no more knowledge of cause and result than have the fishes, or have defied all results save the last and divined all Causes save the First.
We can have no foreknowledge of their foreknowledge; no expectation of long expectation. One year the end will be next year; and that year may be the next.
Some Time
Twentieth century’s persuasion—the End far and wide—is founded on five chief things.
First, on sheer optimism, in its turn founded partly, if unconsciously, on the present trend of teaching and preaching, itself founded partly on the comfortable situation of most folk who preach and teach. Were the world’s past described by the downtrodden or the suffering or the hungry, by cargo of slave-ship or girls of a brothel, by children of galleys or gallows or caste-bridehood or race-hatred or festering slum, it would wear different hues and darker; were the world’s future descried by the world’s victims—the world’s majority—it would be coloured by less joy of continuance. Long life for the world is predicted by a small and special class who find its life worth prolonging.
Second, on a kind of logic akin to but less ignoble than such complacency; which, well aware of his sorrowful past and suffering present, yet has faith in man’s ultimate destiny and regards it as against all meaning and all reason that he should be cut off before the flower of his age—so reasonless, so meaningless as to be beyond conception. Near doom is not conceivable; so doom is far.
Third, on the new sense of time created by, and that has created, the new theories of time’s nature. What they say, the strange priests with the strange names—Weyl and Cassirer; Bergson, Bolzano; Einstein, Minkowski; Poincaré, Palágyi—who tug at the mantle of Chronos and send his scythe swerving through nightmare, what they mean: who knows? They themselves? their warring acolytes? the chronic hierophants who would harmonize, synthesize, their magic and discordant speech? Perhaps none of these. But plain men scent the plain upshot: that through their words and their worship the old God’s life is made longer, Time’s boundaries pushed backward, world’s respite increased.
Fourthly, and fundamentally, on a consideration one by one of the various manners of the end. A distant answer to When? is, by Probability, deduced from the different answers to How? The most probable of these are those probably most remote.
To each of the Ways allot its percentage of likelihood:
Mode of World’s End
Percentage of Likelihood
Comet
1
Fire
2
Water
1
Drought
15
Cold
80
Crash
1
This is a very unsatisfactory table. To avoid fractions, proportionately too many marks, from the scientist’s point of view, are doubtless given to the ways he deems least likely. To ignore for the moment the distinction between man’s end and the globe’s, the figures apply—where there would be a difference between the two—to the former, Collision thus getting one mark instead of (say) ninety-nine. The supernatural end, God, is excluded as not amenable to natural percentages. All the figures are quite arbitrary. Fire, for instance, is particularly unassessable at this juncture of particular doubt and dispute as to the sun’s age and constitution and source of self-renewal. Cold and Drought are really one. Water’s scarce worth a fraction. Comet is claptrap. … It is a very unsatisfactory table.
It could hardly be otherwise. The very ways being guesses, so much the more so their comparative likelihood. Each way had many variants, each variant many variants as to time. One way is bound up with other ways, often inextricably. If (under Cold) the earth’s oceans freeze or (under Drought) disappear before the moon’s return (under Crash) upon us, then tidal friction will abate, and the moon’s advance be arrested; and there will be no such Crash, and Cold it will be. If, on the contrary, the moon makes haste and comes before the seas are either frozen or dried up, then Collision has it. …
The broad result is not affected. It is unequivocal. Comet, Fire and Crash, the three accidents—which, being the least precisely predictable, cannot be refused therefore the theoretical possibility of coming soon—manage all three together to reach a paltry 4 percent. No less than 96 percent is shared by Water, Drought and Cold, which should come upon us in a far future only. Drought-Cold, the composite end, that according to almost all latter-day conjecture, we are bound for, is, according to almost all present-day assessment, not less than thousands of millions of years away. The answer to When? as based on the answers to How? puts early consummation beyond the pale of all human plausibility.
Fifthly, and most persuasively, on the companion belief that the beginning is far away.
Here abandon intensive figure-play for extensive, the humble sums and subtractions of the older prophecy for the bold zero-games of the new. If the calculations are remoter from lay understanding, more fantastic, more visionary, they offer the great compensation of vagueness—more elbow-room. With Millerists and Millenarists one wrong is all wrong; with geologists a million years out is no error; with astronomers a hundred million margin is sheer finicky precision. The new magic has the further advantage of not having yet been caught out; no date of its choosing has ever been reached, so none has ever been proved wrong. Some may dislike the airs of the latest holders of the temple, their contempt for their predecessors, exaction of blind acceptance, unwillingness to see that as the wizards and astrologers to them so they will appear to the next age’s priests of knowledge. But once you accept their premises, once you share their assumption that the external world they speak of is there, you must admit them without rivals at explaining that world, and must applaud alike the triumphant mechanism they have built up on that assumption and the skilful notations in which they describe it: the chemical notation, the mechanical notation, the mathematical notation; the rows of huddling noughts.
Noughts divorced, if not from beauty, from experience; not to be grasped with the brain, though the eye lends mystical help. A bit-by-bit method, dealing with moderate multiples, persuades a few. By express train the moon is only six months away; that Flying Scotsman which for eight hours bore you northwards you can perhaps, with an effort, conceive having carried you on for five hundred times as far. The sun is not four hundred times further again; you can, maybe, just visualize the journey. The old Queen was born only some three times as long ago as you and I. All previous recorded history, from Memphis or Babylon the first city, from great Cheops to great Victoria, is but fifty times longer ago than that. The post-Tertiary period is but twenty (or thirty, or forty) times longer ago than recorded history; the earlier geological periods each not more than two or three times as long as the post-Tertiary; the pre-geological period not more than half—or twice—as long ago again as all the geological eras added together. This method may help, or it may not. The persuasive “buts” and “onlys” may assist the vision of certain piecemeal and analytic minds, or may defeat their own ingenuous end, and make the years’ confusion worse confounded. The jingling millions and billions are better; the rows of huddling noughts.
With their aid, how runs the answer? How long has the world been? Ussher’s brevity is brutally avenged; the new doctors vie in prodigious estimate:
First the humble philologists, who for the evolution of human speech require a year allowance of some
80,000.
Next the anthropologists, who put man’s reign as man, since back in the early Miocene he took farewell of his anthropoid brethren, at
200,000.
Then the biologists, who for the full evolution of life, want a mere
80,000,000.
Passing from life to the lifeless earth, with the geologists we take a jump. The old man with his salt machine, turning it out like mince: how long has he been turning? All the rivers run into the sea: how many years has it taken them to bear down the sodium now found there, allowing for so much originally present, so much blown back to the shore by winds, and this correction and that?
1,600,000,000.
Sea is deep; land is deeper. How many years for the depths of the different sediments that encrust the earth to have been deposited, for the oldest Algonquins to be laid down? Maybe
1,650,000,000.
Land and sea, in even battle, have since the beginning been warring together, an age of the raising of mountains alternating with an age of the lowering of lands. There have been such and such a number of alternations. How many years have been needed to fulfil them? A rough
1,800,000,000.
Chemist joins geologist to take up the tale; together they meditate on the radioactive elements in the earth’s crust. As Paracelsus saw long ago, all stones are philosopher’s stones. Alchemy is a matter of temperature; each metal holds within itself the principle of self-transmutation. Uranium for instance, debauched uranium, goes on changing from one element into another, usually ending its fickle career as lead. The rake’s progress is long, but the spies of science have found out just how long. The rate of disintegration has been discovered, so that if there is so much uranium in a given rock, and so much lead, the age of the rock is “known.” The figure for the oldest rocks is
1,900,000,000.
Strike the balance of these four to get, as the age of the solid earth, over
1,700,000,000.
Pass from geological to astronomical mysteries. The left-hand integer rises.
The years required for the solar system to have accomplished its long journey from its nativity-place in the Milky Way—if it was born there:
3,000,000,000.
To cover the age of the moon, our child—if she was born of us:
4,000,000,000.
To account for the eccentricity in the orbit of Mercury—if one can account for it by zeros at all:
5,000,000,000.
To fit the tidal hypothesis of origin—if the true hypothesis:
5,600,000,000.
Average these four astronomicals:
4,000,000,000.
The world, then, is held to have existed as a solid globe for one thousand seven hundred million, as a separate one for four thousand million years.
As though the clues Earth affords were not obscure enough in themselves, the varying ardour of the suitors, by interpreting them most variously, has made matters worse. The physicists, half envying Genesis, have assured her she is young, always construing her shy hints as conservatively and courteously as possible. The geologists are less gallant, the chemists mere churls. From decade to decade too the estimates have varied, moving up and down in great curves, all sciences together. They were a little lower just before the last war than just after Darwin; they are higher today than at any other time. How bold was Lord Kelvin when, arguing from the laws of thermal conductivity, he demanded for the time since the crust became solid over a hundred million years; arguing from the polar flattening and the rate of rotation, several hundreds of millions! Yet to the salt or sediment schools or the uranium-zirconium schools of today he is a timid fellow, a second Ussher; as they, perhaps, someone’s Usshers tomorrow. Maybe the hints are deliberately misleading. Maybe, like ancient kings who hid the day of their birth lest astrologers should cast them an ill horoscope, for a like reason the world hides hers. Somewhere, in the numbered heart of God, her birthday is known. But not to human calculation, which can only use those poor averaged guesses at the past as ground for new poor averaged guessing at the future.
Four thousand million for the past. Now the evidence, though technical, that the earth is a comparatively young earth, with noontide and meridian far ahead, is described as overwhelming. So put her future at whatever figure you like; put it at nearly double her past: put it (with almost any other integer instead of the seven fairly acceptable to 1930 theory) at
7,000,000,000.
Last of all, to crown us with length of days, come the sidereal actuaries, who place the Sun’s own birthday—that he shared with his brethren in the Galaxy, at the parturition of a great spiral nebula—in a far remoter past, reaching twelve digits, and who make his expectation of life, as the earth-assessors ours, proportionately still longer; make it, with their new notions of matter, of star-centres more radial than radium, of energy subatomic sub-eternal, of ions bombarding each other into outlandish senility, a wild fourteen-digit thing: some
10,000,000,000,000.
It being not known, nor to be sanely guessed, for how much of this ten million million period his radiation will be sufficient to keep earth’s creatures alive, nor what share of his future will be ours also, as earth’s Ultimate Figure choose one somewhere, anywhere, between this outside limit for the sun and the seven thousand million chosen for the earth’s chance on its own.
Choose
1,000,000,000,000—
that is, a million million, or (as in England we say it) a billion.
The World Will Last a Billion Years
What of it? What upshot of this our longevity?
Scarce any. A time so far away cannot be comprehended, and is not comprehended. It has no reaction on human understanding, leave alone human conduct. It hides so distant that it holds no fears, no more than death for a hopeful boy. It holds no interest either. Who wants to hear about it, read about it, think about it—do anything at all about it?
Certain tendencies are no doubt strengthened by, after strengthening, this postponement: the decline of fear, the decay of religion, rising ambitions for man’s destiny. Distance lends enchantment. The Delectable Mountains are ahead. We shall become supermen, then gods. There is time for anything, everything.
This adjournment, like all adjournments, like all optimism, in practice discourages action and defeats its own desire. Time for everything means time for nothing. Dwell careless. Eat, drink and be merry. You’ve till the year one billion ere you die.
Being built on the quicksands of contemporary speculation, the far-off dogma may crumble of course tomorrow. Choked by the armour of many dimensions it is forging for itself, strangled by the mathematical network it is getting entangled in, Science will suddenly be seen (unseen) for the dream, outside God’s reality, that it is. Then its prorogations will be denied, and a new vision of hope or despair, or neither, be revealed.
Till then why not trust the naturalists? They tell so little. Not what the world is, nor where its first substance first came from, nor what the men upon it are or mean; only when this globe as real in the way they suppose, and when life upon it as the physical thing they describe, may, with most fantastic margin for error, be guessed—may appear—to disappear.
Not soon. And not signless.
What shall the sign be, the sign of Thy coming and of the end of the world?
The reappearance of the two men who have lived but not died: Elijah, prophet and Tishbite, and Enoch father of Methuselah—himself no ready dier? How shall they be known?
The sign of the Son of Man in heaven? What shall it be?
The destruction of Rome? While she lives, aureal, imperial, leonine, capitoline,
O fior d’ogni città, donna del mondo,
city of cities, Babylon the third city, Caput Mundi, then lives the world. When she falls, the world falls. To this day the Romans will have it (I am husband of a Roman and know) that when the statue of Marcus Aurelius shall turn golden again then the sun shall turn black; that the last sunset over the Colosseum will be the last sunset over earth.
Or, not rather, the slow signs that Science will discover? For if not soon, not sudden.
Flood will advance painlessly and to programme; there’ll be time to plant gopher-trees. The brains of those latter days will compass every chemical trick to combat Drought and postpone his hour, then to foretell the hour beyond which postponement cannot go. They will raise batteries against the Cold, using devices and deftnesses we cannot conjecture, eking out the reduced rations of radiation according to a timetable corrected continually in their favour, and accepting defeat, accurately forecast, only when the sun as ally indispensable can help them no longer. Centuries soon, by high celestial mathematics crash with comet or star will be deduced. Striking-chance, size, speed, noxiousness, all will be published generations in advance. Stellar waverings inconceivably far will constitute the first warnings, and will continue and increase through the first period. The mathematical stage, concluded by disturbances in the orbit of Neptune or of Chronos, named but still to be found, will be followed by the stage of telescopic visibility, then by the naked-eye stage, as the foe moves through the six magnitudes till larger than Sirius or the Morning Star at her brightest. Then the seasons will begin to go wrong, and the thermometers, and the clocks. If the first warning is given today, that is at a moment when, as the accredited magicians of the age, astronomers and physicists happen to be enjoying enormous prestige with common men—a prestige they may lose tomorrow to the spiritualists or the mystics or the priests—incredulity, if any, will cede swiftly, and long before the naked-eye period the psychoanalysts of the heavens will have permeated the mass of the people with their prediction.
What then will come to pass? First, covering all men, a slow surge of fear—fear, with Love and self-love, the third director of men’s actions. When fear rises self-love rises with it, and Love goes under. In hearts stripped naked by terror, the beast will hack through and triumph forth; their death before their eyes, their faces turned monstrous with their hearts, cruelly they will fight to get or keep for themselves alone the best places or best chances (if against Cold not the Star, the last stocks of preserved sunlight or synthetic warmth), cruelly rejoicing in the suffering of those whom they deprive or despoil. From craftier hearts “What must I do to be saved?”—all fear-moments are religious moments—will go up in clouds of servile prayer to the advancing star (the dying one), with incense of propitiatory virtue and pious works. In a few heavenly hearts Love will stand firm and victorious, in might of self-sacrifice giving up its share of scant coolness (scant heat) unto others. In the few maddest hearts will shine exultation, glad welcome to death as victory, Annihilation as the Bride. Until, as the heat (cold) waxes, and pain and disease oust (numb) even fear, and the horror of physical suffering blots out even the mental horror at the world’s fate. …
Except—who knows? Who knows what happens, as he dies, in the heart of another? Some go fearing, some cursing; some in peace, some in pride; some struggling passionately to live, some knowing that there is nothing better for a man than that he should die; some beholding the darkness, and some the King in His beauty. According to the manner of his individual soul and according to the manner of the general end, so amid these various ways for man’s choosing will he choose to die.
Foreknowledge must be his comfort. By large increase of memory and foresight, by calculus more powerful and machines more marvellous, by telescopes to watch each sunspot on each farthest star, by microscopes to watch each proton and electron at work or play, by subtleties of mind and contrivances of matter that at the last instead of merely adumbrating will seek to direct the destinies of earth and of heaven, by all these and by God’s pity—whichever the way, whatever the end, it will be foretold in time.
In time for what?
Never
World not longeval, but eternal. World without end.
There is a halfway house, a high intermediate possibility: of a termination so remote, so far beyond the proudest chain of ciphers in astronomy as, though short of eternity, to be for the human mind almost indistinguishable from it.
Brahma divided the time of the world into Days, each Day consisting of 2,000 divine periods, each divine period consisting of 12,000 spiritual years, each spiritual year consisting of 360 terrestrial years of 360 days each. A Day thus contains 3,110,400,000,000 days. How many Days will there be?
Buddha divided the time of the world into Great Periods, and each Great Period into four Incalculables. Asked the number of years in an Incalculable, he replied: So great that no writing of zeros would ever attain it. A Cingalese doctor, glossing Gautama, estimates that if once in a hundred years an iron mountain were touched lightly by a light muslin veil, the length of an Incalculable is the length of time required for that veil to wear away that mountain. Unmindful of the master’s warning, a Burmese horologist lays zeros together, and his Incalculable estimate—at once the most liberal and the most precise that we have—is two hundred septillions of miles of noughts. For a Great Period multiply by four. How many Great Periods may there not be?
Likewise modern lovers of number have imagined the time of the world as of a magnitude that bedwarfs the astronomer’s billions. A billion written out contains but thirteen digits, a million billion but six zeros more; there are the numbers containing a billion of the zeros themselves, and the staircase-numbers a billion digits of times yet bigger. The total number of the atoms that make up this earth contains but some sixty noughts; that make up the whole universe of matter, as today judged finite in space, some four hundred; that made up Archimedes’ cosmos, as described in the Psammites, the Sand-Reckoner, some fourscore thousand. Number transcending matter, the total of seconds in the universe not of space but of time may run to a sum decillions of staircase-numbers greater than those fourscore thousands of noughts, to a figure so flagrant that no way or system of human words or symbols is able to show forth or dimly shadow it. How many separate decillions of those decillions may there not be?
It is vanity. In His sight all the noughts round all the universes are a noontide. They will pass. Eternity ahead of them will be no briefer than before.
Not, like these divisional schemes, short of Eternity, but a special way of conceiving it, is the World of Ages or Cycles; Palingesia perpetual. The doctrine has had its finite variants: so many deaths, so many rebirths, and at last the final end. But Arabs, Arawaks, Aztecs have implied the eternity of the series. The Mayas of Yucatan—the great American people—taught that there had been four past Ages or Suns: the Sun of Earth, ended by the Great Drought; the Sun of Fire, ended by the Great Conflagration; the Sun of Air, ended by the Great Hurricane; the Sun of Water, ended by the Great Flood—in world tradition generally the last general world disaster—and indeed the whole sequence is an accurate account of what has happened, if not to the planet, at least over large areas of it. The Suns will continue; Nature has resources enough to find new destructions for each, vitality enough each time to atone.
For Heraclitus each end is identical, always the Sun of Fire; each time a counterfeit world will rise from the ashes; Earth is Phoenix. Collisionists concur. From nebula to sun and planets; crash, and then back to nebula; then back again, repetitional, iterative, ding-dong—and so forever.
Beyond all septillions and decillions, beyond life and death sempiternally recurrent, thrones the pure form of the Everlasting dogma. Without sensible change, without intervening destructions, without parcel or periods, the Earth abideth forever.
The phenomena of science and experience, the water and the cold, the maternal nebulae and paternal impacts that give birth and death and birth again, all matter and its manifestations, all visible tangible things, are pure illusion, a trick of the beholder’s brain. There is no world. The world is but the form or mode of a dream or vision. In that dream sense in which it exists now, it will exist forever.
Though Brahma pass from dream into a dreamless sleep, only apparently will the world come to end.
The world is God. God by His nature is eternal. The world is eternal.
Rome is deathless:
His ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono.
Roma Aeterna: Mundus Aeternus.
Physics too, if sheepishly, is beginning to smile on metaphysics, and both to lend colour to the truth. Time has no independent existence. It is but a manner of conceiving things. Eternity therefore, time’s extension to the nth—to beyond the boundaries of the brain, the confines of sane beatitude or sane terror—has no existence either. All times being the same, because there is no time, anything that exists forever exists now; all that exists now exists forever.
From yet more orthodox throats the same witness is borne. The earth, whatever the precise way, came out of the sun and consists of what were originally the sun’s outer layers. These were made of the lightest atoms, the permanent atoms, the only ones not dissolvable into radiation atoms, the only matter not transformable into light. The sun, as after parenthood he remains, now consists of dissolvables only; whom the earth, consisting on the contrary of final-inconvertibles only, will outlive, and all his brothers the mighty stars.
Avoiding also collision. Space as well as time being infinite, an encounter with other bodies need never take place; to assume that in infinite time it must, is to forget that infinite space redresses the balance.
Sailing but bound for no port, from impact immune, of indestructible substance compounded, our globe will wander through the sunless starless universe forever.