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:

Deduct the Year of the Foundation of the City:

—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:

The clue number was thus 2300. Proceeding:

The proof was irrefragable.

But God in His Word had heaped up proof upon proof:

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.