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.