[1] During the fifth century Chrysostom expressed himself in
language which sounds almost like an anticipation of much
that we hear at the present day. "No long time now remains
until the consummation; but the world is hastening to its
end. This the wars declare, this the afflictions, this the
love which hath waxed cold. For as the body, when in its
last gasp and near to death, draws to itself ten thousand
sufferings; and as when a house is about to fall, many
portions are wont to fall beforehand from the roofs and
walls; so is the end of the world nigh and at the very
doors, and, therefore, ten thousand woes are everywhere
scattered abroad" (_Homily_ xxxiv.) Towards the close of
the tenth century, Bernhard, a hermit of Thuringia, and
other persons, spread or encouraged the belief, that after
the end of the thousandth year, the fetters of Satan were
to be broken; and that, after the reign of Antichrist
should be terminated, the world would be consumed by sudden
conflagration. This wild and extraordinary delusion
pervaded and possessed every rank of society. It seized on
nobles, princes, and even bishops, as well as on the common
people. Many renounced their pursuits and professions;
abandoned their friends and families; gave themselves up to
superstitious prayer and terrifying expectations, and made
over all their substance to some adjacent church or
monastery. Almost all the donations which were made to the
Church in this century proceeded from this avowed motive,
that the end of the world was drawing near. The form ran,
_"Appropinquante jam mundi termino,"_ &c. Others permitted
their lands to lie waste, and their homes to decay; or
betook themselves in hasty flight to the shelter of rocks
and caverns, as if the temples of nature were destined to
preservation amidst the wreck of man and his
works.--_Boone._
[2] I forbear to expatiate on the phenomena or the tokens which
shall be the premonitory of the Millennium or of the day of
judgment. God has not seen fit, even in Scripture, to
withdraw the curtain of obscurity from between us and that
supreme future. We may well be content that our
apprehensions should be vague, when the language of the
Bible is not definite, and when we find rather the sublime
and half-luminous gloom with which poetry or painting can
invest its delineations, than the sharp and precise outline
which the chisel can carve.--_Boone._
[3] What shall they all be, the strong rivalries and
contentions, which shall have been hushed in the grave; the
towering structures of vanity and earthly hope, which shall
have been crushed before the moth; the schemes and
plottings, the contrivances and expectations, the struggles
and triumphs, which shall have been dropped into the
burial-place where the worm is feeding on them! Oh, the
thrones and dominions of mortality, the crowns and
sceptres, the regal splendours and the imperial sway, how
shall they then be reduced to their real and intrinsic
insignificance! The victories of the warrior who conquered
in a hundred fights, and the projects of the politician,
whose statesmanship could grasp the globe; the famous men
and heroes of the earth, with the poets who celebrated
them, and the historians who recounted their exploits, what
shall they be before the word of Omnipotence! The learning
and science of the philosophers who framed their system of
the universe for the admiration of posterity, what shall
they be, before the blaze of illumination which shall be
poured upon us in another world! The pageantries of courts
and palaces; the banquets and the wine-cups, the spectacles
and the entertainments, the mirrors and the lamps, the
golden furniture of pomp, and the flowing robe of luxury;
the great and the affluent, whose patronage was requested
for busy undertakings, who were besieged with flattery and
obsequiousness from morning to night; the noble and the
beautiful, who gathered homage as they moved; the writers
and the orators, whose popularity was unbounded, and who
lived amidst the incense of human applause; they, and all
that appertained to them, where and what shall they be, as
we stand poor, and naked, and miserable before Him with
whom we have to do! They, the heedless and the selfish,
swimming in pleasure, who thought that the whole voyage of
life was to be like Cleopatra's passage along the Cydnus,
one scene of mirth and gorgeousness; of prodigal
dissipation and fatal revelry, with soft music and delicate
odours floating in the air; what shall become of _them_!
How black and cold shall be the cinders of their joy!
All human dynasties will then have crumbled to pieces, and
all the gradations in the scale of human rank will then
have been blotted out; for all must be dwarfed and
prostrated before the ineffable majesty of the Most High
God. All other differences must fade when the Divine
summits are placed in contrast with them; as from the top
of an exceeding high mountain the whole ground beneath is
as a level plain, because from that vast altitude all
smaller elevations are lost, all minuter inequalities of
surface vanish. Human celebrity will then be as a sound,
the very echoes of which will have departed. The pompous
titles with which the vanity of man was pampered; the
distinctions which kings could confer, or heraldry
emblazon; privileges of caste, nobility of blood, the pride
of ancestry, the blaze of reputation, the splendour of
talents, shall then be confounded, one and all, as
frivolous toys and trifling baubles. The mighty ones of the
earth shall be no more than they who were of the poorest
condition; the great shall stand abashed with the mean, the
learned with the ignorant, monarchs with their subjects,
senators and princes, commanders of fleets and armies, the
loftiest and most renowned by the side of the husbandman
and the labourer; for what shall they all be in contrast
with Him, the Universal Creator, whose dwelling-place is
eternity, and to whom belong, throughout all ages, all
glory and dominion, sovereignty and praise!--_Boone._