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
