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
