The End of the World`Foretold.

AN epidemic terror of the end of the world has several times spread over the nation. The most remarkable was that which seized Christendom about the beginning of the eleventh century, when, in France, Germany, and Italy, fanatics preached that the thousand years prophesied in the Apocalypse as the term of the world's duration were about to expire, and that the Day of Judgment was at hand. This delusion was discouraged by the Church, but it spread rapidly among the people. The scene of the Last Judgment was expected to be at Jerusalem, where, in the year 1000, a host of pilgrims, smitten with terror as with a plague, awaited the coming of the Lord.

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"There may," says Dr. Williams, "be a long future during which the present course of the world shall last. Instead of its drawing near the close of its existence, as represented in Millennarian or Rabbinical fables, and with so many more souls, according to some interpretations of the Gospel of Salvation, lost to Satan in every age and in every nation, than have been won to Christ, that the victory would evidently be on the side of the Fiend, we may yet be only at the commencement of the career of the great Spiritual Conqueror even in this world. Nor have we any right to say that the effects of what He does upon earth shall not extend and propagate themselves in worlds to come. But under any expectation of the duration of the present secular constitution, it is of the deepest interest to us, both as observers and as agents, placed evidently at an epoch when humanity finds itself under new conditions, to form some definite conception to ourselves of the way in which Christianity is henceforward to acupon the world which is our own."—Essays and Reviews.

The Epistle of St. James, from his prophetical office, possesses a special interest from its conveying to us a picture of the end of the world. Dr. Wordsworth, in his Commentary upon this Epistle, says:

"The last days of Jerusalem are, as we know from Christ Himself, prophetical and typical of the last days of the world. The sins of tho last days of Jerusalem will be the sins of the last days of the world.

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Hollow professions of religion, empty shows and shadows of faith, partiality and respect of persons, slavish idolatry of riches, observance of some of God's commandments, with open and impious defiance of others; arrogant assumption of the office of religious teaching, without due call and authority; encouragement and patronage of those who set themselves up to be spiritual guides; sins of the tongue, evil speaking against man and God; envying and strife, factious and party feuds, wars and fightings; adulteries, pride, and revelry; low worldliness, and presumptuous self-confidence; a Babel-like building up of secular plans and projects, independently of God's will, and against it; vainglorious display of wealth; hardheartedness towards those by whose industry that wealth is acquired; self-indulgence and sensuality; an obstinate continuance in that evil temper of unbelief which rejected and crucified Christ :-these were the sins of the last days of Jerusalem as described by St. James; for these she was to be destroyed by God; for these she was destroyed; and her children were scattered abroad, and have now been outcasts for near two thousand years. Here is a prophetic picture of the world's state in the last days. Here is a prophetic warning to men and nations, especially to wealthy commercial nations in the last times."

The following eloquent exposition of this great question is abridged from the Saturday Review, April 14th, 1860)

The belief that all human affairs will at some time or other be terminated by one tremendous dramatic catastrophe-that the whole history of the human race leads up to that result, and that the epoch at which it will take place is capable of being foretold -commends itself so powerfully to the imagination of mankind, and is met with under so many different forms in various countries and at various epochs of human history, that it is well worth while to consider what are the natural foundations on which it rests. It is most unquestionably true that, in times and countries where there has been any intellectual activity at all, men have shown a disposition to attribute to the history of the human race a sort of dramatic unity. Traces of this tendency are to be found in the classical visions of ages of gold, silver, brass, and iron—in the Hindoo cycles and avatars in the ancient Rabbinical traditions to which a certain number of idle pretenders to learning still profess to attach importance in our own days-and in the eagerness with which the Christian world has in all ages deduced from the Bible, not merely the general doctrine (which is not discussed here) that the present dispensation will conclude at a given time, and in a visible and, so to speak, dramatic manner, but the specific opinion that that final consummation was at hand on many different occasions. Every one knows that certain classes of society in the present day receive the expressions of this opinion not only with favour, but with a sort of avidity; and most of us are probably aware that at particular periods-as, for example, at the beginning of the eleventh century-the conviction that the end of the world was actually approaching prevailed so universally as to produce very serious effects indeed upon the current business

and proceedings of society. There are, indeed, some arguments produced in favour of specific predictions upon the subject which are so feeble that they can hardly weigh with any one qualified to appreciate the answers to them, though they are at times urged with a dishonesty which requires exposure; but the sentiment which gives these arguments their real weight is a very different and a far more important matter, and deserves closer and more sympathetic examination than it usually receives.

The tendency of men to believe that the world will come to an end, and to dally with and in some degree to welcome the anticipation, is only one form of their impatience of the conditions under which they think and live, and the impatience is one which is neither ignoble nor altogether unreasonable. Rude ages and populations are, to an immense degree, opposed by the routine of daily life, and in more cultivated times a somewhat similar result is produced by the wide diffusion of scientific methods of thought and observation. The thought presses on the mind that the thing that hath been the same shall also be that the world and all that is in it, and all the other worlds by which it is surrounded, are a huge dead machine, grinding on eternally according to its own principles, and coming back perpetually at regular intervals to the same result.

The conception of the End of the World is a welcome one. It is a sort of opportunity for the spiritual nature of man to defy its material antagonist. It is a grand and an elevating thought that at some time, and under some circumstances, all that we see, and touch, and weigh, and measure, will cease to be; and that the spirits of men will be recognised, whether for good or for evil, as the real substances of which the heavens and the earth are the mere accidents. Every generation is guided, and to a great extent governed, by ideal conceptions; and the conceptions which influence any given age are indicated by the abstract words which find most favour with it. In our own times, phrases like "progress" and "civilization" point to a view of life which to many minds is utterly intolerable. They imply some such dream as this -The time will come, and is now coming, when war shall be unknown, when crime shall cease, when comfort shall be universal, and when life, almost freed from disease, shall be prolonged some years beyond its present limit. Every year will bring forth inventions which will economise labour and diffuse the knowledge of principles that will give an ease, a gentleness, and a regularity to life which exists at present only amongst affluent and privileged classes. Such is the sort of ideal which in a thousand ways is hinted at.

The world in which we live is a moral problem already, and one which is at times distressing, but such a lubberland as that could only be made tolerable by the prospect of its speedy end. That

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nen really passed through six thousand years of trial and suffering in order that there might be at last a perpetual succession of comfortable shopkeepers, is a supposition so revolting to the moral sense that it would be difficult to reconcile it with any belief at all in a Divine Providence. The expectation that the world—that is, that human society-will some day come to an end, is based upon the belief that man is something more than the complement to brute matter, and that it is he who imparts dignity and interest to the planet in which he lives, and does not receive his importance from it. It follows from such a belief that the narrow and limited range of human faculties, the ceaseless strife and bottomless confusion of human passions, the struggle between moral good and evil-each of which, as far as human eyes can see, is not only antagonistic but necessary to the other are not mere processes tending to work out their own solution here in some future generation, but tremendous and awful mysteries which can never be reconciled until some final decision and judgment is pronounced upon them.

GEOLOGICAL FUTURE OF THE UNIVERSE.

On the whole, the groups and systems of the geologist-imperfectly interpreted as they yet undoubtedly are present a long series of mineral mutations, and of vital gradation and progress. Not progress from imperfection to perfection, but from humbler to more highly organised orders, as if the great design of Nature had been to ascend from the simple conception of materialism to the higher aims of mechanical combination, from mechanism to the subtler elimination of mind, and from mentalism to the still nobler attribute of moralism, as developed alone in the intellect and soul of man. From the lowly sea-weeds of the silurian strata and marsh-plants of the old red sandstone, we rise (speaking in general terms) to the prolific clubmosses, reeds, ferns, and gigantic endogens of the coal measures; from these to the palms, cycads, and pines of the oolite; and from these again to the exogens or true timber-trees of the tertiary and current eras. So also in the animal kingdom: the graptolites and trilobites of the silurian seas are succeeded by the higher crustacea and bone-clad fishes of the old red sandstone; these by the sauroid fishes of the coal-measures; the sauroid fishes by the gigantic saurians and reptiles of the oolite; the reptiles of the oolite by the huge mammalia of the tertiary epoch; and these in time give place to existing species, with man as the crowning form of created existence. This idea of gradulation implies not only an onward change among the rockmaterials of the earth, but also, as plants and animals are influenced in their forms and distributions by external causes, new phases, and arrangements of vitality-the creation of new species,

and the dropping out of others from the great scheme of animated nature. And such is the fact even with respect to the current era. The mastodon, mammoth, and other huge pachyderms that lived from the tertiary into the modern epoch have long since become extinct, leaving their bones in the silts and sands of our valleys. The elk, urus, bear, wild-boar, wolf, and beaver are now extinct in Britain; and what takes place in insular districts must also occur, though more slowly, in continental regions. The dodo of the Mauritius, and the dinornis of New Zealand, are now matters of history; and the same causes that led to the extinction of these, seem hurrying onward to the obliteration of the beaver, ostrich, elephant, kangaroo, and other animals whose circumscribed provinces are gradually being broken in upon by new conditions.

Such facts as these, taken in connexion with the physical changes that are occasionally taking place on the surface of the globe, necessarily lead to speculations as to the conditions and phases of the Future. Respecting these, however, it were in vain to offer even the widest conjecture. Subjected as our planet is to the numerous modifying causes already described, we know that vast changes are now in progress, and that the present aspect of nature will not be the same as those she must assume in the eras that are to follow. But what may be the nature and amount of these changes, what the new conditions brought about by them, or what the races of plants and animals adapted by these conditions, science has yet no available means of determining. This only the philosophical mind rests assured of, that be the future vicissitudes of the globe what they may, they will continue to be the harmonious results of Law and of Order; and that, as throughout the whole of the future, the great COSMICAL DESIGN which geology now labours to reveal, will be steadily upheld by the Omniscient omnipotence of Him "with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."-Advanced Text-Book of Geology, by David Page, F.G.S.

*In the widespread attention recently paid to the study of unfulfilled prophecy, certain writers have been ignorantly charged with prophesying the End of the World; whereas they foretell what is written rather than attempt to foretell what is about to come to pass. They pretend to no interior inspiration; but state their conclusions as inferences from the inspired record, accepting it alone as their only premises, and leaving to their readers to acquiesce or otherwise in their deductions. Thus, the Rev. Dr. Cumming shows, very forcibly, the year 1867 as the eve of the world's long predicted Millennial Rest; and he quotes an array of names who concur with him in looking to 1867 as a great crisis-a testing crisis-intersected by the various lines of prophetic dates.-See "The School of the Prophets," Times, Nov. 3, 1859, a comprehensive view of the subject admirably adapted for its place.