BROTHERS, we must die!

This is the cry that the congregation of Seventh-day Adventists has just uttered in a solemn conclave that it held in San Francisco these last few days.
If we are to believe this joyful congregation, the world is coming to an end. And the most curious thing is that this same cry also reaches us, like an echo, from England, uttered not by a sect, but by a famous spiritualist, who is none other than the novelist Conan Doyle.

We know that the father of Sherlock Holmes has for some time lapsed into the extravagances of the most unbridled metapsychism. He even recently opened a bookstore in London devoted solely to the sale of works on spiritualism. Now, Conan Doyle announces the most terrible misfortunes to us. All the spirits he has consulted have announced the end of the world to him. A universal cataclysm is preparing; all the forces of nature will unite against man, in order to annihilate his race. This time, it will not be, as a humorous writer said of the Flood, it will not be a failed end of the world: there will be no Noah, no ark where a couple of all the species populating the world would be preserved... No!... there will be nothing left... It will be the final and absolutely definitive end of the universe.
We have been warned.

It seems that the Seventh-day Adventists have taken these predictions seriously. Most have evangelically donated their goods to charities. If you feel tempted to imitate them, believe me, keep at least a little pear for thirst. The end of the world could be postponed to a later date. This has happened a few times since the year 1000.
This year one thousand was a year of terrible crisis for all the nations of the West. Since the beginning of the Christian era, obscure traditions and equivocal prophecies marked the end of the tenth century as the fatal epoch of the end of the world.

These beliefs had spread throughout the West; they had invaded France, England, even the Baltic coast. As the fatal date approached, anxiety increased on all sides. In anticipation of the event announced by the prophecies, everything that seemed then a warning or an omen was noted with scrupulous care, and the chronicles recorded it with minute fidelity. In 996, there were formidable storms on the Ocean. The following spring, a comet appeared in the East, "on the side where the Beast of the Apocalypse must descend"; In the winter of 999, which preceded the year marked by God, snow fell in such abundance that in several provinces the cottages of the serfs were buried and the men perished with the flocks. It then rained for three months without interruption, so that the wheat was drowned and famine raged everywhere.
This was how the year of the vintage was announced.

The fears felt at the thought of the approaching catastrophe everywhere exalted the sentiments of piety. In the expectation of heavenly pains or joys, people gradually detached themselves from passing joys and perishable goods; they took advantage of the advice of the Evangelist; they thought of the treasures of heaven "that thieves do not dig up and moths never gnaw".
Multiple disasters, infallible signs, say the charters of the time, attest that the end of the world is not far off; irrefutable signs announce it; the prophecies of the Gospel are about to be fulfilled. It is therefore right and reasonable to prevent by wise precautions the misfortunes possible in our mortal condition...

"Therefore, I and my wife (such and such) considering the weight of the sins with which we are charged, and full of confidence in the mercy of God who said: "Give alms and all your sins will be forgiven you", we hereby give as a private gift, and of our own free will, we assign and transmit to the monastery of... our goods with the houses, buildings, peasants, serfs, vineyards, woods, fields, meadows, pastures, ponds, watercourses, livestock of all kinds, furniture and real estate in the state in which we possess them today..."

From one end of Christendom to the other, these kinds of donations were innumerable.

Finally, the year One Thousand opened. The first days of the year had nothing sinister. Days, then months passed. The wait became more and more painful. The time of Lent was spent in recollection and prayer. But Good Friday, the anniversary of the death of the Savior, was approaching. And everyone trembled.

On the evening of Holy Thursday, says the chronicle of Soissons, a bar of fire came out of the half-open sky and descended slowly, like the long furrows of lightning. The light was so bright that everyone was dazzled in the closed houses as well as outside, because it penetrated through the smallest openings. However, the sky had become serene and pure; but the trail of fire suddenly unrolled, in the shape of a dragon; its head grew larger and longer, its feet took on a livid hue; and, after crossing the air for a few seconds, the meteor disappeared.

Meanwhile, candles burned before the reliquaries of the saints; the litanies of the dying were recited aloud in the churches. On Friday before daybreak, the faithful assembled. Processions were formed; the people followed them barefoot. They stopped before each Virgin, they prostrated themselves at the foot of each Calvary; and there, clerics and laymen all intoned together the Miserere mihi or the De Profundis.

However, the days still passed. Spring passed with its flowers; summer, on which many people no longer counted, returned with its fruits. Piety relaxed as the danger seemed to recede. But a new prodigy came to awaken it. In the month of September, an immense comet appeared in the sky, in the West. It was seen for three months; it shone with such a bright light that it lit up more than half the sky.

And, all the time that it shone, the world continued to tremble. The fear of comets, in fact, acted to such an extent on the minds of our ancestors that it made them see in these stars a crowd of frightful figures that their imagination alone gave birth to. They distinguished swords of fire, flaming daggers, bloody crosses, horrible dragons. Comets always appeared to them blood-colored.

And this terror of comets continued for centuries after the fatal date of the year 1000. It is found in the 16th century as strong as in the 10th. And one believes one is dreaming, for example, when one sees a great scholar like Ambroise Paré, sharing these hallucinations, and when one reads in his chapter on Celestial Monsters, this fantastic description that he made of the comet of 1528:

"This comet," he said, "was so horrible and so frightful and it engendered such great terror in the common people, that some died of fear; the others fell ill. It appeared to be of excessive length and was blood-colored. At the top of it, one saw the figure of a curved arm, holding a large sword in his hand, as if he wanted to strike. At the end of the point, there were three stars. On both sides of the rays, there were seen a great number of axes, knives, swords stained with blood, among which there were a great number of hideous human faces with bristling beards and hair.

This is what the "Father of Surgery" saw in a comet. Now, Paré was a scholar, a man accustomed to experience, to observation, and, consequently, little inclined to let himself be carried away by the "madness of the house". Judge by the impression that the sight of a comet produced on him, the insane terrors that such an apparition must have unleashed in the imagination of the vulgar.

The year One Thousand was for our ancestors a long nightmare. It took several years to dispel the terrors that had assailed them and to reassure these superstitious souls. It does not seem, however, that the lesson was of any use. The fear of the end of the world continued to agitate people more often than was reasonable. From the year 1000 to the 16th century, historians have counted no fewer than twenty-five precise dates assigned in books either to the appearance of the Antichrist or to the great final cataclysm. But it must be believed that the prophecy had served too much, because the people of the end of the Middle Ages were infinitely less moved by it than their predecessors. The prediction of the end of the world then only served to inspire poets with severe criticism of the vices of the century.

Since villains are gentiles by finance,
Since prelates have no more wisdom,
Since merchants have no more conscience,
And since no one approaches God anymore,
Since in clothes we seek new ways,
Since women uncover their breasts,
The Antichrist comes, the end of the world approaches.

Thus, at the beginning of the 16th century, the announcement of the end of the world gave the poet Adrien Charpentier the opportunity to censure in severe terms the debauchery of the time. Since then, except for a few primitive or fanatic peoples, threats of the end of the world have not had much effect. Generally, they are greeted with smiling skepticism. And this is fortunate, because, because of their frequency, if we had to believe them, we would end up living in a perpetual nightmare.

Everything that has a beginning is fatally condemned to have an end. So the world will end. But how will it end?

Ask the scientists... They hardly agree on this point. Some - Herschell, Laplace, think that the world will end with the extinction of the sun; others believe that the world will disappear as a result of the shortage of carbon dioxide, a precious substance that the earth uses up faster than it produces it; others still, noting that the liquid element is gradually disappearing, claim that humanity is condemned to die of thirst in a few thousand years. Here are some who, considering the subsidence of the land, predict a second universal flood. I finally point out to you the prediction of an American statistician who calculated that in the year 2120 or so, the earth would carry the maximum of what it can feed as a population and would experience a general slaughter for food.

Thus, it would be men themselves who would eliminate humanity... This seems paradoxical. But when we have seen to what extent, in the last war, destructive madness was pushed, when we see science solely concerned with applying all progress to the art of killing, we are forced to recognize that this end of the world is the most likely.

Jean LECOQ.