attention to the emptiness of all these false
pretensions to a kind of knowledge that no man
possesses. Another writer of a large book,
lately issued from the press, seeing the Scarlet
Woman in the Papacy, interprets for us the
history of what is yet to come. Rome is yet to
place her foot upon the necks of kings before
she is swallowed up in the abyss at the time
when the Jews, by help of money, shall have
advanced themselves to the possession of the
heavenly Jerusalem. "The process," says this
writer, "by which the now rejected and outcast
Jew is to be restored, and his city and temple
to be raised from the dust and degradation of
centuries to glory unexampled in the world's
history till then, will involve in it the rejection
of the Gentile, and the precipitation of his
metropolis into the depths of the abyss, to rise no
more." The means to this end he defines thus
emphatically: "Money and superstition are the
two chief elements of power and influence—the
means by which the possessors will be most
likely to obtain the objects of their worldly
desires. The Jew commands the one, and the
Papacy works out its ends by the other; and
however determined spirits may scorn and scoff
at their respective hopes and pretensions, with
such weapons the scattered Israelites will
assuredly enter into possession of the Holy Land,
and the Papacy as certainly place her iron heel
on the necks of the submissive beings of the
earth."

A contemporary French wiseacre interprets
Scripture for us into the cry of an approaching
"End of the World through Science." The pile
of science cracks under its own weight, and is
about to fall in ruin on our heads. "Ignorance,"
he says, "of the relations of forces is the
portal by which our destiny will enter. It will
be the flaw in the armour through which all the
race of man is one day to receive its mortal
wound." It is no misstatement to say that this
gentleman, M. Eugène Huzar, conceives that the
last conflagration of London may arise out of
one man's having set the Thames on fire.
"See," he says, "round our globe, that immense
ocean, with its phosphorous fires, with its oily
and fat beds, with its elements so combustible
that the volcanoes catch fire at it incessantly,
and never go out for want of fuel till the sea
shall have deserted them. See, on the other
hand, this chemical product burning in the
water, true Greek fire, which will lay open the
road to a hundred other discoveries still more
incendiary. And understand how, some day or
other, conflagration may be kindled in the
world." Fire set to the Thames or Seine in
one of the two great capitals of science, by an
unforeseen chemical accident, will spread over
the Channel, raise the North Sea and the
Atlantic into one great blaze, and the more water
the more fire. The Pacific will blaze up, the
rivers will run flame, and everything living will
be roasted to a cinder.

Wherein are these our contemporary
speculations better than that of the Judas who fixed
Antichrist for the tenth year of the reign of
Severus, or that of Dionysius of Alexandria,
who promised him in the days of Valerian,
or those who promised that the end of the
world should begin when Lady Day fell upon
Easter-eve? An old French wiseacre, M.
Jurien, taught that "Antichristianism was born
about the year four hundred and fifty; it shall
die about the year seventeen hundred and ten.
This may happen sooner, but I do not see that
it can go much farther, unless it be to seventeen
fourteen." And he fixed the beginning of the
Millennium for the year seventeen eighty-five,
as impudently as another wiseacre now fixes it
for eighteen sixty-seven. Richard Brothers,
a presumptuous oracle in the same school at the
end of the last century, taught that "the very loud
and unusual kind of thunder heard in January,
seventeen ninety-one, was the voice of the angel
mentioned in the eighteenth chapter of Revelations,"
and fixed the fifteenth of August, 'ninety-
three, for the destruction of London." Write,
write; the spirit says write, " prophesied an
old Suffolk woman ninety-four years ago; "the
High Priest, the High Priest shall never have
another Christmas dinner!"

The last, and at this particular moment most
notorious, of these would-be prophets, is a
doctor to whom we have already referred, who
talks big words empty of wit, and streams
incessantly the mouthiest of books from all his
fingers' ends. He points to the wars and the
police reports; tells us in his own inflated
way, that "there is at present an area
accumulation and intensity of morbific agencies in
the air which no previous year has witnessed"—
did he never hear of the plagues of the middle
ages?—observes a general "dereliction of
moral obligations," and fills for us a windbag of
coming tribulation. "I hope," he says, "soon
to publish a photographic sketch of the
Millennial state, as a companion to this volume."
The next step in audacity will, perhaps, be an
advertisement of Heaven in the Stereoscope.

This vain man, equal to any of his predecessors
in audacity, although inferior to most of
them in wisdom, even favours us with a long
account of the last conflagration of the world,
in the style of the penny-a-liner. That
"spectacle of awful grandeur" is done into a long
report for us, "as seen by the happy and safe
spectators, from the cloud of glory that floats
their beautiful pavilion far above it. I look,"
he says, in the course of this outpouring,
"to another part of the world; I see, what
must pain some, the library of our great
Museum, the yet more precious library of the
Vatican at Rome, reached by the all-devouring
and unsparing fire, I see the works of Gibbon
and Voltaire, and Rousseau, and Shelley, and
Byron cast into the flame; and as they are
consumed, they send forth volumes of sulphurous
and intolerable smoke. I see the works of
Milton and Shakespeare, and Scott, and the
masterspirits of every age of our country, blazing
in the flames, while they shoot up only in
brilliant sparks that have all the splendour of the
lightning, and all its evanescence too." That