The End of the World

The origin of the world is unknown.

When geological time begins, some short thousand million years ago, the earth is already a globe, in shape if not in surface much as now, whirling around a star little different if at all from our sun today; a body with its given size and substance, its allotted place and path in heaven. How it came there is unknown.

Knowing nothing, Man has variously and valiantly guessed. Seven chief guesses jostle for primacy.

The nebular. There was once a great fluid cloud or rotating chaos of fire, far-flung beyond the present orbit of Neptune. Gradually, through prodigious years, it cooled and condensed, at its dwindling fringes throwing off successive rings which became the several planets, while the main mass shrank to form our central sun.

Nobody knows. We only know that an end there must one day be.

Whatever had a beginning must have an end. It is hard to realize and harder to relish: but the hour will come when the fields and forests, the lands and oceans, the earth and heaven, the whole seen world with man himself by whom it is seen, and all that man has made, the roads and the farms, the towers and the temples, the crowning cities, the glory and vainglory of kingdoms, will be no more, will dissolve into the elements from which they first arose, will vanish forever like a dream⁠—vanish because they are a dream. The race of man may go first or, as some conjecture, may outlive awhile the earth; or race and globe may perish jointly together. But die the world must, and the sides shall know it no more.

Hopes that by some miracle it might be spared are one with man’s same hopes of defeating death: hopes born of cowering fear or towering pride, and fulfilled for no man.

Through deed of the earth’s own.⁠ ⁠…

Unhelped of the sun, not in solar mode but Stygian, Earth may find fire for self-destruction. The heat is there. We are still a gaseous globe, with a solid crust much thinner in proportion than eggshell to egg. The heat is there. Every fifty feet you go down the thermometer goes one degree up; two miles or so inward it is the boiling point of water, and there, below the lowest granite, the lowest gabbro, red-hot, white-hot, incalescent, incandescent, not a morning’s walk beneath our feet, glows the ardent underworld. Which, any hour, may renew its ancient zeal. No need to explode, to send flying the whole crust. The old channels to the old outlets show an easier way: forth of a thousand reawakened volcanoes, from the lowliest to the highest, from Cosima to Cotopaxi or the Sahama, burning matter, tumults of lava molten and magmatic, will spout and spread, covering the earth already riven and afire from great earthquakes, and struck by purple lightning. In three millenaries seventeen million people have died plutonically; all the seventeen hundred million people on the earth today may so perish in three minutes.

William Miller was a simple New Englander. He had served against Britain in the Canadian War, and after that one experience of the wider world settled down to farm life in the country. There he got religion, and religion him. He became a student of the Prophets, especially of Daniel, in whose apocalyptic pages God suddenly showed him the Secret: in the year 1843 the world would stop.

William had no fear for himself; only fear that the time might be too short for him to spread the tidings to those who were chosen, and for them to prepare their souls for the day of destruction they alone would escape. He seems to have been a disinterested man, desiring neither power, admiration nor money. It was the activity of certain rivals which spurred him to action⁠—Harriet Livermore was proclaiming 1847; Joseph Wolff, of Jerusalem, was waiting for the end in Jerusalem; Captain Saunders, of Liverpool, was waiting for it in Liverpool. William asked and obtained leave from heaven, and publicly announced his revelation to some friends:

Calculation I

From the date of the commandment to rebuild Jerusalem, BC 457, to the Crucifixion of Christ: 70 weeks. A “week” equals 7 years

Then came the Comet. The most terrible and triumphant of modern times, three hundred million miles long, a svelte sword straight and unwavering, cutting the night-sky in two. The Sign! William was faint with ecstasy. New believers flocked forward; unbelievers wavered. The 21st dawned. Last preparations had been made. Before evening armies of men and women were seen moving out from Boston into the open country and up on to hillocks, whence heaven could receive them most conveniently. Thousands more followed to watch them, and maybe also⁠ ⁠… The sun dropped; the stars came out. As earth’s last darkness fell, some shivered; then joined the others in shouting Hallelujah till midnight and the trump of doom. Pandemonium and paroxysm reigned.

The hour came.

And went.

Nothing happened. Nothing. In misery of beaten hope, through the dawn of March 22nd the crowds moved homewards crushed and silent, or weeping.

In another place a group waited in white ascension-robes; a suggestion of Elder Joshua’s, though when these wedding garments proved ineffective he promptly denied it. One man fitted a turkey’s wings to his shoulders, and tried to fly; he fell and broke his arm. At Westford, Mass., the local Millerites had assembled in their farmhouse headquarters, proposing to spend earth’s ultimate evening together in prayer and praise until, just before the midnight hour, they would move out into the open for their ascension. Now Crazy Amos, the local drunk, was not a believer. Knowing the Millerites were all safe indoors, he stole out on to the village green hard by, and blew a great blast on a great horn that was his cherished toy. The listeners heard, in a body rushed out, madly jostled each other as they fought for the best places to be caught up from.