THEN COMETH THE END

Evening Star, Issue 19764, 14 January 1928, Page 2

THEN COMETH THE END

The end of what? The end of this ago? The end of the world? The end of the human race? How does it come? There was a very striking vision given of it in an article' reprinted from the ‘ Sunday Chronicle ’in the ‘ Star.’ The article was by the editor of the ‘ Occult Review.’ Its contention was that the devils and demons and the evil spirits of the unseen were mobilising for a final effort to “let hell loose upon the earth.” This is said to be revealed to Spiritualists and other devotees of occult religions. The preliminary evidences of it are in the restlessness, the crimes, suicides, social and industrial upheavals, war preparations, etc., that are everywhere going on. Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind. The article recalls other efforts of a similar kind indicative of how the end will come. We may refer to one or two of these. • * * * The alert and swift' imagination of H. G. Wells dealt with the subject in Ms ‘War of the Worlds.’ He gives us a picture of the ultimate evolution of the world out of processes now in operation. Before the war came everybody believed in progress. A squittering succession of ideas drifted through tlie minds of the masses about competition, the yellow peril, the white man’s burden, etc. But they went on waggling silly little flags, accumulating endless machines of destruction, fierce competitions, and race hatreds. They sent to the ignorant peoples of India, China, Africa their tobacco and whisky, boots and bowler hats, electric trams, motor cars, guns, and revolvers. They were content to believe that nothing would come of all this but more trade and bigger money. The long-expected German invasion came to a head. The age of airships arrived. Germany, working in secret, had accumulated fleets of these. Her game was to strike suddenly. She did. She leaped upon England and America. War passed from the earth to the skies. The perfection of the airships reduced Dreadnoughts to scrap iron. Once the match touched the powder the explosion | was world wide. Almost before men realised it the whole world was fighting in the air. For the whole world had been secretly accumulating these devilish instruments of warfare. The East, with constant prodding, was awake at last and upon its feet. Lidia, the yellow man, and the black man determined to pay off old scores against the white man. The world had seen in the Communist insurrection in Paris, in the revolution of ’B9, what human nature is capable of under rage and terror. Gold disappeared; trade and commerce came to an end. It was like the blood disappearing out of the life of a living creature. The starving populations went half-mad cowering in dens and caves from the frightful engines of death hurtling above them in the air. In the old system of land warfare one could calculate from what quarter your foe would be likely to come. He had to march by certain routes of sea or land. But there are no roads in the skies. Your enemy may pounce upon you from any quarter, dropping blood and death. “It was the dissolution of an age; it was the collapse of the civilisation that had trusted to machinery ; and the instruments of its destruction were machines. But while the collapse of the previous great civilisation, that of Romo, had been a matter of centuries, had been a thing of phase and phase, like the ageing and dying of a man, this, like his killing by a railway or motor car, was one swift conclusive smashing and an end.” Mr Wells’s book was, published some six or eight years before the Great War. It is remarkable how he predicted so clearly what happened. All he foretold did not come to pass. But if another war breaks out again it will bring with it for the human race chaos and primeval night.

About the same time, or perhaps a little prior to the appearance of ‘ The War in the Air,’ there was published another book predicting the end, but along somewhat different lines. This was ‘Lord of the World,’ by Robert Hugh Benson. It was somewhat overshadowed by Mr Wells’s brilliant production, but it is in many ways a remarkable work. Father Benson draws a picture of what the world will be like in the not distant future. The varieties of speech will be abolished. All will speak one language. Scientific. inventions will have made life and work comfortable in every way. The air will be conquered. People will travel through it in machines called volors at a rate exceeding that of railway trains. Space will be practically abolished. Artificial sunlight, noiseless streets, motor locomotion, the Government doing everything will have brought about a Socialistic but materialistic millennium. Christianity will be practically dead in the political and fashionable world. Here is how it is regarded in the new synthesis of the coming age. The young and cultured wife of the leading statesman of the time is trying to comfort her mother, who is at death’s door. The mother .had been brought up in the Catholic faith, and lies terrified but obdurate. She cannot adjust her needs to the new creed. The daughter tries to explain it to the dying woman. Sho tells her that all that Christ promised has come true only in another way. The mother had spoken of her need of the forgiveness of sins. The daughter tells her that she has it. “ We all have it, because there is no such thing as sin. There is only crime.” And then she tells her: “ You used to believe that communion made you a partaker of God. Well, we are all that, because we are all human beings. Humanity takes the place of God. Christianity was only one way of saying that.” And how much better and truer is the modern scientific expression of it all! She looked at the piteous old face and the writhing hands on the coverlet, and then she said: “Look how Christianity lias failed now; it divided people. Think of all the cruelties and wars that it has caused; the disobedience to the State, the treasons. You cannot believe .that these were right. What kind of a God would that be? And then Hell., How could you ever have believed in that? . . . Don’t you understand that that God has gone—that He never existed at all—that it was all a hideous nightmare, and that now at last we know the truth,” n * ♦ » From that truth certain things inevitably follow. If man is only a higher sort of animal, then the lower must be weeded out in the interests of the higher. So we are back to the old pagan custom that only healthy children arc reared. The infirm and the kofleless invalids and the insane are put

out of existence, as Haeckel and his school argue that they should. If a man has thus a right to deal with his fellows, he must have a similar right to deal with himself. The late Mr Archer, the eminent dramatic critic and author, thought that in the not distant future there will bo penny-in-the-slot I machines where those who tired of life can end it if they please. In Father Benson’s book a striking outline is given of hospitals under Government supervision, equipped w. nurses and all the scientific apparatus necessary for a euthanasia for those who desire it. But both good and evil principles always tend to realise themselves in personalities, and ultimately in one supreme personality, who becomes their living incarnation. So in this book such a character emerges. He is evidently modelled on St. Paul’s ‘ Man of Sin,’ and is a striking and impressive creation. He becomes, as it were, the summation of the age, the dictator ot his time, the God of Humanity. Perhaps the ablest thing in the book is the conflict of this humanity with the old faith. It is shown with cogent logic how the principle of a godless humanitarianism leads inevitably to peivsecu tion. Christianity asserting allegiance to a king outside the body of humanity was in much the same position as- a cell in the physical body claiming independence for itself.’ That means for both disease and anarchy. There is no remedy, therefore, but extirpation. The last survivors of the Christian faith are gathered in Romo. Thither are despatched war volors to make an end of them. A bomb or two and Romo is a smoking ruin. The Pope with a handful of followers escapes to Nazareth, resolving to die there where their Lord lived so long. Their place of conceal-, raont is discovered, and the volors are t after them again. But they encounter the celestial hosts. The earth reels, quivering on the edge of dissolution. Then this world passed, and the glory ' of it.” “ Lord of the World ” has not the 'unity or lucidity of Mr Wells’s book. But it is weirdly suggestive of the logical goal ot an atheistic civilisation, such as we see in actual verity working itself out in Russia.

It is curious that all religious seem to be agreed that this age or epoch will be brought to a final end by an irruption from the invisible world. Even those who make no profession of religion look forward to a similar issue. Thus William Morris says: “I used really to despair onco because I thought what the idiots of our day call iprogress would go on perfecting itself. Happily I know now that all will have a sudden check—sudden in appearance, I mean, ‘as it was in the days of Noe.’ ” The writer of the article in the ‘ Sunday Chronicle ’ does not refer, as he might have done, for confirmation of his theory to a mysterious passage in tho mystic book of ‘ The Revelation. ’ We are told: “There was war in heaven between Michael and his angels and the devil and his angels The latter were cast down to the earth. ‘ Woe for the earth and for the sea, because the devil is gone down unto you, having great wrath, knowing that ho hath but a short time.’ ” It seems impossible to account for the evils and wickedness of the world on merely human grounds. They are human plus something nonhuman. /Hid these theories may help us to visualise not how or when the end will come, but that it will come, and the causes that may lead up to it.