THE END OF THE WORLD.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXVI, Issue 9604, 23 December 1891, Page 6

THE END OF THE WORLD.

A e few days ago a cable message an* nounced that some Second Adventists were! convinced that the end of the world was to take place this Christmas. From time! to time, ever since the beginning of the' Christian era, the cry of the near approach of the end of the world has been raised, and the exact date has been fixed. A fowl months ago, at a meeting, in New York, of the Brooklyn Baptist Union, First Lientenant C. A. L. Totten, of the Fourth Artillery, United States Army, who is at present detailed as military instructor in the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, gave’ his version of “A time and times and thd dividing of time.” “Believers in the Bible who are also students of prophecy,” said he, "are* unanimous that it is now the time of the end; that the current decade will see all things fulfilled. There are dozens of time,prophecies in the Bible, and upon all of them the same momentous date cornea out/ The one I shall give you this evening I 1 consider to be the most remarkable' Messianic prophecy in existence. It iaj startling in every aspect. It is an entirely! new and original discovery. ! “On March 25 I was engaged in revising: the matter having reference to the Jewish! feast of Purim, its absolute date audits' actual bearing upon certain, ominous chronological events in our own near; future. That same day a stranger wrote me from Chicago calling my attention to the odd chronological riddle contained in the book of Esdras, which we have been! v taught to consider apocryphal, but which ihas been regarded as canonical by many Jews, and which many of the early! watchers recognised as inspired. “ The riddle he referred to will be found in the fourteenth chapter of the fourth book of Esdras, verses 10-12. It is as fol-j lows: ‘ The world has lost its youth and the times begin to wax old. For the world 1 is divided into twelve parts, and ten parts of it are gone already and half of a tenth! part, and there remaineth that which is 1 after half of the tenth parti Seven-sixtieths 1 remain. The world was in its eleventh hour.

" Here, then, was a plain chronological nut, and a nut worth cracking. My correspondent was C. G. Dixon, of 152, La Salle street, Chicago, and Ms letter to me was actually written to me on the Jewish feast of Purim itself, for the twenty-fifth! day of last March was the first day of *h»n! feast in the current year, and a solution of! the riddle is New Tear’s day of the thin teehth year of Afiasueras (466 b. 0.), thd very year in which the events commemorated by the feast of Purim actually took! . place.” Lieutenant Totten then proceeded to do some elaborate figuring before his audience, and showed mathematically that the end of the world was near. He concluded f “The chronology involved in this prophecy! is of the most astounding character. It strikes the 'ends’ of both ‘worlds/so to! speak, or, to use an artillery expression, it is ricochet. Prom the momentous New 1 Year’s Day upon which Esdras received It, it moves straight to the mark Deo. 25; 8996, a.m., then bounding for ward it buries itself ia another year just ahead of us. “To continue our artillery illustration the trajectory of this awful cycle is soclosd above our heads at this very minute that 1 we are almost in its dangerous space, and' I believe will be there in another year.' But let it bei clearly understood that thiol calculation will afford no man any legitimate clue for predicting the day or honx or year of the impending second adveutj But I also believe that it is much nearer than 1899.”