THE MILLENIUM.

Hawke's Bay Weekly Times, Volume 1, Issue 33, 12 August 1867, Page 200

THE MILLENIUM.

“ Victor Hugo must be a man of very strong faiths He must also be gifted with very keen prophetic vision ; for no one else can discern what he proftsses to see in the near future, and no one believes in his prophecies. In his really eloquent and impressive introduction tp' the New Paris Guide, he draws a picture of what he rightly calls an * extraor* dinary nation’ which is to arise in the next; century.. With this nation the Millenium will not only commence, but attain perfect growth. Tt will abhor war,, and will ihd it; impossible to; .see the-, difference. .between the purple of thei General and the red of

the butcher.’ It will regard the slaughter of a Waterloo or a Sadowa with as much detestation as we now read of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Instead of devastating wars. w,e shall then have grand congresses, a federal council of mankind, in which will be settled the disputes that would now occasion an appeal to arms. Justice will everywhere prevail, and peace and innocence will descend, white-robed, from Heaven, to preside over the destinies of the human race. The name of this extraordinary nation will be Europe, and its capital will he Paris ! It is a Pj*y not to put faith iu the beautiful vision which the illustrious exile beholds, like a modern St. John, from his Patraos in the English Channel; but really—the fact will excuse the phrase—we can’t see it. To ask us us to believe that the Millenium is coming within the Bext fifty years, and by way of Paris, too, is taxing rather too severely our faith in mankind and Victor Hugo. There is something exquisitely”ludicrous in the notion of making Paris the New Jerusalem- It would have occurred to a Frenchman only, and the courage and egotism a of Victor a Hugo to put it in print.