END OF WORLD

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 210, 29 April 1932, Page 7

END OF WORLD

CRISIS THIS YEAR PREDICTIONS BASED ON AUTHORITY OF BIBLE COMING WORLD-WIDE WAR. When I told my friend Capanbells that the sect called the Christadelphians, and the Bible Brotherhood, said that the end of the world was coming or something very like it, he remarked, "And serve it jolly well right." To put it briefly, they say, basing their predictions and calculations on the Bible — and most imaginatively ingenious they are too — that some tremendous changes are due this year or thereabouts (writes Ben Adhem, in the Liverpool Weekly Post). There will be world- wide war, culminating in a decisive climax in Palestine, where the Messiah will "descend from Heaven and put an end to the carnage, ushering in a thousand years of peace — the Millennium." All through history, for thousands of years there have been times when people have feared the end of the world. Comets and eclipses scated the nations of old. Nay, so little has human nature changed in the course of centuries that we have similar panics in our time. Only a few years ago, when there was an eclipse of the sun, people in that great nation which boasts so much of its superior hustling civilisation — to wit, the United States — went foolish and assembled in solemn crowds awaiting the crash of doom, which, as we all know, didn't come, for the earth is s'till carrying on as a planet in the solar system. You will have heard of Mother Shipton, the Yorkshire witch. I have seen the cave where she lived at Knaresborough — at any rate, it is claimed that she dwelt there in a pretty spot by the honny river. Well, that long-eared old lady predicted the end of the world, as well as a few other trifles. You may have read the rhyming prophecy attributed to her (I suspect other hands faked it up a little long after her demise) . After prognostieations about "c'arriages without horses shall go" (indicating the invention of the railway train) and sundry other items, she says. — To an end the world shall come. In eighteen hundred and eighty-one. • Which proved as bad a prophecy as it is a rhyme. Yet many people thought there was something in it, and lived anxiously through the year 1881, feeling much relieved when the last .minute of December 31 ticked away; J I was a boy at the time, and remember the tallc and the fear concerning the prophecy. Rational people, of course, ridiculed it and laughed at it, but there were many who had a serious notion that there might be something in it. I believe there was also a comet somewhere about at that time, and that rather strengthened Old Mother Shipton's prophecy. I recall that I was not the least alarmed myself. Indeed, with the budding journalistic instinct that later placed m e in the newspaper world I rather wanted the event to come off. I thought how exciting it would be — a tremendous and terrible new.spectacle, and I was rather disappointed that it did not happen. There were others besides Mother Shipton who "tipped" the end of the world and failed to score. There was a parson named Baxter. He predicted it several times, When it did not happen in the year he fixed he unblushingly explained that he had made a little error in his calculations, and eoolly put the prediction forward a few years, and then when it did not come up t6 the scratch again, still a few more years. A very ingenious gentlemen. He based his prophecies on the Bible like the religious sect who are doing the same thing to-day, and who, I am afraid, are no more nearer the bull's eye than he was. For, though I make no claim to be a prophet. I can assure you that the end of the world will not he just yet; certainly not this year.