ONLY THEORIES

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 585, 17 July 1933, Page 7

ONLY THEORIES

COMING EVENTS world's yain prophesies which never happen. creating scares. Look out for Monday, June 21! wrote Ian . Coster in the Sunday Express recently). On or about that date all true believers will be snatched into spaee, and the rest of the world will suffer a terrible seven years of war, earthquake, famine and pestilence. Mr. A. E. Ware, retired motortrader, of Eastbourne, near London, knows that the Second Coming will happen in five weeks 'time. He hired the Queen's Hall to say so. How does he know? Why, he worked it out, just like doing a simple sum. This verse of the Bible, plus that verse, equals June 12, 1933. Easy! He even makes an attempt at prophesying the end of the world. This is due exactly 1007 years after June 12. Elementary! It does not matter to Mr. Ware that he is the latest of a long line of prophets of the world's end. He knows he is night. So did they. The bumper year for the "doomsdayers" was A.D. 1000. The Day of Judgment was definitely arranged for the thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christ. What a panic they eaused. Kings gave up their thrones and nobles their estates. Large areas were left untilL ed in Europe, and a famine resulted. Convents and monasteries lYere crowded with penitents. Many of the eharters of the time began with the ominous words: "As the world is now drawing to its close . . ." Yet the world, rolled through A.D. 1001 without any major calamity, and the few sceptics who had bought property and goods for a song made nice profits. | Cardinal N'ieolas de Cusa announced in 1704 that all would be over. His argument was that the Deluge occurred in the 34th jubilee of the Creation, and that, therefore, the world was due to end in the 34th jubilee of the Christian era. A neat theory, but there must have been a flaw in the Cardinal's arithmetic. Foretelling the end then became a fashion, and thou- | sands were taken in every time. They waited on hilltops, dug their graves and lay in them, and went into hysteries. Swedenborg fixed the date for 1757, Johann Gengal for 1836, William Miller, an American Adventist, for 1843, and Dr. John Cumming for 1866. Even Mother Shipton had a try. She put it down for 1866, and she was as right as any of the others. Most of them became discouraged after the first failure, but the Rev. Michael Bax- 1 ter, of London, was a tryer. He made ■ seven guesses — and they were all wrong. The end should have come in 1 December, 1919, for a couple of pro- ( phets agreed on the date. Mr. E. W. ' T. Macdonald, of Hendon, announced that after 10 years' study of the Great 1 Pyramid, he estimated the "Fourth ^ Com-ing" to be due. A mysterious Pro-

fessor Porta, of Michigan, threw half the world into a tremble by his foreI cast of destruction through sunspots. ! Thousands of negroes deserted fields | and factories in America and spent the zero hour on their knees in the fields. | In May, 1922, Dr. G. T. Harding an- | nounced that "everything would be up" when his brother left office. President Harding died in 1923 — and not even the United States was destroyed. The next large scare was in 1925, following the prediction of Mrs. Margaret Rowen, a Californian prophetess. She said that the 144,000 faithful would be caught up at midnight on February 6. The scene was at Pachogue, Long Island, where Robert Reidt, the local apostle, gathered his congregation on the fateful night, all waiting to be transported by supernatural power to California. Reidt, heedless of the reports and the comeras, put a megaphone to his lips and shouted to the skies, "Gabriel, we're ready! Oh, Gabriel" The hour of midnight struck, and nothing happened, so they all went home to bed. The most pessimistic of scientific prophets gives the world a few million more years of life. None of us minds much what happens then.