Mr Baxter’s Prophecies.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 476, 31 May 1890, Page 6

Mr Baxter’s Prophecies.

The Rev. Mr Baxter, to whose prophetic utterances recent allusion was made, has been donning the seer’s mantle once more. He now condescends to enter into particulars as to what is to happen before the great battle of Armaggedon is fought and won. Antichrist, who is to be either Nero or Napoleon 1., is due in the course of next year or the one after, but whan he does come he will lose no time in setting to work among the nations. Wholesale slaughter will prevail everywhere, and the human race will be pretty well wiped off the face of the earth. The final scene, however, i 3 not to be enacted until some years afterwards, and Mr Baxter promises us some terrible experiences on its arrival. Before this, however, a considerable re-arrange-ment of the map of Europe is to take place, but why is only one continent mentioned ? Prance is to have its revenge on Germany, and is to swallow up, as it were, the entire Fatherland, and the existing twenty-three States of Europe are to be reduced to ten. On the sth March, 1896, at twenty-one minutes to one o’clock—how singularly precise all prophets are in these matters—omnibus and hansom drivers will be taken from their places and spirited away, while their horses run into one another. Trains are to rush through stations and come into disastrous collision, though such events have been only too common before now, and in the rush to get to the better land of which Mrs Hemans has so beautifully written, engine-drivers and guards will desert their posts, and pilots will leave their ships to founder or to float just as either result may eventuate. Even the Forth Bridge and the Yyrnwy embankment will, it may be assumed, join in the final smash up which Mr Baxter so vividly paints and foreshadows, and those of us whom this wreck of matter still leaves alive in the world of chaos are to be disposed of by countless scorpions with fair hair, men’s faces, heads bearing crowns of gold, green locust bodies, and red tails, who are to swarm out of the bottomless pit to attack and destroy the stiff-necked children of men yet left alive. Mr Baxter’s prophecies, strong as they are, will, however, we fancy, not be accepted by the general public without the accompaniment of the proverbial grain of salt. They are not likely, at all events, to interfere very much with the ordinary course of business in the meantime, and a quarter of a century hence people will have time, perhaps, to laugh at their rashness, just as the public used to smile and laugh at those of the popular and venerable Scottish doctor of divinity, with which miny years ago we were all so familiar.