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Armed with the sword and the cross they held almost absolute sway over their little republics, coined money, levied taxes, disposed of small armies and went to the chase in almost regal state. The advent of the year 1000 was regarded with universal terror in Christendom. A fear, based on a supposed apocalyptic prophecy that the end of the world was at hand, paralysed all political and social life.
In general the Jews believed that the universal recognition of the sovereignty of God would bring about, or would at least be coincident with, the coming of the Golden Age, so frequently spoken of by the prophets, and described with imaginative profusion in the apocalyptic writings.
He hated Palestine: the Jordan, the Mount of Olives, the holy bazaars, the geographical sanctity of shrines and soils, the long torture of prophetic texts and apocalyptic interpretations, all the devotional maunderings of the fool and the Philistine. He would have had the Bible prohibited for a century or two, till mankind should be able to read it with fresh vision and true profit.
Patriotism and loyalty as moving causes had disappeared, but religion fiercely took their place. With Cromwell, the religious persecution took on an apocalyptic note of massacre, but the Irish were still showing that they were there with arms in their hands.
The prophecies concerning these individual churches have been fulfilled; so that even infidelity itself bears witness to the "strange verification of Apocalyptic promise and threatening." Two of the churches, Ephesus and Laodicea, where no spiritual souls remained, were threatened with utter extinction. They are now in utter ruins forsaken, desolate.
However this may be, at his death the faith of many was shaken, and his disciples attached to the prediction of Christ a more subdued meaning. At the same time that Jesus fully admitted the Apocalyptic beliefs, such as we find them in the apocryphal Jewish books, he admitted the doctrine, which is the complement, or rather the condition of them all, namely, the resurrection of the dead.
"He saved others," they said again; "himself he cannot save. If he be the king of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him! Ah, thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself." Some, vaguely acquainted with his apocalyptic ideas, thought they heard him call Elias, and said, "Let us see whether Elias will come to save him."
And it is remarkable that these searching inquiries are not so much forced on institutions from without, as developed from within. Consummate scholars question the value of learning; priests contemn dogma; and women turn their backs upon man's ideal of perfect womanhood, and seek satisfaction in apocalyptic visions of some, as yet, unrealised epicene reality.
Let the enemies of freedom be discouraged; let the advocates of oppression despair; but let those who grapple with wrong and falsehood, in the name of God and in the power of His truth, take courage. Slavery must die. The Lord hath spoken it. The vials of His hot displeasure, like those which chastised the nations in the Apocalyptic vision, are smoking even now, above its "habitations of cruelty."
Thus he said of Byron's 'Cain', "It is apocalyptic, it is a revelation not before communicated to man"; and he thought Byron and Tom Moore better poets than himself. As regards art, he cheapened Michael Angelo, and the only things about which he was enthusiastic in Italy, except the fragments of antiquity which he loved for their associations, were the paintings of Raphael and Guido Reni.
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