plundered and devastated, His festivals abolished, His name blasphemed, His service despised. Yes: what do I hear? what do I see? Instead of hymns in praise of God, jovial and profane songs will here be sung; and Venus herself, the goddess of the heathen, will have the audacity here to take the place of the living God, to sit at the altar, and receive the homage of her true worshippers." All this actually occurred some years later, and in the very church in which the prophetic words were uttered. Whoever knows the condition of Paris at that time, and considers, for example, what Walpole said of it in his letters, can very well understand how a man like Beauregard, whose vision penetrated the depths of the abyss of the reigning corruption, might very well prognosticate these things, which afterwards came to light as the manifestations of a spirit that for a long time had been at work, although until then only in a noiseless way.

II. Prophetic Anticipations in the Early Medieval Times: Antichrist, and the End of the World.

To estimate aright the prime characteristics of the religious and political prophecies of the middle ages, we must go back to the earlier times of the Church. The first christians succeeded to an inheritance transmitted to them by the Alexandrian Jews with their Hellenic culture; for the latter had already fashioned Sibylline prophecies, which held out the prospect of a final victory of Judaism over heathenism, and its elevation into a religion for the world. These SibyllineJewish books or fragments were current in the last century before Christ, and again in the first and second centuries after Christ. To them were soon added Christian vaticinations, some of which were held in reverence by the heathen and by a part of the Christians, who took them under their protection or made use of them as genuine, giving to them the name of Sibyllists, as, for example, they were called by the philosopher Celsus. To the Roman authorities, however, it did not seem a matter of indifference to spread abroad expectations of an approaching destruction of the Roman Empire and of the abolition of

the religion of the state; and so they forbade, under penalty of death, the reading of these books or "leaves."

As long as the Roman Empire existed in the west, down to the period of the great migration of the nations, there was no real ground for independent prophecies. The christian representations with respect to the future were wholly controlled by their prophetic book, the Apocalypse. While the heathen Romans thought that their empire was sure of endless duration, and the eternity of Rome was, so to speak, an official dogma, the Christians, on the other hand, knew that Rome, drunken with the blood of christian martyrs, must fall, that the Roman secular power would come to an end. Hence the vaticinations which they framed had reference, first of all, to this expected destruction of the Roman Empire, and were connected with the interpretation of the prophetic Apocalypse without further details. The Christians of those early centuries had no well-defined idea that a new christian order of things, a circle of christian states, would spring up from the ruins of the empire. They were not in a condition to look beyond the Roman horizon, and to anticipate the still slumbering powers of barbaric nations, who appeared to them to be only the instruments and forces of devastation. And so they cherished the belief that the destruction of the Roman

Empire would also be the end of the present order of the world; or, to speak more exactly, that the beginning of the end had come. They thought, in fact, that Rome itself with its universal power was still spared, so that the catastrophe of the end of the world might be kept in abeyance. Lactantius says: " She, Rome, is the city which still holds and bears all." They were all the more confirmed in this representation by an incorrect interpretation of the passage in Paul's second epistle to the Thessalonians, ii, 7, (rendering Karixwv, qui tenet, he that holdeth on), understanding by it the Roman Empire, whose overthrow was to be followed by the manifestation of " the Man of sin," and soon after by the end of the world.

And so in the christian world, until the heart of the middle ages, there were no proper prophecies of general significance and weight. The prophetic inclination natural to man rested satisfied with conjectures about the great enemy of christianity, the Antichrist, who was expected by every one in east and west to be a Jew and the restorer of Jewish dominion. Much also was said about the approaching end of the world. The formula of the tenth century, " appropinquante mundi termino," is well known. But this was to be preceded by the manifestation of Antichrist, whose dominion was to endure three and a half years. With

him men's imaginations were chiefly busy, yet still within the bounds traced by the old tradition. He was to be of Jewish stock; in the far east, in Mohammedan surroundings, he was to appear as a victorious general and a devastator, and fill the world with the terror of his name. So long then as no personage appeared, who could be described as a Jewish prophet and mighty tyrant, nothing could be said of an immediate coming of the end of the world. The expectation sometimes became so impatient, that he was represented as already living, though still in secrecy, just delaying his appearance. But farther than this they could not go; and thus the great Antichrist, the apostasy he was to effect, his victory and his bloody though short dominion,-all this remained a phenomenon constantly expected, constantly feared, but never occurring, though his course was minutely described, and his acts and destiny recounted and imaged forth. But in every century there were forerunners to prepare the way for the great terror; that is, every party regularly accused its opponents of being such preparatory messengers and servants, but the lord of these servants showed himself never and nowhere. was indeed from time to time proclaimed: He is already born, or he is now nine or ten years old; as, for example, St. Martin, Bishop of