The Infant's Skull; Or, The End of the World. A Tale of the Millennium — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Infant's Skull; Or, The End of the World. A Tale of the Millennium
John Stuart Mill · en
Impossible to describe the revulsion of feeling at the universal
disappointment. It was an explosion of regret, of remorse, of
astonishment, of recrimination and of rage. The devout people who
believed themselves cheated out of a Paradise that they had paid for to
the Church in advance with hard cash and other property; others, who had
squandered their treasures, contemplated their ruin with trembling. The
millions of serfs who had relied upon slumbering in the restfulness of
an eternal night saw rising anew before their eyes the ghastly dawn of
that long day of misery and sufferings, of which their birth was the
morning and only their death the evening. It now began to be realized
that, left uncultivated in the expectation of the end of the world, the
land would not furnish sustenance to the people, and the horrors of
famine were foreseen. A towering clamor rose against the clergy; the
clergy, however, knew how to bring public opinion back to its side. It
did so by a new and fraudulent set of prophecies.
"Oh, these wretched people of little faith," thus now ran the amended
prophecy and invocation; "they dare to doubt the word of the
All-powerful who spoke to them through the voice of His prophet! Oh,
these wretched blind people, who close their eyes to divine light! The
prophets have announced the end of time; the Holy Writ foretold that the
day of the last judgment would come a thousand years after the Saviour
of the world!... But although Christ was born a thousand years before
the year 1000, he did not reveal himself as God until his death, that is
thirty-two years after his birth. Accordingly it will be in the year
1032 that the end of time will come!"
Such was the general state of besottedness that many of the faithful
blissfully accepted the new prediction. Several seigneurs, however,
rushed at the "men of God" to take back by force the property they had
bequeathed to them. The "men of God," however, well entrenched behind
fortified walls, defended themselves stoutly against the dispossessed
claimants. Hence a series of bloody wars between the scheming bishops,
on the one hand, and the despoiled seigneurs, on the other, to which
disasters were now superadded the religious massacres instigated by the
clergy. The Church had urged Clovis centuries ago to the extermination
of the then Arian heretics; now the Church preached the extermination of
the Orleans Manichæans and the Jews. A conception of these abominable
excesses may be gathered from the following passages in the account left
by Raoul Glaber, a monk and eye-witness. He wrote: