few new ones generated; not only as at the
Deluge, in the mountainous or more loose
columns, extant above the surface of the waters
of the globe; but in all parts, and under the
seas and ocean, as well as in other places;
which fissures must immediately swallow up the
main mass or bulk of the waters upon the face
of the ground, and send 'em to their fellow-
waters in the bowels of the earth; which was
the first and principal step towards a general
conflagration. And then (2) the vapours
acquired from the comet's atmosphere, which at
the Deluge were, by reason of their long absence
from the sun in the remote regions beyond
Saturn, pretty cool; at this time must be
supposed, by reason of their so late and near
approach to the sun about the perihelion, exceeding
hot and burning; and that to so extraordinary
a degree that nothing but the idea of the
mouth of a volcano, just belching out immense
quantities of liquid and burning streams, or
torrents of fiery matter, can in any measure be
suitable to the violence thereof. Imagine,
therefore, the earth to pass through the very middle
of this." Thereupon Whiston proceeds to
realise for us the situation in which—if he were
right and if there be any sense in a reverend
gentleman whose vanity we shall not feed by
helping towards the publication of his name—
we shall all find ourselves if we are alive, seven
years hence.

For, the conflagration, Whiston shows, is the
beginning of the Millennium. The burning will
be at the surface, and heat will subside during
a thousand years. On earth during the
Milennium there will be no seas or great waters. The
rub of the comet will have caused so much
stoppage of the earth as to snap the link
between it and the moon, who will then travel
away on her own separate path. Again, the
rub in a direction opposite to the earth's diurnal
rotation, would so balance it as to stop its
spinning on its axis. Thus there would be
during the Millennium no natural day on one side
of the earth, and no night on the other.

One day the Duchess of Bolton pretending to
come to court in a great fright, explained that
she had been at Mr. Whiston's, who told her
that the world was to be burnt up in three years,
and that, for her part, she was determined to
go to China. Certainly that was a place quite
out of the world. Horace Walpole's reflection
upon the matter was: "For my own part I
comfort myself with the humane reflection of
the Irishman in the ship that was on fire—I am
but a passenger."

In our day, End of the World cries are to be
heard in plenty. We are still also taught by
ingenious gentlemen, able in their own conceits
to tell us who is the Beast. Greek letters
represent numbers. The number of the Beast is six
hundred and sixty-six. Any man's name being
written in Greek letters, the numbers
represented by the letters are cast up, and if their
sum prove to be six hundred and sixty-six, or
whatever other number that number may be
interpreted to mean, the man is proved to be the
Beast. Upon this principle many a pope has
been denounced, and so has Martin Luther, his
name being spelt Lauter for this occasion only.
Once upon a time Napoleon Bonaparte was
detected as the Beast, and the last of this series of
discoveries, not many months old, occurs in a
large book entitled Therion, more than six
hundred pages long; if the number of pages
had but been six hundred and sixty-six, the
book itself might have come under serious
suspicion. The author of this work declares
it to be "certainly a most astonishing fact
that the numeric sign, sixty, ten, six,
presents in full detail, and with the utmost
precision, the name of Louis Napoleon." A
question having been raised by a brother
scholar out of the fact that the last o in the
name of Napoleon ought to be written in Greek
with a long o, or omega, instead of a short o,
or omicron, and that this change would upset
the whole calculation, the author of Therion,
replies that the name is not Greek, and therefore
is not confined as to its ending by Greek
rules; "furthermore," he says, "the lexicons
tell us that omega is an assemblage of two o's
and I would wish to be informed, the proper
spelling of a certain name being Napoleon, by
what right I should proceed to write it
Napoleoon? And, because it is not Napoleon, are we
to understand that this chief could not possibly
have been within the view of the prophet?
Why is the Holy Spirit to be bound by the rules
of classical orthography? That the name alluded
to should be compounded of letters common to
the Greek, and the language in which the
Beast's name of the latter days should be written,
was to be expected, and we find it is so,—every
letter in the word Napoleon belongs equally to
the Greek and the modern alphabets. And this
characteristic, when extended to a double name,
as in the case of the present ruler of France,
should at least have the effect of propitiating
our judgment, for I need not mention that there
are many names among us—e. g. Frederick,
Alfred, William, &c.—which, not admitting of
being written in Greek, could none of them be
the Beast signified." There is a good deal of
consolation in all this. Our gracious Queen is
safe against scandal, which is more than could
have been said for Queen Elizabeth. Anybody
with a c, f, h not preceded by t, i, g, v, w or y
in his name is safe against suspicion on this
head at any rate. The same acute writer calls
attention to the fact that our imperial ally is
the Gallic (i. e. cock-like) chief, and thus
fulfils the scriptural name of "Lucifer—Son of
the Morning!"

This may sound like a burlesque on sacred
things, but we simply repeat what we find in the
works of the wiseacres. Upon the passage in
Revelations, which says that "the fourth angel
poured out his vial upon the sun," one
interpreter, a scholar of high standing, Dr.
Wordsworth, says that the sun is Our Lord Himself;
another interpreter who is no scholar, Dr.
Cumming, says that it is Napoleon Bonaparte.

We are ashamed that there is need to call