details, it grew ever
more sombre, appalling, and stupendous in its general certainty
and preternatural accompaniments. When the tenth century drew nigh
its close, a literal acceptance of the scriptural text that "the
dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, after
being bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years," should
"be loosed a little season," filled Christendom with the most
intense agitation and alarm. From all the literature and history
of that period the reverberations of the frightful effects of the
general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of
the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous
season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense
incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church,
like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our
expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion,
fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and still
continued to expect him.

The longer the crisis was delayed, and the more it was brooded
over, the more awful the suppositious picture became. The
Mohammedans held that the end would be announced by three blasts:
the blast of consternation, so terrible that mothers will neglect
the babes on their breasts, and the solid world will melt; the
blast of disembodiment, which will annihilate everything but
heaven and hell and their inhabitants; and the blast of
resurrection, which will call up brutes, men, genii, and angels,
in such numbers that their trial will occupy the space of
thousands of years.

But in the later imagination of Christendom the vision assumed a
shape even more fearful than this. The Protestant Reformation,
when one party identified the Pope, the other, Luther, with
Antichrist, gave a new impulse to the common expectation of the
avenging advent of the Lord. The horrible cruelties inflicted on
each other by the hostile divisions of the Church aggravated the
fears and animosities reflected in the sequel at the last day.
Probably nothing was ever seen in this world more execrable or
more dreadful than those great ceremonies celebrated in Spain and
Portugal, in the seventeenth century, at the execution of heretics
condemned to death by the Inquisition. The slow, dismal tolling of
bells; the masked and muffled familiars; the Dominicans carrying
their horrid flag, followed by the penitents behind a huge cross;
the condemned ones, barefoot,