436 G. L. Bun- Great. Augustine, like Paul, had to make a stand against it. The end was always coming, and never came. But precisely for this reason it grew at length a mark of orthodoxy to deny that the time of the end could be foreknown, and on the lips of all pious church- men, as on those of Adson and Abbo in the tenth centuiy, were the words " Of that day and hour knoweth no man," " The day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night." Even the credulous mil- lenarian, whose own millennium was of course no thousand years of this world, but the thousand of Christ's reign which should follow it, yet who had built on the prophecies of Old Testament and New, and especially on the text that " with God a thousand years are as one day," a belief that his millennial Sabbath would set in at the end of the sixth thousand years from the Creation (and even Augustine believed that this was in his day nearly up), must have felt his faith wax faint as date after date inferred from Ezekiel and from Daniel passed by and brought no change. Bishop Gregory of Tours in the sixth century wrote his chronicle of the times already past propter eos qui adpro- pinquaiitein imuuii fincin despcrant — " for the sake of those who de- spair of the end of the world." In the tenth century, then, it was only ignorant laymen like those of Lorraine, or some ill-trained visionary like Abbo's preacher, who could put faith in a date for the end of the world. And Dom Plaine may well be right in be- lieving that it was only the revival of millenary dreams in the cen- tury following the Reformation which made it easy for Baronius and his contemporaries to fancy a panic at the year looo. It must be remembered, further, that the round numbers of a decimal system had much less vogue in the tenth century than now. It was the I, V, X, L, C, D, M, of the old Roman notation which governed the numerical ideas of men. Nor was currency, or weight, or measure, in the scales of that day a decimal matter. Under the influence of the Hebrew Scriptures even the decimals of classical antiquity had largely given place to the sacred round num- bers of the Jews — the threes, the sevens, the twelves, and their multiples ; and especially was this the case in all that pertained to prophecy. Nor may one forget that the Christian calendar itself was yet a novel thing in the year looo. The monk Dionysius, who at the middle of the sixth century devised it, had no authority to impose its adoption ; and it crept but slowly into use. Monkish chronicles had early begun to employ it; but the first pope to date by the Christian era his official letters was John XIII., scarce thirty years before the year looo; and " its use," says the latest and highest authority, Arthur Giry, " did not become general in the west of
