Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/136

 122 chroniclers, a shrewd observer of events, connects the stirring of the Third Crusade with the deep emotion produced by these forebodings, which in one version of the Letter are directly connected with the Holy Land and the attacks ot Saladin on Jerusalem. No less a personage than Giraldus Cambrensis connects the Crusade with the emotion produced by this Letter. Roger of Wendover, in his Chronicle, under the year 1229, mentions not only this Letter but three similar letters, the oldest being the one under our immediate consideration. So does Gervasius (to mention only English chroniclers), and so also Benedict of Peterborough. All these ascribe the Letter to Magister Johannes Toletanus.

The period at which the Letter was circulated for the first time was favourable for the publication of such auguries of evil and of catastrophes threatening to destroy the world. The public spirit was then in a state of effervescence, half frightened and half disappointed. The dreaded time of the Second Advent of Christ was expected to take place at the end of the first thousand years; and the expected appearance of the Millennium was one of the factors which had often, especially in ancient times, produced ecclesiastical, social, and political convulsions. The year 1000 had been awaited by anxious multitudes, dreading the terrible signs and wonders which were to come upon the world. The year 1000 had just past, and neither had the terrible events come to pass, nor had the enthusiastic expectations been realised. A state of subdued excitement remained. Some of it spent itself in the Crusades, the rest in apocalyptic and mystical literature and in sectarian movements, on which I do not intend entering here. They belong to Church history proper, and are only mentioned here in connection with this astrological Letter.

Man must have something in which to trust, and on which to rely, to strengthen his failing courage and to lift for him, if possible, a corner of the veil that covers the future. Man is always anxious to know that which a wise Providence