The perils of prophecy

That the faith of his forebears had passed the flood-tide was sensed with apprehension by the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who developed the metaphor in some of the most beautifully elegiac lines in the English poetic canon:

1. Listen! You hear the grating roar,

2. Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling,

3. At their return, up the high strand,

4. Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

5. With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

6. The eternal note of sadness in.

7. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

8. The Sea of Faith

9. Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore,

10. Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

11. But now I only hear

12. Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

13. Retreating, to the breath

14. Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

15. And naked shingles of the world.

Coincidentally, in the very same year (1867) that Arnold was posting the decline of one millennial faith, another was born: Karl Marx, a second Messiah promising salvation to the poor and powerless, published Das Kapital. As did his illustrious predecessor (or more precisely his predecessor's apostles), Marx also foretold that a final apocalypse would precede mankind's rebirth into a new world. Marx's was, of course, purely terrestrial, a cooperative of mortal men and women. His apocalypse, once it had commenced, in 1917 in Russia, became one of terror, persecution and death.