People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 April 1896 — A Mighty Portent. [ARTICLE]

A Mighty Portent.

The plot thickens. The villian is another fellow this time. He is not a crank, a socialist, a populist or anarchist. It is a Rev- Brooks, a conserative minister to a rich St. Louis congregation. He predicts the destruction of the United States in the next six months by an uprising of the people the bloodiest the world has ever known. Similar startling predictions or statements from similar sources come from every direction, though few so prominent. What does it all mean? Why this hush asif some awful evil portending weighed down the whole people? I have talked to scores of men in the last few weeks, not reformers, and thev say just what Rev. Brooks said, excepting the time. Why is there so general an impression of an awful time just ahead of us. And on the heels of this the cable brings the intelli gence that Paris is excited over this prediction of a French girl. Henriet Condon, who claims to be the mouth piece of the Archangel Gabriel to warn Europe of a coming holocaust and the fall of France and England. The cable says: She is a young woman of 25. Her parents are eminently respectable and no money or gifts are accepted. Thousand are visiting her, the ten minutes she gives to each who can secure a letter of introduction. There is no question as to her motives, which seem above suspicion, it being impossible to look into her piercing blue eyes and not feel that ghe is speaking with the utmost sincerity. A, these seances she tells people the deepest secrets of their hearts and this forces them to view her predictions With confidence and awe. The Paris press is filled with the wonderful ihfcirination she gives, the cleirgy is dumbfounded and the scientific then nonplussed. Surely we live bn the border land of a new cycle or a fearful social volcano. But up to the last hour of this old, worn out order the blind will go on trying to skin their neighbors and gather title to the wealth others have ereted. It was always thus. Belshazzer’s Feast was even in progress when the razing of the city had commenced without. It will be thus is the closing days of the Nineteenth century. —Appeal to Reason.