History and Doctrine of the Millennium

THE MILLENISTS, OR THE NEW SCHOOL MILLENARIES. ²

Many sorts of error have at one time or other been connected with the doctrine of the Lord’s coming; but never was the Lord himself left out of the doctrine, until the present age of the reformation; never wise men were found of old, or learned men, willing to believe and teach the coming of the Lord without the Lord’s personally coming; men willing to believe and stout to maintain the hope of the Lord’s being personally absent from his own epiphany; (what an absurdity!) men bold to proclaim the Lord’s invisible “appearing” at hand; (which is a plain contradiction;) men who “love his appearing,” which they arc sure never to behold, for it is to be afar off or else invisible: invisible, not for the brightness of its glory, but for its hidden spirituality; but now in this age, Christendom goes headlong after a doctrine that would have shamed, I think, the common sense of idolatrous Greece and Rome; to wit: that the Lord’s parousia, or visible manifestation of himself, is one in which himself does not appear! So preposterous an idea does not admit of a plain statement without exposing it to contempt; and yet, as the blessed God has given understanding to man, this invisible “epiphany,” “parousia,” “coming,” and “appearing,” is now the millenists’ doctrine, and deceitful hope: a hope of device which would astonish the primitive ages and martyrs of the church, and fill them with wonder above the admiration they could exhibit in view of our factories, steamers, and trains of men and merchandise, spinning and weaving, and running against wind and tide, through hill and dale, twenty-five miles an hour, without fatigue. HDM 35.2

Truly, an age of inventions this, and one of the most important is least understood; one of eternal moment is everywhere coming into use; and few consider it; which is: A scripture way to look for our “Nobleman’s return” without at all expecting to see himself, or any other: a spiritual way of enjoying the riches, pomp, and universal dominion of this world, for a long time, in the blood of the first Adam, by proffering the entire glory to the second Adam, in the unseen world! HDM 36.1

The intellectual absurdity and natural impossibility of this new theory would move our laughter, were it only a grave error of the head inoperative upon the heart; but it is connected with the tenderest life of the believer, withdrawing his affections from the Lord of glory. God is manifest in the flesh, a visible object of love and adoration; he left a lively assurance, when he ascended, that he will return with judgment to his enemies, and to be admired of all his holy and chosen people. The first love of the young church was manifest in daily looking for his parousia, and in breaking of bread in memory of his dying love, and in the hope of his speedy coming. The falling away has succeeded, until the church of the nineteenth century gives up for a thousand years his epiphany, and tires of the hope of his return, and dismisses from her heart “the love of his appearing.” HDM 36.2

This fearful apostasy is one into which Protestants have fallen away beyond Rome herself; justifying the prophet’s rebuke of treacherous Judah, whose wickedness exceeded that of backsliding Israel: “Yea be thou confounded also, and bear thy shame, in that thou hast justified thy sisters,” ¹ which are called Samaria and Sodom. Let us not triumph, but rather put on sackcloth, and go softly all the residue of our appointed time, seeing that we too have been carried away with this dissembling, and that our brethren are blindfold still in the pernicious error. HDM 36.3