The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 3

IV. Battle Over Fundamental Principles Ensues

Premillennial prophetic journals, such as The Morning Watcli and The Investigator, appeared, and individual treatises by the score began to pour from the presses, reaching their peak in the early forties-with more than 150 separate works in the first half of the nineteenth century. Meantime Samuel R. Maitland, in his treatise of 1826, challenged the generally received year-day principle, as applied to the 1260 days of Daniel and the Apocalypse. In this he assailed the whole Protestant application of the symbols of the little horn and the beast of the Revelation-avowing that it was yet to be fulfilled in a personal and openly infidel Antichrist, with the days of his career as literal days. PFF3 281.1

In this view James Todd and William Burgh, of Ireland, joined. Thus the really epochal Catholic treatises of the Jesuit Lacunza and the Dominican Lambert were now countered by the professedly Protestant Maitland and Burgh, who were excusing the Papacy from the application while these two sons of the Roman church were applying it to their own papal Rome. Truly, it was an anomalous situation. PFF3 281.2

And still another factor began to operate to give fresh weight to anti-Protestant opinion-the Oxford Tracts, which began to be issued in 1833. The chief object of these writers was to de-Protestantize the Church of England ³² naturally enough, they took over the Futurist view of Antichrist, setting aside all application of the prophecies to the Roman Papacy. This left Protestantism hopelessly split, and the Papacy made good use of the efforts of the Oxford Tractators, as will like wise be noted later. PFF3 281.3

Meanwhile the influx of German neology ³³ into England was not without effect, with its Preterist apocalyptic scheme that had received great impetus under Eichhorn, Ewald, Heinrichs, and others. Professor Lee of Cambridge adopted this Preterist view, and in America Professor Moses Stuart did like wise. This, too, will he discussed later. PFF3 282.1