were foretold are come to pass, so those will follow which are yet promised; the Lord himself giving assurance and saying, When ye see all these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. Dearest brethren, the kingdom of God has begun to be nigh at hand; reward of life, joy, eternal salvation, perpetual happiness, and possession of Paradise lately lost, are already coming nigh, while the world passes away." p. 217.

Dionysius of Alexandria, A. D. 258, wrote two books on the promises, in reply to Nepos, a millenarian. The books are lost; but a portion is preserved by Eusebius, from which I copy as follows:

"But since they (the millennaries) bring forth a certain book of Nepos, on which they much rely, as if it demonstrates to conviction that Christ's kingdom will be on earth, &c., and since the book is published, and is considered by some to be most convincing; and since some teachers count the law and the prophets nothing, and neglect the gospel, and despise the apostolic epistles, and boast of the doctrine of this book, as if it were some great and hidden mystery; and permit some of the more simple of our brethren to think nothing elevated and lofty, either of the glory or divinity of our Lord's epiphany, or of our resurrection from the dead, and of our gathering, and of our likeness unto him; but persuade them to hope for only small and mortal things in the kingdom of God, even such as are visible now; it therefore becomes me to dispute the matter with Nepos."

From this it appears how little he regarded the millennium of time.

Methodius, bishop of Tyre, and a martyr, A. D. 260 nearly, said: "And truly it is expected that creation will be disturbed as if it would perish in that conflagration, that it may be renewed, for it will not be annihilated: since we ourselves renewed, and free from pain, shall live in that same renewed world. So Psalm ciii.: Thou wilt send forth thy Spirit, and they shall be created, and thou wilt renew the face of the earth: to wit, from that time God will make a most delightful atmosphere. And since after this world the earth will be preserved yet, it is entirely necessary that its inhabitants should be such as will neither die any more, nor marry, nor be given in marriage; but should be like the angels, unchangeably in immortality, and occupied in the highest. Hence it is foolish to ask what manner of life their bodies will enjoy, seeing that this air, nor world, nor any of these things, will survive."*

* Epiphanius, Her. 74. Mede, 843.

These are the most eminent fathers of the third century. Fragments of the writings of others remain; but nothing to give any new aspect to this inquiry can be expected from them. The millenary doctrine, as held by Irenæus, does not appear, except as it may be reflected in Dionysius from Nepos. Certainly it does not seem to have acquired strength or favor. On the contrary, its tendency was downward; the Eastern churches reject and the Western fail to cherish the doctrine, in the third century.

DOWNFALL OF THE MILLENARIES IN THE FOURTH

CENTURY.

The doctrine comes forth in a fallen state through the pages of Lactantius, A. D. 310. He was tutor to Constantine's heir. In the seventh book of his Institutes he discourses freely on this topic. A cursory perusal of that book strikes me like the songs of the Roman Sibyl he loves to quote, rather than the word and counsel of the holy God, to whose word he makes less appeal. I am amazed at the mixture of truth and fable it contains, and I gaze with wonder on the image it reflects of the very spirit of Constantine's reign; the first christian autocrat of the world, and Pontifex Maximus of pagan Rome, who regulated the worship of images and demons, while he lived in the name of Christ, and was himself deified and worshipped, as a demon, after his death. Through the imperial gate corruption burst upon the church in a flood, and the millenary doctrine of Lactantius assimilated more to a sensual paradise than the kingdom of heaven. No wonder the christian fathers of that century took the alarm at length, and wholly discarded and formally rejected the fruitful source of error: for not only did the sensual abuse it; but the holy were sometimes misled, through subtilty and craftiness, to seize on all the glorious promises and prophecies and gospel of the kingdom of heaven, and to appropriate them to the thousand years' reign; and thus the holy word was stealthily plundered of its eternal import, and the gracious assurances of the Most High were unwarily limited to the millennium, and all beyond that thousand years was left a blank, or at least an unexplored heaven; spending many words on the Lord's giving up his kingdom at the end of that period, and on the many multitudes who would be in a natural way born into that kingdom, without trials of faith, and persecuting pains, or cares, or any tribulation.

The millenary doctrine passed unnoticed in the great council of Nice; but it was denounced in a council at Rome

under Pope Damasus, A. D. 373; and so effectual was the condemnation, that "the heresy, however loquacious before, was silenced then; and since that time has hardly been heard of."* Such was the testimony of Baronius in the 16th century. He adds: "Moreover, the figments of the millenaries being now rejected everywhere, and derided by the learned with hisses and laughter, and being also put under the ban, were entirely extirpated."+

St. Jerome was an unmerciful scoffer at the doctrine of the millenaries, not always regarding fairness in his laughter at their Jewish temple, victims, feasts, houses, lands, wives, and children, with much of the same sort, all for a thousand years. On Ezek. xvi. 35, "And thy sister Sodom," &c., St. Jerome observes:

"The Jews, among other fables, and figments, and endless genealogies which they invent, fancy this also: that in the advent of their Messiah, (whom we know to be Antichrist,) and in the thousand years' reign, Sodom is to be restored to its ancient state, like the garden of God, and like the land of Egypt, and Samaria is to recover her former felicity, when they shall return from Assyria to the land of Judea; and Jerusalem also is to be rebuilt, &c. But we, leaving the more perfect knowledge of these things to the judgment of God, are perfectly sure, that after the second advent of our Lord nothing will be base, nothing terrestrial; but then will be the celestial kingdom which was first promised in the gospel."

This is sound doctrine, worthy of profound attention. We agree with Jerome to defer all questions of strife to the final tribunal, believing the coming of our Lord in "the celestial kingdom which was first promised in the gospel," to be near at hand; and being fully persuaded that nothing base, or sensual, or temporal, or hurtful, or sorrowful, will be allowed in that kingdom. If it please the Lord, while this world is burnt up, to rescue and save the carnal Jews in the blood of the first Adam, though we cannot understand it now, we shall then, and adore his mercy; if it please him to restore the temple and sacrifices of blood at Jerusalem of the world to come, we shall know it then, and praise him, though it is utterly repugnant to our conception of his purpose now; if it please him then to chasten his saints with the assault of the hosts of our great adversary, we borrow no trouble about it, for our Savior, Joshua, will be with us; we will not be afraid; for Him we look in his kingdom, and defer all hard questions to "that day."

*Bar. A. D. 373. 14.

† Bar. A. D. 411. 48.

Sts. Cyril, Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, and a great company, held with the views of Jerome to the primitive faith, and gave no countenance, but often reproof, to those sentiments, which gathered all divine promises into the enjoyment of a temporal state, and spent the hope of them chiefly upon natural Jews in the flesh, degrading the heavenly throne to a terrestrial city, and limiting the reign and kingdom of the Lord to the definite period of a thousand years. Into so palpable errors the later millenaries fell, by separating the hope of that time from the kingdom of heaven, preached in the evangelists, with which Justin, Tertullian, and Jerome connected it.

I conclude this division of my subject with a summary of the doctrine of the fathers, taken from the Exposition of the Parables, in five volumes, by Ed. Greswell, D. D., Fellow of Oxford, Eng. :

DR. GRESWELL.

Greswell has a masterly knowledge of the millenary doctrine, reasons with great clearness and propriety, and comes in here to sum up the case for the millenaries of the ancient church, before we open the doctrine under the church of the Reformation. In the five points following, he affirms that all the fathers of the ancient church agree, and himself believes.

1. That Elijah must yet come before the end of the world. 2. That Elijah is one of the witnesses to be slain; the other is commonly supposed to be Enoch.

3. That Antichrist must come, and must be destroyed by the advent of Christ. In this perfectly agree all, whether friends or foes of the doctrine of the millennium. The only distinction was, that the advocates of the millennium expected their kingdom to begin and proceed after the destruction of Antichrist; the opponents of the doctrine expected the same of the kingdom of heaven."

4. That Antichrist is a person, rather than a character, a bodily agent. Yet they all agree to give the name to the symbolical character of the beast in Revelation, and also to the little horn, and to the king of the North in the prophet Daniel.

5. Before the appearing of Antichrist, the Roman empire was to be broken up into ten parts, which at his appearing were to be reunited in him, and he should reign over them three and a half years. Many understood "that which letteth," 2 Thess. ii. 6, to mean the empire, or imperial power. Tertullian says in his Apology, that Christians pray for the emperor and empire in the faith, that while

these are prolonged Antichrist is kept back. Lactantius attaches the same interpretation to the city of Rome, instead of the emperor and empire. And the end of Antichrist's power is the beginning of Christ's reign; the one will begin when the other is over, and not before.-Greswell, p. 393395, vol. i.

They expect the literal return of the carnal Jews, in that flesh and blood which is of the first Adam, to rule the earth for a thousand years in the empire of the second Adam, which empire is the palingennesia, the anapsyris, the apokatastasis pantoon, the resurrection of the just, the first resurrection, and the temporal glory of the millennium: and so he takes the answer to the prayer, "Thy kingdom come," to be fulfilled in the thousand years' reign.

PART II.

HISTORY AND DOCTRINE OF THE MILLENNIUM FROM THE REFORMATION TO THIS DAY.

AFTER the millenary doctrine was condemned, A. D. 373, it ceased to appear in history until after the Reformation, save the sore alarms of the world's coming to an end, which agitated Christendom at the end of the first millennium of our era, and again in the fourteenth century, at the end of the first millennium of christian rule over the Roman empire. The terrors of these and of some other times amounted to panic, and drove many from the regular discharge of high and imperious duty, under a proper notion that, the end being within a certain time known, the obligation to prepare for anything beyond that period ceased. The error was in the calculation of the time: an error so often made, that times have fallen into disrepute, even when their calculation seems to be very clear.

Hitherto, however, in no single instance has the doctrine of the millennium, or of the end of the world, been found separate and disconnected from the personal coming and kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ in the earth. Whether the fathers of the ancient church regarded the thousand years' reign in the light of a temporal kingdom, or in the