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founds an argument against Papal tradition on the fact, that this confessedly false doctrine was for a time maintained by several of the eminent doctors of the Christian church, and attacked by none; Gibbon decides that "though it might not be universally received, it appears to have been the reigning sentiment of orthodox believers;" Neander, the greatest master of early ecclesiastical history, seems to deny its general prevalence, and assign it a local rise and local extension.* Candor compels us to say that we think that he understates the fact, and that the truth of the case could not be more accurately compressed than in the above clause of Gibbon.

The declaration of Eusebius, that "most of the ecclesiastical writers," induced by the antiquity of Papias, believed this doctrine, being the concession of an adversary, must be taken in its full extent; and it settles the point, that a clear majority of the registered opinions of the doctors of the church, from the first half of the second century until the time of Eusebius, were Chiliastic. On the other hand, the declarations of Irenæus and Justin Martyr, being the concessions of ardent Chiliasts, must also be interpreted in their full extent. "I am not ignorant," says Irenæus, "that some among us who believe in divers nations and by various works, and who, believing, do consent with the just, do yet endeavor to (transferre) turn these things. But," he adds, "if some have attempted to allegorize these things, they have not been found in all things consistent, and may be convinced from the words themselves." Justin Martyr confesses that "many of a pure and pious judgment do not acknowledge this," namely, the Chiliad. The attempt made by Dr. Duffield and others to make out that the true reading in the above acknowledgment of Justin should have a negative, is scarce reconcilable with the original construction of the sentence; and the fact that he distinguishes his own party as ορθογνωμονες κατα παντα χριστιανοι " Christians in every particular orthodox," shows that he meant to represent the opposite party,

"If we find that millennarianism [Chiliasmus] was then extensively propagated, and are able to explain this by the circumstances of that period; yet we are not to understand by this, that it ever belonged to the universal doctrines of the church. We have too scanty documents from different parts of the church in those times, to be able to speak with certainty and distinctness on that point. When we find Chiliasm in Papias, Irenæus, Justin Martyr, all this indicates that it arose from one source, and was propagated from one spot. The case is somewhat different with those churches, as, for instance, the Romish Church, which had an anti-Jewish origin. We find afterward an anti-millennarian feeling in Rome," &c.-Rose's Neander, vol. ii, p. 324.

not as heretics, but as good Christians, imperfectly orthodox. This is very much as one evangelical Christian denomination, at the present day, might speak of another. We may add, that the Oxford edition of Tertullian, published in 1842, gives the sense of Justin as we have rendered it. The testimony of both these Chiliastic fathers proves, therefore, that in the palmiest days of Chiliasm, its opponents were a "respectable minority," numerous in amount, and pure in character. Origen, who was its first great known opponent, speaks of the Chiliasts in his day as being Tives some, and simpliciores quidam, certain rather simple ones. It may, therefore, be believed that it had much declined long before any recorded attack upon it; that it never was an absolute test of orthodoxy, and that its opposers were always more numerous than the disbelievers in an immediate advent of the Son of man.

The assertion that Dr. Whitby is the author of the doctrine of the millennium as distinguished from Chiliasm, needs no other refutation than Dr. Duffield himself furnishes, (p. 248,) when he informs us that the princes of Europe "strike directly against the modern notion of the millennium" in the seventeenth article of the Augsburg Confession, which condemns the doctrine "that prior to the resurrection of the dead, the pious will engross the government of the world." We need go no further than a former number of this periodical, which produces the testimony of John Howe, delivered before Whitby published. We need no better proofs than Dr. Duffield's own quotations furnish, that the same was a known doctrine in the best days of the uninspired Jewish church. Perhaps the most that Whitby did was to identify the doctrine of the world's ultimate conversion with the millennium proper, namely, that of Rev. xx. And this was a very natural step, resulting from the solutions which modern commentators had wrought of the previous nineteen chapters. We need not ascribe as much merit to Whitby in regard to the millennium (we speak without disparagement of that great commentator) as Dr. Duffield ascribes to Mede in regard to Chiliasm. "He was the first to open that sealed book; and, unfolding the millennarian doctrine, to pour in a light never seen before. He stands, in fact, the acknowledged father of interpreters of that wonderful book."P. 256.

The writer, however, in whose collective and constructive imagination the scattered rays of Chiliastic traditions and reveries were combined and expanded into a splendid fabric, seems to have been Papias, a man who figures rather unfortunately among the fathers of the first century, whether exhibited in the history of

Eusebius, or in the preserved fragments of his own writings. When this celebrated church historian ascribes to him the first agency in giving development and currency to the theory of Chiliasm, and characterizes his mind very unfavorably, we see no reason for discrediting his historical statements, because, forsooth, his own orthodoxy, in regard to the trinity, is rather more than suspicious. The statements of Eusebius have the native air of genuine truth, and have some confirmatory circumstances about them. It is from the writings of Papias himself mainly that Eusebius judges him; from them he corrects the statement of Irenæus, that Papias was a hearer of the apostle John; and he quotes at length an extract in which Papias describes the greediness and faith with which he sought and swallowed all obtainable verbal reports and traditions of the oral discourses and personal doings of our Lord and his apostles. The five books in which these were recorded the Christian church has not carefully preserved from oblivion, and has not much respected the specimens which Eusebius gives. "I was of opinion," says Papias, "that I received not so much profit from books as from living and surviving voice." "He relates," says Eusebius, some marvelous things, (παραδοξα,) as having come to him by tradition;" "he relates, as from unwritten tradition, some strange parables and teachings of our "Saviour, and other things more fabulous. Among which, he says. there is to be a thousand years after the resurrection from the dead, the kingdom of Christ corporeally having been established upon the earth, not perceiving that such things were said mystically, in symbols." The silly passages of the stupendous millennial vine, and prolific grain of wheat, demonstrate him to have been as deficient in sense as Eusebius could by any language well represent him.

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Doctrinal truth may be stationary, but prophetic revelation, which discloses the great last events of this world, sheds new light with advancing years. To the records of inspired prediction, antiquity is comparatively blind; it is to the patient comparer of past history and past fulfillments, that the accumulating treasures of prophetic truth roll themselves forth. Here the great law of progress rules in full supremacy. Antiquity sits in ignorance, knowledge is with the future; "what is first is adulterate, what is last is true." Even Dr. Duffield would not maintain that the inspired delineation of the great events of this world were as well understood by Papias, Justin Martyr, and Irenæus, as by Bishop Newton, Dr. Whitby, and Dr. Faber. And even admitting that the Scripture predictions of the true millennium were first accu

rately understood by a commentator so modern as Whitby, nearly all the great events of New Testament prophecy have similarly waited for a modern development. Admitting that the millennial reign of the twentieth chapter of Revelation was not understood by the church until a late century; this is equally true of the whole Apocalypse.

It is the prerogative of Providence to set limitations to human knowledge for human good. God has a glory in concealing; it may have been wisely ordered, and the supposition is no impeachment of divine veracity, that the distance of the advent should be hidden from the knowledge of the early church, in order that she might retain it in her conception, and fear its uncertain approach. With equal wisdom, (and as a necessary consequence of the previous concealment,) the future earthly triumph of Christianity may have been veiled from her view, until the age when Providence had prepared the church for her achievements, and was ready to disclose the truth of the promise, to encourage her in their performance.

Our general conclusions may be stated in brief terms. 1. The doctrine of the millennial conversion of the world, as we hold it, is not only earlier than Dr. Whitby, but earlier than the Christian era, and is clearly found in the earliest uninspired Jewish documents. 2. The doctrines of Chiliasm are Persian, imported from the Babylonish captivity into rabbinism. 3. Thence introduced into certain of the uninspired Christian compositions, and aided by a belief of an immediate advent, they maintained a prevalence, and perhaps an ascendency, through more or less of the second century. 4. The question being of a prophetic nature, was likely to be misunderstood in early times, and to be elucidated by time and progress. The ancients, therefore, had more reason to look to us than we to them, as the probable possessors of real truth. Whatever is first is adulterate, what here is last is true. We are profoundly convinced, therefore, that upon traditionary grounds, the church has no reason, in regard to this question, to change her doctrinal position; and this conviction we trust soon to corroborate by an appeal to the Scriptures.

A SERMON,

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Westminster Assembly.

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