THE MILLENNIUM AT HAND.
By L. McCoy
[It is refreshing to one’s feelings, this hot weather, to be regaled with the idea that we are just on the threshold of the millennium of universal peace and brotherhood; that, notwithstanding the gigantic preparations for war and blood-shed throughout the world, the true interpretation of them is “peace,” and that it will be conquered, without the shedding of a drop of blood; and that soon the angel (the peace society) of Rev. 20:1 will have vanquished Satan, and they will peacefully enter into an armistice for one thousand years! But the novel and ingenious manner of sustaining such sophistry by Scripture proof is seen in the following extract from a letter addressed to the late annual peace convention at Iowa City, by a prominent elder and writer in the Disciple church, and published in the Record and Evangelist. The terrible civil war in the United States, under the immediate influence and in the face of your society’s operations; the grand preparations for war by all nations following the Russo-Turkish war, and the war-portending attitude of the Old World, seem to crush our hopes of peace; but to my mind there is nothing disheartening in them. They are but the final struggle of his Satanic Majesty to choke the mighty millstones of peace and good will, ere he is chained for a thousand years; for he is not a stranger to John’s vision. Rev. 20. “And I saw an angel [the peace society] come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil, and Satan [who is a murderer, another name for warrior; for war and murder are near akin if not one and the same], and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal [the ratification of the proclamation of peace among the nations] upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more till the thousand years should be fulfilled; and after that he must be loosed a little season.” I believe the time for chaining Satan is near at hand, and your society has had much to do in bringing this about, if indeed it is not the angel which John saw “with a great chain”—enlightened public sentiment—“in his hand.” The victory of Mr. Richards in the British Parliament, the resolution of the United States Congress, the settlement of the “Alabama” difficulty, the Spanish trouble, and others, upon the principle of peaceable arbitration, together with the present effort to put an end to the “Eastern Question” without shedding any more human blood or the destruction of property, with the general feeling of the people against war, all indicate to me that the time draweth nigh. It is not safe nor wise to dogmatize on such questions, especially in reference to the time when this shall come to pass. I will, however, call attention to some points I think clearly shown by John in a vision given him while on the lonely Isle of Patmos. See Rev. 12. John saw “a woman”—symbol of a church—“clothed with the sun”—Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, who has arisen with healing in his beams—and “a crown”—the symbol of authority—“of twelve stars”—the twelve apostles—“on her head,” and the moon was under her feet; “and she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.” “And she brought forth a man-child”—civil liberty—“who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron; and her child was caught up unto God and to his throne”—God took especial charge of the principles of civil liberty and religious toleration when they were announced to the world. “And the woman”—the church in the persons of the Pilgrims—“fled into the wilderness”—the wilds of the American forests—“where she hath a place prepared of God”—there was a providence of God in the discovery of this country—“that they should feed her there a thousand, two hundred, and threescore days”—a day for a year gives us twelve hundred and sixty years. The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, to this add two hundred and sixty (260) and you have 1880. Now add to the two hundred and sixty years one thousand years of peace during which there will be no war, and you have the time of the church’s sojourn in the wilderness. Now I expect from this and other dates to see the end of the world’s deception by the binding of Satan in the proclamation of universal peace within the next five years, or at the farthest, in the decade following 1880.