The Millerite Adventists in Great Britain, 1840–1850

Abstract

Millenarianism was an important element in early nineteenth-century Evangelical Christianity. The majority of British and American Evangelicals favoured a post-millennial Advent, and looked forward to a thousand years of heaven on earth which were to precede Christ's Second Coming. The great religious and benevolent societies—tract and Bible societies, foreign and domestic missionary societies and the like, whose progress in Britain and America was closely linked—were sustained by the hope that their work and even their very existence were signs of the approaching Millennium. Within the major Evangelical denominations as well as the smaller sects, there were also ‘students of prophecy’, who took a closer interest in the allegorical and prophetic books of the Bible than the majority of their contemporaries, but this interest was by no means limited to the fanatical or eccentric. These ‘students’ read their Bibles with the extreme literalism common to Evangelicals at this time, and in their exegeses disputed the time and circumstances of the Second Advent. Many supported the idea of a post-millennial Advent, while others argued that Christ's return had already taken place at the destruction of Jerusalem. Some favoured a pre-millennial Advent; that is, that Christ would return before the thousand years of heaven on earth.