chiliasm survived amongst them to a later date than in Alexandria or Constantinople.
But the Western Church was also more conservative than the Greek. Her theologians had, to begin with, little turn for mystical speculation; their tendency was rather to reduce the gospel to a system of morals. Now for the moralists chiliasm had a special significance as the one distinguishing feature of the gospel, and the only thing that gave a specifically Christian character to their system. This, however, holds good of the Western theologians only after the middle of the 3rd century. The earlier fathers, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, believed in chiliasm simply because it was a part of the tradition of the church and because Marcion and the Gnostics would have nothing to do with it. Irenaeus (v. 28, 29) has the same conception of the millennial kingdom as Barnabas and Papias, and appeals in support of it to the testimony of disciples of the apostles. Hippolytus, although an opponent of Montanism, was nevertheless a. thorough-going millennarian (see his book De Antichristo). Tertullian (cf. especially Adv. Marcion., 3) aimed at a more spiritual conception of the millennial blessings than Papias had, but he still adhered, especially in his Montanistic period, to all the ancient anticipations. It is the same all through the 3rd and 4th centuries with those Latin theologians who escaped the influence of Greek speculation. Commodian, Victorinus Pettavensis, Lactantius and Sulpicius Severus were all pronounced millennarians, holding by the very details of the primitive Christian expectations. They still believe, as John did, in the return of Nero as the Antichrist; they still expect that after the first resurrection Christ will reign with his saints “in the flesh” for a thousand years. Once, but only once (in the Gospel of Nicodemus), the time is reduced to five hundred years. Victorinus wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse of John; and all these theologians, especially Lactantius, were diligent students of the ancient Sibylline oracles of Jewish and Christian origin, and treated them as divine revelations. As to the canonicity and apostolic authorship of the Johannine Apocalypse no doubts were ever entertained in the West; indeed an Apocalypse of Peter was still retained in the canon in the 3rd century. That of Ezra, in its Latin translation, must have been all but a canonical book—the numbers of extant manuscripts of the so-called 4 Ezra being incredibly great, while several of them are found in copies of the Latin Bible at the beginning of the 16th century. The Apocalypse of Hermas was much read till far through the middle ages, and has also kept its place in some Bibles. The apocalyptic “Testamenta duodecim patriarcharum” was a favourite reading-book; and Latin versions of ancient apocalypses are being continually brought to light from Western libraries (e.g. the Assumptio Mosis, the Ascensio Jesajae, &c.). All these facts show how vigorously the early hopes of the future maintained themselves in the West. In the hands of moralistic theologians, like Lactantius, they certainly assume a somewhat grotesque form, but the fact that these men clung to them is the clearest evidence that in the West millennarianism was still a point of “orthodoxy” in the 4th century.
This state of matters, however, gradually disappeared after the end of the 4th century. The change was brought about by two causes—first, Greek theology, which reached the West chiefly through Jerome Rufinus and Ambrose, and, second, the new idea of the church wrought out by Augustine on the basis of the altered political situation of the church. Augustine was the first who ventured to teach that the catholic church, in its empirical form, was the kingdom of Christ, that the millennial kingdom had commenced with the appearing of Christ, and was therefore an accomplished fact. By this doctrine of Augustine’s, the old millennarianism, though not completely extirpated, was at least banished from the official theology. It still lived on, however, in the lower strata of Christian society; and in certain undercurrents of tradition it was transmitted from century to century. At various periods in the history of the middle ages we encounter sudden outbreaks of millennarianism, sometimes as the tenet of a small sect, sometimes as a far-reaching movement. And, since it had been suppressed, not, as in the East, by mystical speculation, its mightiest antagonist, but by the political church of the hierarchy, we find that wherever chiliasm appears in the middle ages it makes common cause with all enemies of the secularized church. It strengthened the hands of church democracy; it formed an alliance with the pure souls who held up to the church the ideal of apostolic poverty; it united itself for a time even with mysticism in a common opposition to the supremacy of the church; nay, it lent the strength of its convictions to the support of states and princes in their efforts to break the political power of the church. It is sufficient to recall the well-known names of Joachim of Floris, of all the numerous Franciscan spiritualists, of the leading sectaries from the 13th to the 15th century who assailed the papacy and the secularism of the church—above all, the name of Occam. In these men the millennarianism of the ancient church came to life again; and in the revolutionary movements of the 15th and 16th centuries—especially in the Anabaptist movements—it appears with all its old uncompromising energy. If the church, and not the state, was regarded as Babylon, and the pope declared to be the Antichrist, these were legitimate inferences from the ancient traditions and the actual position of the church. But, of course, the new chiliasm was not in every respect identical with the old. It could not hold its ground without admitting certain innovations. The “everlasting gospel” of Joachim of Floris was a different thing from the announcement of Christ’s glorious return in the clouds of heaven; the “age of the spirit” which mystics and spiritualists expected contained traits which must be characterized as “modern”; and the “kingdom” of the Anabaptists in Münster was a Satanic caricature of that kingdom in which the Christians of the 2nd century looked for a peaceful Sabbath rest. Only we must not form our ideas of the great apocalyptic and chiliastic movement of the first decades of the 16th century from the rabble in Münster. There were pure evangelical forces at work in it; and many Anabaptists need not shun comparison with the Christians of the apostolic and post-apostolic ages.
The German and Swiss Reformers also believed that the end of the world was near, but they had different aims in view from those of the Anabaptists. It was not from poverty and apocalypticism that they hoped for a reformation of the Church. In contrast to the fanatics, after a brief hesitation they threw millennarianism overboard, and along with it all other “opiniones Judaicae.” They took up the same ground in this respect which the Roman Catholic Church had occupied since the time of Augustine. How millennarianism nevertheless found its way, with the help of apocalyptic mysticism and Anabaptist influences into the churches of the Reformation, chiefly among the Reformed sects, but afterwards also in the Lutheran Church, how it became incorporated with Pietism, how in more recent times an exceedingly mild type of “academic” chiliasm has been developed from a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, how finally new sects are still springing up here and there with apocalyptic and chiliastic expectations—these are matters which cannot be fully entered upon here.
See Schürer, Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte (1874), §§ 28, 29; Corrodi, Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus (1781); R. H. Charles, The Doctrine of a Future Life (1899); Book of the Secrets of Enoch (1896), pp. xxvii–xxx, ch. xxxii. 2–xxxiii. 2; Apocalypse of Baruch (1896), xxix. 3–8 (notes); Book of Enoch (index, s.v. “Messianic Kingdom”); Bousset, Religion des Judenthums (1903), 273–276; C. A. Briggs, The Messiah of the Apostles, p. 284 seq.; Sabatier, Les Origines littéraires et la composition de l’Apocalypse de St Jean (1887); Spitta, Die Offenbarung des Johannes untersucht (1889). See also Eschatology and works there quoted. (A. Ha.)
MILLER, HUGH (1802–1856), Scottish geologist and man of letters, was born in humble circumstances at Cromarty, on the 10th of October 1802; his father, Hugh Miller, a seaman, was drowned when he was but five years old. His primary education was acquired at a dame’s school and afterwards at the parish school, and at the age of six he had learned that “the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books.” At the age of
twelve he began to write verses. Two of his mother’s brothers, James and “Sandy” Wright, hard-working men at Cromarty,
