FIRST published in 1886,
Millennial Dawn, was the earliest work of Jehovah's Witness founder
Charles Taze Russell.
Although much of the book's content is an embarrassment
to present day Witnesses, it still contained many unscriptural notions
and false prophecies.
In 1911, just three years from Armageddon, Professor William
G. Moorehead gave his opinion on the book.
Now, in the coming issues of Concern,
you can read just what the professor had to say regarding Mr. Russell's
writings.
The spring of 1878 marks
the date when the nominal church systems were "spewed out" (Rev.
3:16), and from that time (A.D. 1878) they are not the mouth-pieces
of God, nor in any degree recognised by Him".. "We recognise A.D.
1881 as marking the close of special favour to Gentiles - the close
of the "high-calling", or invitation to the blessings peculiar to
this age - to become joint-heirs with Christ and partakers of the
Divine nature" (Vol. 235)
It requires courage or recklessness to make the above
statements. For thirty-three years the evangelical churches have been
without Divine recognition, "spewed out" of the Lord's mouth! And yet
during this same period the Gospel has been carried into the most hopelessly
degraded and ignorant sections of our planet by the most devoted and
truly apostolic servants of Jesus Christ since the first century. For
thirty years all special favour to the Gentiles has ceased! This in
the face of the most fruitful years of missions for almost ten centuries.
The Dawnists have matchless courage. For bald assertion their equals
it would be hard to find.
7. The final consummation of theage
will take place in October 1914. (Vol. II, p.234, Vol. III, p.153.)
This date, 1914, as terminating absolutely the present order
of the things of the world, is taken as fixed beyond doubt or peradventure.
Dozens of times the writer of these books sets it down as positive and
unalterable. He finds its parallel in the ministry and the rejection
of the Saviour by the Israelites, A.D. 33 to A.D. 70, when Jerusalem's
overthrow occurred and the Jews went into an exile which still endures.
So the "harvest", or the final testing, runs from A.D. 1874 to 1914 when
Gentile rule will be destroyed, Christendom be annihilated, all wrong
end, and righteousness and peace fill the redeemed world. It is then
that the Millennium, so long expected and so long yearned after, finally
comes and the planet celebrates its glad, its unending Jubilee!
One grows weary of this everlasting attempt to fix chronologically
the end of the age. For nearly a thousand years men, many of them devout
and earnest Christians, have been quite sure that they had discovered
the key of chronological prophecy and confidently announced the time
of the end. Awhile before the year A.D. 1000 the world became panic stricken,
for it was believed that date would coincide with the final judgement
and world's end. Miller, Cumming, Elliott, Dimbleby, Totten and one does
not know how many more, tried their hands at fixing the date for the
consummation, on chronological and astronomical grounds; they settled
both day and date with exactness, and ignominiously
failed, of course.
Mark 13: 32 should stop this nonsense, but alas it does not.
