Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture

Volume III

THE MILLENARIAN TURN: MILLENARIAN CONTEXTS OF SCIENCE, POLITICS, AND

EVERYDAY ANGLO-AMERICAN LIFE IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES

INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

175

Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture

Volume III

THE MILLENARIAN TURN: MILLENARIAN CONTEXTS OF SCIENCE,

POLITICS, AND EVERYDAY ANGLO-AMERICAN LIFE IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH

CENTURIES

Edited by JAMES E. FORCE and RICHARD H. POPKIN

Founding Editors: P. Dibon (Paris)t and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA)

Director: Sarah Hutton (Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom)

Associate Directors: IE. Force (Lexington); Ie. Laursen (Riverside) Editorial Board: IF. Battail (Paris); F. Duchesneau (Montreal); A. Gabbey (New York);

T. Gregory (Rome); ID. North (Groningen); M.I Petry (Rotterdam); J. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.I Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht)

Advisory Editorial Board: 1 Aubin (Paris); B. Copenhaver (Los Angeles); A. Crombie (Oxford); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); K. Hanada (Hokkaido University); W. Kirsop

(Melbourne); 1 Malarczyk (Lublin); 1 Orcibal (Paris); W. Rod (Miinchen); G. Rousseau (Los Angeles); J.P. Schobinger (Ziirich); J. Tans (Groningen)

Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture

Volume III

THE MILLENARIAN TURN: MILLENARIAN CONTEXTS OF

SCIENCE, POLITICS, AND EVERYDAY ANGLO-AMERICAN

LIFE IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Edited by

JAMES E. FORCE University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky

and

RICHARD H. POPKIN University of California, Los Angeles, California

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Printed on acid-free paper

Ali Rights Reserved © 200! Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Origina1ly published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 200! No part of this publication may be reproduced or

utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, inc1uding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and

retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-90-481-5664-1 ISBN 978-94-017-2282-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2282-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction to the Millenarianism and Messianism Series Richard H Popkin

Introduction

vii

James E. Force xv

1. The Appropriation of Joseph Mede: Millenarianism in the 1640s Sarah Hutton 1

2. Britain and the Beast: The Apocalypse and the Seventeenth­Century Debate about the Creation of the British State Arthur H Williamson 15

3 A Whig Apocalypse: Astrology, Millenarianism, and Politics in England during the Restoration Crisis, 1678-1683 William E. Burns

4. Robert Boyle on Knowledge of Nature in the Afterlife Margaret J. Osler

5. Robert Boyle, the Conversion ofthe Jews, and Millennial Expectations Jan Wojcik

6. The Virgin, the Dynamo, and Newton's Prophetic History James E. Force

7 "The Mystery of This Restitution of All Things": Isaac Newton on the Return of the Jews Stephen Snobelen

8. The Occult Bible: Hebraic Millenarianism in Eighteenth­Century England David S. Katz

9. David and Goliath: Jewish Conversion and Philo-Semitism in Late-Eighteenth-Century English Millenarian Thought Jack Fruchtman Jr

10. Caveat Emptor: Pre- and Postmillennialism in the Late Reformation Period Reiner Smolinski

11. The Eschatology of Everyday Things, England, 1600-1800 Hillel Schwartz

Index

v

29

43

55

67

95

119

l33

145

171

181

MILLENARIANISM AND MESSIANISM IN EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN CULTURE

Volume I

Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World

Edited by MATT GOLDISH and RICHARD H. POPKIN

Volume II

Catholic Millenarianism: From Savonarola to the Abbe Gregoire

Edited by KARL A. KOTTMAN

Volume III

The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo­

American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Edited by JAMES E. FORCE and RICHARD H. POPKIN

Volume IV

Continental Millenarians: Protestants, Catholics, Heretics

Edited by JOHN CHRISTIAN LAURSEN and RICHARD H. POPKIN

VI

R.H.POPKIN

INTRODUCTION TO THE MILLENARIANISM AND MESSIANISM SERIES

Within Judaism and Christianity there has always been a great expectation that something monumental would happen that would transform human existence and bring an end to human history as we know it. In the Bible, from the time of the Babylonian Captivity, there has been the expectation that a messianic figure would appear who would bring about the culmination of Jewish hopes. In the subsequent centuries, as Palestine came under Greek, Syrian and then Roman control, the messianic expectation grew stronger and stronger. The Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that a great ferment and fervor existed in the period just before the beginning of Christianity.

And, of course, Christianity as a religion began as a claim that the messianic expectation of Judaism had been fulfilled in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The early Christian texts, especially the four gospels, portray the life and death of Jesus as historically linked to biblical messianic expectations, especially as put forth in the book of Isaiah. However, the Crucifixion did not seem to be attended with the expected political triumph of the Jewish Messiah over all of the enemies of the Jewish people. In fact, it looked like a complete defeat. But as St. Paul explained at length, it would come to be fulfilled at the time of the Second Coming of Jesus into world history. Jesus first came to expatiate the sins of mankind, and he would return to reign on earth and to inaugurate the events leading to the Day of Judgment. The most forceful and exciting statement of when, where, and how the messianic triumph would occur was that which appears in the last book of the New Testament, The Revelations of St. John, which played a great role in future discussions within Christendom. This work, along with sections of the Book of Daniel, provided a blueprint centuries later for those seeking to determine exactly when the Second Coming would occur. It named and described many symbolic figures who would appear as the dramatic climax of human history neared. It also stressed the importance of the events that would lead up to the Second Coming. These included the appearance of the Antichrist, who would try to lead the believers

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viii R.H Popkin

astray, the conversion of the Jews to belief in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, and the rebuilding of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

In the first century of the Common Era, Jews were crushed physically and emotionally by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. Some had hoped the Messiah would arrive in time to save the Temple and the holy city. After the Roman general, Titus, captured and destroyed the city and made captives of the Jews, survivors sought clues of God's plan for when the long sought Messiah would arrive. When a rebellion against Roman rule took place in the second century, some thought its leader, Bar Kochba, was the expected Holy One. In the centuries thereafter, Jewish leaders studied various malevolent develop­ments in Jewish history as containing possible evidences of the birth pangs of the Messiah. They looked for clues about the mighty empires that would have to be destroyed, as foretold in the Book of Daniel, in order for the Messianic Age to begin. They tried to calculate from the symbols in the Book of Daniel, how long it would be after the end of the Roman Empire.

The messianic expectations on the part of both Jews and Christians reached new heights in the late Middle Ages in Europe. On the Christian side, the preachings and writings ofthe Italian monk, Joachim de Fiore, provided a new and urgent reading of Revelation as foretelling the third and final age of human history that would soon begin.

Jewish kabbalistic thinkers in southern France and Spain sought clues about when the Messianic Age would begin in the kabbalistic interpretations of biblical texts. Numerological readings of Hebrew terms, it was hoped, would provide significant clues. The Jewish scholars investigating this lived, of course, in Christian communities in Europe. Although often isolated by medieval anti­semitic laws and regulations, some interchange of ideas, interpretations, expectations and documents occurred. In the late Middle Ages, Christians became concerned about studying the Bible in the original languages and also about finding out what secret information the Jews might have in their possession. Jews and Jewish converts were contacted and employed in Christian research centers to find out when the long awaited return of Jesus, when he would begin his thousand-year reign on earth, would take place. So, by the late fifteenth century, Christian millenarians and Jewish scholars seeking to find out when the Messiah might arrive, knew of some of each other's findings and ideas. Leading Jewish scholars interacted with important persons in the Church and State in many places in Europe. In Spain, for example, until 1492, figures like Don Isaac Abarbanel, a leading theorist on messianism, was a prominent financial court adviser, first in Portugal and then in Spain.

The many turbulent developments in Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries convinced both Jewish and Christian thinkers that the end of days was at hand. In the West, the forced conversion of most of Spain's Jews, the collapse of the Moorish kingdom in Spain, the expUlsion of the Jews from Spain and later Portugal, and the unification of Castille and Aragon were taken as indications that something monumental was starting. 1492 was seen as the miracle year, the ann is mirabilis. The Voyages of Discovery emanating from Portugal and Spain, the new worlds they revealed and the riches they brought

Introduction to the Millenarianism and Messianism Series ix

back to Europe had to be part of the great Divine plan. Christopher Columbus, in his Book of Prophecies, told Isabella that he would find enough gold in the Americas to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem!

At the other end of Europe, the Ottoman invasions conquered Constanti­nople, the seat of Eastern Christianity, in 1453, and spread as far as the Balkans, Budapest, the outskirts of Vienna, and the waters around Italy. This also had to be some indication of divine significance. And in Europe, the corruption of the papacy and of the clergy, railed against by Savonarola and Erasmus, was taken as a sign of the deteriorating world that would precede the coming of the Messiah. The resurgence of Greek and Roman learning provided ammunition for those seeking clues about the ways of God in History. All over Europe, the eruption of reform movements within the Church, which led to the establishment of non-Catholic Christian states in England, Germany, Bohe­mia, and Switzerland, and the emergence of organized Reformed churches as powerful alternatives to Roman Catholicism, all made various visionaries think in terms of the dramatic scenarios in both the book of Daniel and Revelation. Some hardy thinkers saw the Turkish Empire as the last empire before the divine one. Others saw the pope or the papacy as the Antichrist who was about to be overthrown as a prelude to the Second Coming of Christ. Some commentators on Scripture had come to the conclusion, based on calculations drawn from Daniel, that the Millennium would commence 1260 years after the fall of the once mighty Roman Empire. This made it all important to figure out exactly when the Roman Empire ended. Much had to be studied and examined about the last days of the Roman Empire. Sir Isaac Newton became a super-expert on the late, late Roman Empire after it had moved out of Rome and even after it had moved out of Italy in the sixth and seventh centuries. The Scottish mathematician, John Napier, devised the system of logarithms to help in these difficult calculations.

The Book of Daniel, Chapter 12, verse 4, told that at the time of the end, people would move to and fro and knowledge would increase. People living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the voyages of exploration, the creation of colonies all over the world, the development of international commerce and the startling increase of knowledge in so many areas, as sure signs that the Time of the End was fast approaching.

The early modern period saw a wide variety of different and often incompatible millenarian and messianic scenarios being set forth, some of which guided the leading players in different parts of European history. A rich and often wild ferment of ideas, incorporating earlier texts, new Judeo­Christian interpretations, and elements of what was to emerge as the new science, melded together. Examining developments from 1500 onward in terms of these ideas throws quite a different light on the course of events and the motivations behind all sorts of developments, from the theocracy of Savonar­ola in Florence and the dramatic doings of the early reformers in Germany, to the plans advocated by early Christian Hebraists, Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and optimistic Jewish thinkers who were looking for some ray of hope after the expulsion of the Jews from Iberia. The religious controversies

x R. H. Popkin

that dominated English history in the sixteenth century, the religious civil wars in France, the rise of Calvinism in the Netherlands and the Dutch Rebellion, along with the religious fragmentation of the German states, and the rise of Protestant sects in Poland and Hungary, all set forth millenarian interpreta­tions. And climactic events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada looked to many at the time as a most important sign of God's plans for mankind.

Many Jewish scholars had figured out that 1648 would be a most important year for the Jewish world, the moment of the arrival of the Messiah. Protestants in England and The Netherlands had calculated that 1655-56 would be decisive, beginning with the conversion of the Jews. With religious issues holding such an important part in the conflicts all over Europe, millenarian and messianic thinking and acting played an exciting role in the history of the times.

So, from Portugal to Sweden to Poland to Italy to Palestine and Constanti­nople, there were exciting and excited messianic outpourings. For example, in Portugal in the late sixteenth century, there was constant expectation that a lost king, King Sebastian, lost in battle, would return and usher in the Messianic Age. Then, in the next century, there was a claim that Jesus would come first to Portugal to rescue the new Christian Marranos and take them with him to Palestine where they would rebuild the Temple. At the same time, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel proclaimed in 1655 that the coming of the Messiah was imminent because a Portuguese explorer had reported finding some lost tribe members in the Andes mountains. And Menasseh learned from perusing Queen Christina's copy of La Peyrere's Du Rappels des luifs that the King of France would soon lead the Jews to the Holy Land where they would rebuild the Temple and where the Messiah would rule with the King of France as his Regent. Menasseh rushed back to Amsterdam to tell people that the coming of the Messiah was imminent. To prepare for this he rushed to England to get the Puritan government to re-admit the Jews as a prelude to the Messianic Age. Foreign diplomats at the time said it was impossible to talk to Oliver Cromwell about mundane business because he was only concerned about when the Messiah would come. We have an account of some Swedish emissaries who had come to London to discuss some disputes about the Russian fur trade with Cromwell. They reported that the only thing Cromwell would discuss was if there were any new reports about when the Messiah was coming.

When Menasseh ben Israel arrived in England to begin his negotiations with the British government, he was met at the dock by a Welsh millenarian with the improbable name, Arise Evans, who told him that the son of the recently beheaded King Charles I would be the Regent of the Messiah and would rule the world with him. Menasseh is reported to have said that this seemed most unlikely but that he could believe that either the King of Sweden or the King of France could play such a role. Poland, at around the same time, was being invaded by the Swedish army. Just as the Swedes seemed to be over-running the country,. the Polish King held up the statue of the Black Madonna in front of the Swedish troops who immediately withered away. This was taken as a divine sign and was followed by an actual marriage of King John Casimir to the

Introduction to the Millenarianism and Messianism Series Xl

statue of the Black Madonna. This was followed by the destruction of the various Protestant millenarian groups in Poland as a token of Polish love for the Madonna who had saved them.

The Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles asked me to organize a series of conferences on Messianism and Millenarianism in 1997-1998 in view of the growing interest and concern with the Millennium, and to present these conferences at the William Andrews Clark Library.

For over twenty years I had been setting forth my own researches into the subject, and organizing conferences of other scholars at the Clark. In 1975 I gave a paper at the Clark, in the series, Culture and Politics, organized by Perez Zagorin. My paper was on "Jewish Messianism and Christian Millenarianism" and dealt with the amazing interactions between Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam and the British and Dutch Christian Millenarians, and with the French Marrano theologian and courtier, Isaac La Peyrere, who was predicting that at any moment the King of France would lead the Jews back to the Holy Land and rule the world with the Messiah! After more research on such matters I was invited in 1981-82 to be the Clark Professor to organize a lecture series on the subject. I was able to bring together people working in different disciplines and in different countries. And I was able to work with an exciting group of young scholars in the bowels ofthe Clark, and to imbibe the fruits of rooting through the rich collection of seventeenth-century religious tracts in the Clark collection.

So, it seemed fitting that a more comprehensive group of conferences should be organized at the Clark near the end of century, bringing together people in many disciplines from Europe, Israel, Canada, Brazil and the United States.

Although the messianic and millenarian movements often were intertwined and took place in the same geographical space and chronological time, it was thought best to divide the conferences by the religious groups involved. Originally I had hoped to have conferences on Jewish messianism, Moslem millenarianism, Catholic millenarians, British millenarianism, and Continen­tal millenarianism. For reasons beyond my control, we ended up with just four conferences, leaving the Moslem side of the story for later discussions.

In the second half of this century, the study of millenarianism has been led in part by studies such as Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium, Gershom Scholem's studies on Jewish mysticism, by the studies into the forces at work in the Puritan Revolution in England and North America by Christopher Hill, Hugh Trevor-Roper and others, by the studies on millenarian religious views in The Netherlands and in Bohemia, by studies on the influence of Jacob Boehme's mysticism, by studies on the impact of the early Quakers in England and all over Europe, and by studies on the millenarian movements and proto­Jewish ones in Transylvania and Poland. The wealth of material examined in the last fifty years of religious movements incorporating millenarian and messianic ideas, and the influences of these groups, needs a lot of cross fertilization of disciplines, scholars and ideas.

National histories have had difficulty with historical actors who moved

XlI R.H Popkin

easily from one country into another and interacted in different circumstances. The career of John Dury in the seventeenth century may be an extreme example. Of Scottish extraction, he was schooled in The Netherlands, got his theological training at the French Walloon seminary in Leiden, and became a pastor in Elbing, Germany where he met Jan Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib. Early on he was a correspondent of Joseph Mede, the Cambridge don who was the theoretician of how to read Revelation. Dury knew Descartes. He was very active in organizing new programs at the beginning of the Puritan Revolution. Later he was appointed by the Westminster Assembly in London to be their official negotiator to unify the Protestant churches all over Europe in preparation for Jesus's imminent return. In this capacity he traveled all over Europe and met many theologians and princes. He was an intelligence agent for Oliver Cromwell. He was also one of the most active persons in trying to bring the Jews back to England. His contacts spanned most of Continental Europe, New England, and of course England. After the Restoration he was banned from living in Britain as a regicide, and spent most of the rest of his life in Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. He was the father-in-law of Henry Oldenburg, a secretary of the new Royal Society of England. He was continuously rethinking millenarian possibilities as events unfolded in Eur­opean history. He even became quite concerned about whether Sabbatai Zevi's claim to be the long awaited Jewish Messiah affected Christian expectations.

Dury may be an extreme case, but his many roles, and his many links to different religious worlds, mirror the events of the time. Comenius, the leader of the Moravian Brethren, who was in exile because of events in the Thirty Years War, lived in Poland, Germany, The Netherlands and England. He revolutionized the educational system in various parts of Europe, proposed all sorts of educational reforms from kindergarten to graduate school, held a summit conference with Descartes in The Netherlands and was offered the first presidency of Harvard College in the New World. It's hard to fit him into just one national history.

We hope that by opening up many of the kinds of discussions and activities that were going on in the Jewish, Catholic and Protestant worlds in many countries, it will help people see the international character of the phenomen­on. From Savonarola to the visionaries in the Puritan Revolution, to the studious Isaac Newton seeking the secrets of nature and Scripture, to the Catholic millenarians like the Jesuit Immanuel Lacunza and the Abbe Henri Gregoire at the time of the French Revolution, millenarian and messianic visions played many great roles.

By dividing up the thinkers by religion, it is hoped that the interconnection and interaction of these many people does not get lost. We are dividing them up both creedally and also in separate volumes. At the conferences we discussed them at different times, with different groups of speakers, and changing audiences. Nonetheless we hope and trust that the reader will see that there are significant connections between the ideas in one volume and those in another, and some of the people being discussed were contemporaries who knew each other and exchanged ideas. Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel knew Father

Introduction to the Millenarianism and Messianism Series Xlll

Antonio Vieira of Portugal and Brazil, and they talked in Amsterdam of their common eschatological views. Isaac La Peyrere knew Catholic and Protestant thinkers in France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Spain and England. The English, New England and Dutch millenarians were well aware of the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi taking place in Turkey, and tried to fit it into their own scenarios. The Abbe Gregoire knew Jewish leaders in France, Germany and Italy, as well as many Protestant thinkers in Europe and America. Simultaneously with the millenarian interpretation of the American and French Revolutions by participants, a Jewish messianic movement centered around Jacob Frank was taking place in central Europe. The many movements and many interpretations of what was going on spawned a host of intriguing figures, like Swedenborg and Rabbi Falk, the Baal-Shem of London, whose influences are still to be worked out. And the ways in which events were being construed in millenarian and messianic terms spawned a backlash of critics like Pierre Bayle, who needs to be understood in terms of the millenarian context in which he lived, especially his opposition to the French Reformed Millenarian, Pierre Jurieu.

We have tried to give each part of our conferences its due in terms of the carefully prepared and edited presentations of papers, with an overall introduc­tion in each volume by its editor. I want to thank Matt Goldish, then of the University of Arizona and now of Ohio State University, a veteran of many earlier Clark conferences, both for helping me select the participants in the Jewish Messianism conference and for his hard work in preparing the articles for publication. Next I should like to thank Karl Kottman, who did his doctorate with me a long time ago on Fray Luis de Leon, and with whom I have discussed Catholic Millenarianism over the years. I selected the partici­pants in the Clark conference, and Karl willingly took on the task of editing the results. Thirdly, I should like to thank James E. Force of the University of Kentucky for both organizing and editing the third conference on British Protestant Millenarianism. He and I have worked together now for over twenty-five years on our common interests in millenarianism, most recently concerning Isaac Newton's views. Jim was working on his dissertation on Newton's disciple, William Whiston, at the Clark during 1981-1982, when I first tried my hand at organizing a year of lectures on the subject of millenarianism in British thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fourthly, I should like to thank John C. Laursen of the University of California at Riverside, who has become part of my intellectual circle in the last decade. I selected the speakers, and Chris did the heavy lifting, collecting the papers, editing them, and preparing an introduction to the volume. There was also a fifth conference on Messianism and Revolution organized by my son, Jeremy, that included papers about the American Revolution, the French Revolution, as well as the Revolutions in Mexico and Russia, the emergence of the B'hai movement, and the effect of the translation of the Book of Revelation into Chinese, among other topics. It was decided that since many ofthe participants wanted to publish their papers separately that no volume would be prepared. However, the conference was an extremely lively finale to the year's program.

xiv R. H Popkin

Of course, I should like to take this opportunity to thank all of those who participated in the conferences, coming from as far away as Israel, Brazil, France, Germany, Canada and Sweden. Not only their presentations, but also their participation in formal and informal discussions greatly enriched the proceedings.

Lastly I should like to thank Peter Reill, Director of the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies for inviting me to prepare these conferences, and for the hospitality that he and his staff extended through the academic year 1997-98. Two assistants provided to me by the Center, Anna Suranyi and Tim Corrall, now married and new parents, played an indispensable role in making my participation possible. I could no longer drive and needed special medical equipment and they cheerfully pushed and pulled me from the meetings at the Clark, to the receptions and dinners. Without their aid and comfort I would not have been able to participate as fully as I did. And I should make a note of thanks to Peter and the Clark for putting in ramps to aid in getting me from the parking lot to the wonderful central room of the Clark Library where we met.

Three assistants did the serious work of transforming the four separate conference volumes into the completed form. Laura Emerson Tremonte began the work in the summer of 1999. Then Gabriella Goldstein did heroic work in getting all of the corrections and changes into the text. And Stephanie Chasin accomplished the last stage of the process, getting the four separate conference volumes into uniform shape for publication. Without all of this help the venture could not have finally gotten from conference to book publication. I am most grateful to all three of these women for their efforts.

I hope that the finished product, the four volumes, are worthy of our efforts and will be a serious contribution to further studies of millenarianism and messianism.

Richard H Popkin May 19, 2000 Pacific Palisades, California

INTRODUCTION

Thanks to the work of legions of scholars, the millenarian expectations within large segments of the population in Cromwellian England have been carefully examined. The widespread belief that England, with its messianic leader Cromwell, heralded the millennium is well known. 1 Less well examined, perhaps, has been the cultural conceptions of the role of millenarian and messianic ideas in the "long" eighteenth century. Especially during the stable Hanoverian era - until the American and French Revolutions - the common­place millennial expectations of the English Civil War appeared to recede. By the end of the eighteenth century, with the Napoleonic wars, millenarian views and interpretations underwent a minor renaissance but with nothing like the fervor, it is commonly thought, of the Puritan era when so many believed that the end was near. By the end of the eighteenth century, so the "official" story goes, the religious sceptics and deists of Enlightened England such as David Hume had done too well their work of tarring such religious radicalism with the brush of "enthusiasm."

Happily, this "official" interpretation of the events of the early modern period - in which scholars have too often taken their cue from writers such as Hume and simply ignored millenarian contexts and expectations in the Age of Reason - has undergone a marked shift in the past twenty years.2 In this collection of essays, we continue the attempt, first begun in 1981-2 with the first appointment of Professor Richard H. Popkin as the William Andrews Clark Library Professor,3 to trace millenarianism, and such associated themes as messianism and apocalypticism, into less familiar contexts in both the seventeenth and, especially, the eighteenth centuries in Britain and America.

This collection of essays grew out of a conference held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in February of 1998 in connection with Professor Popkin's second appointment as the Clark Professor in 1997-8. In the elegant conference room of the Clark Library, scholars from a variety of disciplines convened in late February of 1998 to focus upon the crucial role played by millenarian movements and ideas in shaping culture during the early modern period in Britain and America. In the following essays, these writers explore the profound impact which beliefs in the fulfillment of millenarian and messianic prophecies had upon "enlightened," Anglo-American culture, espe-

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xvi J.E. Force

cially upon early seventeenth-century theorists of imperial expansion, upon political theorists of the post-Restoration era, upon natural philosophers such as Boyle and Newton, upon controversialists engaged in attempts to convert the Jews, upon American ministers anxious to explain the status of their nation as, in Tuveson's phrase, a "Redeemer Nation,,,4 and, finally, upon everyday people. Millenarian expectations did not simply disappear after the Puritan era nor were they reduced merely to influencing the margins of culture through such enthusiastic radicals as Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott. Large portions of society continued to be animated by a belief in fulfilled millenarian and messianic prophecies during the "long" eighteenth century and the authors of these essays show the range of this animating influence. The methodological assumption which underlies these essays is that, for a full comprehension of the importance of millenarian thought in this era, we must take seriously the writers who interpreted their society in this context. The lessons learned from re-evaluating Revolutionary and Restoration politics, the rise of science in England (and of the theological impact of the scientific and religious ideas of the founding members of the Royal Society), and the interpretation of Jewish and Christian ideas from the Puritan era onward in the light of Millenarian concerns contributes to a much fuller comprehension of the rich legacy of early modern thought.

In Chapter 1, "The Appropriation of Joseph Mede. Millenarianism in the 1640s," Sarah Hutton explains why Joseph Mede (1586-1638) rightly deserves his fame as one of the most influential figures in the history of English millenarianism. Mede was highly regarded as an authority on the book of Revelation in seventeenth-century England and acknowledged as such by his European contemporaries. Among English commentators on the Apocalypse, he was held in esteem by, among others, such famously heterodox theologians as Henry More, Isaac Newton, and William Whiston. In her paper, Hutton examines the circumstances of Mede's first rise to fame among the radical dissenters for his interpretation of New Testament prophecies in the politically turbulent period immediately after his death. Next, she discusses the aims and intentions of the first complete edition of his works published by John Worthington in 1664 in a very different political context. By comparing these two episodes in Mede's posthumous fame, she argues that, contrary to the view prevalent among historians of the English Civil War, Mede did not share the theology or politics of his radical admirers. On the contrary, the use made of his interpretation of the Apocalypse by radical sectarians of the 1640s and 1650s belies the fact that he was a Church of England loyalist and obscures the fact that apocalypticism was an integral element of the theology of that church. Although the purpose of Worthington's edition was, in part, to assert these points, it did not stem the uptake of Mede by non-conformists of all colors.

In Chapter 2, "Britain and the Beast: The Apocalypse and the 17th-Century Debate about the Creation of the British State," Arthur H. Williamson provides a new approach to British imperial expansion with his textured analysis of the apocalyptic ideas which flourished around the period of the regnal union of Scotland and England and which served as the crucial rationale for that

Introduction XVll

expansion, e.g., apocalyptic expectations that Britain would fulfill the prophe­cies reserved for the end of days by leading the peoples of the world against Antichrist - the gigantic, idolatrous, and repressive empire of the Hapsburgs -and into a world of true faith and freedom. In a "court" variant of this vision, the historical redemption was conceived within terms of British expansion but, in deference to James VI and I, focused upon the Ottoman Empire rather than the Hapsburg dynasty. Williamson carefully examines the role of various Scottish thinkers who contribute to the apocalyptic framework undergirding British imperial expansion. Those who rejected the new imperial Britain, particularly English Catholics, found themselves rejecting its underlying apocalyptic framework as well. Any debate about the Apocalypse often became, simultaneously, a debate about the empire of Great Britain. Finally, during the later seventeenth century, a challenge to apocalyptic empire building came not from the critics of the Protestant apocalypse, but from a competing imperial vision, one founded on commerce. Commerce did not necessarily preclude apocalyptic expectations, but it did refocus the enterprise. "Civilized" and uplifting trade tended to supplant the militarism inherent in the original British apocalyptic program. Culture, not the imperial onward march of Christian soldiers, became the key to what was imagined as a new kind of empire altogether. All of these themes and insights presage Williamson's most Apocalyptic book project yet, Scotland and the European Social Imagination.

In Chapter 3, "A Whig Apocalypse: Millenarianism, Astrology, and Politics in the Restoration Crisis, 1678-1683," William Burns examines the role of millenarianism, and associated discourses such as the astrological significance of planetary conjunctions and the interpretation of prodigies, in the "Exclusion Crisis" of the Restoration between 1678 and 1683 when the King's Catholic brother James, Duke of York, was excluded from the line of Royal succession. Scholarly examination of this crisis, in striking contrast to that of the English Civil War of the 1640s, has focused upon modes of thought more congenial to post-Enlightenment politics, such as Lockean contractualism or civic repub­licanism, but apocalyptic and millenarian writings clearly shaped the mind set of some of the "Whigs" who originated as a political force with the crisis. Whigs, like the earlier Puritans, viewed the Papacy as Antichrist, seeing that identification as central to current politics. The "Popish Plot" to murder King Charles and events associated with this plot were immediately viewed as episodes in Antichrist's struggle against the true Church and, thus, as literal fulfillments of the prophecies of the book of Revelation. Even when not in a context of imminent apocalypse, the identification of the Papacy as the Biblical Antichrist was common in Whig writing. Whigs also brought together astrology and millenarianism in discussing comets and the "great conjunction" of Saturn and Jupiter in Leo in 1682 and 1683. Christopher Ness, a London Congregational minister, wrote a number of tracts bringing together current politics, millenarianism, and astrology in ways which have barely been examined by scholars until now. Ness wrote about a wide variety of "prodigies" including comets, "darts," or unexplained shafts of light in the sky, and prophesying maidens, all of which he interpreted as pointing to the imminence

xviii J.E. Force

of the apocalypse and the necessity of struggle against the Catholic Antichrist. In his chapter, Burns shows how the "Exclusion Crisis" is, with this hitherto overlooked context, less of a prototype for modern political debates and more of a seventeenth-century religious struggle. Re-contextualizing later seven­teenth-century political ideology - and thereby returning Restoration England to the seventeenth century - is the major element of Burns' scholarly research program and this chapter is a case study of the fruits of such an approach.

In Chapter 4, "Boyle on Knowledge of Nature in the Afterlife," Margaret J. Osler illustrates the intimate linkage between Millenarianism and late seven­teenth-century natural philosophy, a linkage often traced between the political and theological agendas of the Puritan revolutionaries but less often, until fairly recently, remarked between millenarianism and natural philosophy. James R. Jacob, for example, interpreted many of Robert Boyle's (1627-1691) writings as a reaction against the political agenda ofthe religious radicals of his time. Malcolm Oster has recently argued that Boyle did not share the millennial ideas of the Hartlib Circle and hinted that "the temper of Boyle's understanding of knowledge, opinion and belief pointed towards a different vision in which Christianized atomism and the advancement of learning provided the appropriate historical ciphers for his religious eschatology." The precise characterization of that eschatology is Osler's concern in this paper. She approaches this issue by considering Boyle's views on the knowledge of nature in the afterlife. Boyle's voluntarism, his insistence that God can intervene in the created world, provided the underpinning for his natural philosophy and the theory of knowledge associated with it. As one of the spiritual entities that does not change, God retains his power to intervene, even in heaven. At the Last Judgment, God will renovate the world, possibly rendering all previous natural philosophy obsolete. For Boyle, the new world and the possibility of entirely new laws of nature followed from his profound belief in the utter contingency of the world and its causal dependence on divine power and freedom. Theological voluntarism remains the unifying theme in Boyle's natural philosophy, before and after the Final Judgment. In this paper, Osler extends our understanding of Boyle's theology and its relationship to his theory of knowledge into realms not heretofore considered in the scholarly literature. It also extends her own considerable work on Boyle - concentrated up to this time on the relationship between his voluntarist theology and his corpuscularianism - into the field of millenarian apocalypticism.

In Chapter 5, "Robert Boyle, the Conversion of the Jews, and Millennial Expectations," Jan Wojcik, who, through her work on Robert Boyle has contributed greatly to clarifying the unexamined epistemological suppositions which lie behind the relationship between theology and natural philosophy in early modern England, here examines the generally accepted view that, because Robert Boyle was associated with the members of the Hartlib Circle during the Interregnum, he necessarily shared their millennial expectations. In this article, after reviewing the evidence both for and against Boyle's "millen­nialism," Wojcik introduces new evidence from a previously unexamined manuscript - one which includes a specific discussion of the conversion of the

Introduction XIX

Jews (an event that was believed to be a necessary condition for the second coming). The marked lack of urgency expressed in Boyle's discussion lends support to the claim that Boyle was not thinking in terms of an imminent and cataclysmic millennium. In light of Professor Reiner Smolinski's chapter in this volume, in which he revises our understanding of various forms of millennial­ism in seventeenth-century England, Wojcik shows that it is, just, possible that, in contrast to the ardent Premillennialism of Newton, Boyle held to a Postmillennialism (although there is not enough evidence to justify a firm claim to that effect).

In Chapter 6, "The Virgin, the Dynamo, and Newton's Prophetic History," James E. Force expands upon Lynn White's warning against our "schizo­phrenic" modern tendency to separate religion and science. White's implicit view of the difficulty in combining them into a stable synthesis such as that found in the Age of Faith seems to Force to offer some insight into Newton's particular form of "Prophetic History," which emphatically includes his ardent millennialism. The author of the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy gazes contentedly into Hume's two "eternities before and after the present state of things." As a Prophetic Historian, Newton, effortlessly and seamlessly, synthesizes both of Hume's "two eternities" - the "realm" of the Virgin (a term which would have made the Puritan iconoclast queasy) - with the "realm" of the Dynamo. Newton is both at the same time. He fuses the poles of the distinction limned so skillfully by Hume, elegized by Adams, adopted by Auden, and finally lamented by White as a needlessly "schizophrenic," peculiarly twentieth-century "tragedy" which is avoided by such "religiously motivated" Medieval scientists as Roger Bacon. A scientist-theologian such as Newton combines the natural world ofthe Dynamo with the historical world of the Virgin and views both as different ways in which the all-powerful Lord God controls his created world of nature and natural law. Newton maintains an equipollence between the realms of the Virgin and the Dynamo which has proven extremely difficult for succeeding thinkers to understand or appreciate, as White explains. Of Pythagoras, F.M. Cornford, apparently under the impression that Pythagoras attended church, has written that "The vision of philosophic genius is a unitary vision. Such a man does not keep his thought in two separate compartments, one for weekdays, the other for Sundays." What is speculation about Pythagoras is historically true of Newton and Force has long endeavored to show the many implications which follow from this fact.

In Chapter 7, '''The Mystery of This Restitution of All Things': Isaac Newton on the Return ofthe Jews," Stephen D. Snobelen - after a comprehen­sive survey of Newton's voluminous unpublished manuscripts (including important material only made available in 1991) - shows that one of the most important features ofIsaac Newton's prophetic thought was his powerful belief in the latter-day return of the Jews to Israel. Snobelen establishes several important points in his comprehensive fashion. First, Newton is used as a source of insight into the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century culture of prophetic interpretation - particularly with respect to belief in the Jewish Restoration. The return of the Jews was for Newton one of the central themes

xx 1.E. Force

of biblical prophecy and Snobelen shows clearly how fervently Newton believed in this apocalyptic event and just how it formed an integral part of his overall prophetic scheme. Second, Snobelen analyzes Newton's under­standing of the divine causes of the Jewish captivity and how he linked these with repeating patterns of apostasy among both Jews and Christians. Third, he explores Newton's attitudes toward the Jewish people, their unbelief in the Messiah and their pivotal place in salvation history. Fourth, he reconstructs Newton's prophetic time-scale of the Jewish Restoration and reveals that he saw the event as at least two centuries away - a fact that had important ramifications to his sense of millenarian urgency. Fifth, Snobelen details important features of Newton's prophetic hermeneutics and his attitude towards those who did not accept his view of prophecy. Sixth, Snobelen highlights further how much Newton's powerful remnant theology and under­standing of the Church's corruption had isolated him from the religious mainstream of his day. Finally, Snobelen relates the findings of this paper to other aspects of Newton's theological and natural philosophical thought and brings both of these areas into sharper focus. In this chapter, as in so much of what Snobelen writes, one feels as if one is witnessing Newton's most interior thought processes at work.

In Chapter 8, "The Occult Bible: Hebraic Millenarianism in Eighteenth­Century England," David S. Katz begins with the unlikely question of how did a poet such as Robert Lowth (1710-1787) ever become Archbishop of Canter­bury? In Lowth's case, it is because of his then astonishing claim that the Bible was Literature and that its poetry conformed to all the canons of verse which we have a right to expect from great art. By publicizing the notion of the Bible as Literature, Lowth cut the ribbon on a new waterway whicp. would open up into an ocean of modern criticism that stretches from California to Calcutta and back again. Katz argues that we tend to think of millenarianism and messianism as doctrines which by their very nature are intrinsically radical and destructive of the existing religious and social order. Yet when apocalyptic belief systems become exceedingly complex, and the intellectual property of an elite group of highly trained religious philosophers, then the net effect may be conservative in nature. When the Bible came to be regarded as Literature in the eighteenth century, it required canonical interpretation of an artful text, a process which could be quarantined in a protected zone separate from the cares and needs of everyday life. Literary exegetes such as Joseph Mede and Lowth may not have accurately predicted the Coming of the Messiah but they did prophesy the Coming of the English Professor, who makes claims about textual knowledge and brooks no challenge to his interpretive hegemony, which in any case is reserved for an elite group of scholars. The same process of damping down may also have been the result of concrete pictorial representations of the apocalypse by Blake and others, which inevitably transformed the unthinkable sublime into the merely beautiful. The aesthetization of millenarianism which occurred in eighteenth-century England kept eschatology safe. In this article, Katz examines these issues, with special reference to Robert Lowth (1710-87), John Hutchinson (1674-1737), and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). This

Introduction XXI

article reflects Katz' interest in messianic revolution and the occult tradition and is part of a larger ongoing study on the English Bible in the Protestant world up to and including American Fundamentalism.

In Chapter 9, "David and Goliath: Jewish Conversion and Philo-Semitism in Late-Eighteenth-Century Millenarian Thought," Jack Fruchtman Jr., fills in an important blank in the growing body of literature from the past quarter century devoted to illustrating how English millenarian thought permeated English culture throughout the eighteenth century. Absent so far has been any scholarly attention to England's Jewish community and their views on and relation to the pervasive millenarian thought of their time, perhaps because the Jews, as a small minority, were frightened to speak out fearing increased incidents of anti-Semitism and perhaps even harsher laws than those which had disenfranchised the Dissenters and Catholics. They may have also feared expulsion as a community (after all, Edward I had expelled the Jews in 1290). A vocal exception to these fears was the Jewish controversialist David Levi, who was born in 1733. In this chapter, Fruchtman analyzes Levi's courageous confrontation with the noted scientist, theologian, and political radical Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) after Priestley attempted to convince the Jews to convert to Christianity in order to hasten the inauguration of the millennium and the return of Christ. Unlike his Jewish neighbors, Levi willingly entered the marketplace of ideas to combat Priestley's open letters to the Jews. It was a remarkable performance by a Jew against one of the most respected writers of the late-eighteenth century. Priestley was shocked by what he considered Levi's impertinence, but he did not ignore him. Very little work has been done on the important contribution that Levi made to eighteenth-century debates. This study fits into Fruchtman's many other attempts to investigate late eighteenth­century ideas in contexts that expand the boundaries of conventional studies. English Jewish thought and, especially, the case of Levi goes well beyond such studies while simultaneously illustrating, once again, the pervasiveness of millenarian thought throughout the whole of English culture.

In Chapter 10, "Caveat Emptor: Pre- and Postmillennialism in the Late Reformation Period," Reiner Smolinski challenges a now commonplace argument among scholars that Daniel Whitby (1638-1726), in England, and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), in America, originated Postmillennialism, an eschatological innovation that particularly appealed to the nineteenth-century apostles of progress. Unlike premillennialist doomsayers, postmillennialists are often characterized as forward-looking, progressive thinkers who welcome scientific innovations and actively work toward the literal transformation of the fallen world into a terrestrial paradise prior to Christ's visible return at the end of time. Postmillennialism, so this story goes, therefore appeals to intellectuals among the apostles of progress who willingly embrace science, democracy, and human perfectibility as God's ultimate gift. According to this all too common interpretation, the hallmark of premillennialists is their gloomy outlook on society. In the work of Edwards and Whitby, these modern interpreters show evidence which reifies their own historical interpretation of the pre- and postmillennialism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In contrast,

xxii 1.E. Force

Smolinski contends that, while this handy dichotomy may in fact describe the two predominant millennial systems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars, reading these classifications backwards into history superimpose an anachronistic and overly simplistic grid upon the emerging millenarian systems of the late-Reformation period. He specifically demonstrates that neither Whitby nor Edwards were the first proponents of postmillennialist "progressi­vism" simply because such "progressivism" is intrinsic to all millennial systems. Smolinski's attempts to bring order out of the chaos of millenarian terminology - by essentially focusing upon whether the millennium is part of the "Church Militant" or the "Church Triumphant" - is well grounded in his previous research on Cotton Mather's important millennial work, Triparadisus, and clearly connected to his next project, a massive study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century biblical hermeneutics, especially as it affects Cotton Math­er's unpublished manuscript entitled Biblia Americana.

In Chapter 11,"The Eschatology of Everyday Things, England, 1600--1800," Hillel Schwartz breaks with more traditional historiography by arguing for the continuity of a common millenarian impulse throughout English society from the late seventeenth through and beyond the eighteenth century. He also breaks with more conventional methodology by insisting upon the importance of, and then exploring, the millennial implications of aspects of daily life that imply ordinary expectations of abrupt, conclusive, and catastrophic or paradisiacal endings. By shifting our focus away from theology or prophecy and toward such practices as accounting, timekeeping, dying, and mourning, he argues that during the eighteenth century millenarianism did not go underground so much as it became more fully grounded in a paradoxically quotidian eschatol­ogy. The research for this paper plays into a larger research strategy in which Schwartz seeks to find ways to move more fluidly between "high" and "low" culture, between principle and practice, and between the articulate and inarticulate, a process which he first undertook in connection with his depiction of the Camisard inspires in London in his now classic work, The French Prophets.

The "millenarian turn" - taking seriously the millenarian context of intellectual life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries even when previous generations of more Whiggish scholars judged that millenarian interpreters of Biblical prophecy were unimportant to the modern, secularized mind - will continue to produce new insights into who we really are by fully understanding more completely who we really were even at the height of the Age of Reason. In 1750, David Hume, in a letter to his friend Dr. John Clephane, ridiculed the millenarian and apocalyptic expectations produced in London following two minor earthquakes, one on February 8th and one on March 8th. These minor earth tremors were widely interpreted as prophetic signs of the end of the world, a millenarian expectation fueled by public lecturers, preachers, and the popular press. There were some reports that Sir Isaac Newton had himself scientifically predicted these apocalyptic quakes, a rumor put to rest by William Whiston who blasted such ignorance in the Daily Advertiser:

Introduction XXlll

Mr. Whiston gives notice, That though he expects many more Earthquakes in the World, with a Year, or two at the farthest, before the Restoration of the Jews, as Signals of its Approach, and of the horrible Miseries the wicked Part of the Jews and Christians will be subject to, while the really Pious and Good will be providentially delivered them, yet does he not in the least believe that Sir Isaac Newton foretold any Earthquakes .... 5

Hume, of course, could not contain his glee in remarking the effect which these millennial expectations might have upon Dr. Clephane's profitable medical practice. Hume writes with ironic sympathy:

I think the parsons have lately used the physicians very ill, for, in all the common terrors of mankind, you used commonly both to come in for a share of the profit: but in this new fear of earthquakes, they have left you out entirely, and have pretended alone to give prescriptions to the multitude. I remember, indeed, Mr. Addison talks of a quack that advertised pills for an earthquake, at a time when people lay under such terrors as they do at present. But I know not if any of the faculty have imitated him at this Time. I see only a Pastoral Letter of the Bishop of London, where, indeed, he recommends certain pills, such as fasting, prayer, repentance, mortification, and other drugs, which are entirely to come from his own shop. And I think this is very unfair in him and you have great reason to be offended; for why might he not have added, that medicinal powders and potions would also have done service .... 6

Today, we tend to take writers such as Hume or the Scriblerian Wits as THE univocal voice of the eighteenth century and, of course, these extraordinary writers are very important not least because they do seem to speak in a voice more characteristic of our more secular era. At least, we like to believe that they do. But the fact is that, when the date for the expected third quake approached, "prophesied" according to Whiston's interpretation of cataclysmic passages in the apocryphal book of Esdras for April 5th, the people of London became panic-stricken. Writing in the General Evening Post, "Publicus" estimates that over one hundred thousand people left their houses to take refuge in the open space of Hyde Park over the night of April 4th and the early morning of April 5th. Horace Walpole reports on April 4th that "this frantic fear prevails so much that within these three days 750 coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park Corner with whole parties removing into the country.,,7 Hume, who knows his own era better than we ever will, finally concludes his letter to his friend, Dr. Clephane, by observing somewhat wistfully that the medical practitioners dare not duel with the parsons for their patients' allegiance:

The worst is, that you dare not revenge yourself in kind, by advising your patients to have nothing to do with the parson; for you are sure he has a

xxiv JE. Force

faster hold of them than you, and you may be discharged yourself on such an advice. 8

What a fuller comprehension of the importance of millenarianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the cauldron in which the "modern mind" was forged according to most historians - implies for a complete understanding of ourselves is an open question. But from "fundamentalist" Islam to the mass suicides connected with the appearance of Comet Hale-Bopp to the often frenetic apocalypticism associated with the more hysterical reporting of the Y2K "crisis," it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that from the "Enlightenment" to our own time, human beings have not really changed very much and that, today, in the first dawn of this new millennium, we would not be so quick as Immanuel Kant to claim that, even if we are not now enlightened, we are progressing steadily down the path toward enlightenment.9

In addition to thanking all the scholars who participated in these sessions at the Clark Library, the editors owe special thanks to Professor Peter H. Reill, Director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for 17th- & 18th­Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Under Professor Reill's active leadership, the Center and the Clark Library have continued to mount ambitious, innovative, thematically organized colloquies while simultaneously increasing the number of short-term fellowships for outstanding post-doctoral students and expanding the range of programs at the Clark to include musical galas and poetry readings. Thanks, too, are owed to the friendly co-operation of all of the members of the Clark Library and Center staffs who contribute so much to making these uniquely collegial academic programs so enjoyable and intellectually stimulating, especially Fran Andersen, Nancy Connolly, Marina Romani, Candis Snoddy, Carol Sommer, and Suzanne Tatian.

James E. Force University of Kentucky

NOTES

1. See Bernard S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972); Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1972); William Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (London: Macmillan, 1969); J.F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds., Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Peter Toon, ed., Puritans, the Millennium, and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology, 1600-1660 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1970). On the transformation of millenarianism to the idea of progress, see the classic study by Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Peter Smith: Gloucester, 1972, first published in 1949). Margaret C. Jacob has described the impact of millenarian ideas on the continent in The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981).

Introduction xxv

2. Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), was one of the first writers who took seriously millennial thought in the Restoration era.

3. Richard H. Popkin, ed., Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650-1800 (Leiden: E.l Brill, 1988.) See, too, Richard H. Popkin, "The Third Force in 17th­Century Philosophy: Scepticism, Science, and Biblical Prophecy," Nouvelles de la repuhlique des lettres, Vol. 3 (1983), 35---63. Cf. Popkin, "The Third Force in 17th-Century: Scepticism, Science, and Millenarianism," in The Prism of Science, ed. Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Israel Colloquium in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Vol. 2 (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1986),21-50.

4. Earnest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation. The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.)

5. [London], Daily Advertiser, March 14, 1750. 6. Hume to Clephane, April 1750, in The Letters of David Hume, ed. lY.T. Greig, 2 Vols.

(Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1:141. 7. It is possible that Whiston is "Publicus" given that he cites this entire letter from the General

Evening Post, April 1-19, 1750, in his own Memoirs, 2 Vols. (London, 1753),2:209-13, as "my own Address" to the citizens of London. One hundred thousand is a very large number but even if it was significantly less, there were a surprising number of people moved by millenarian fear to leave their beds. Walpole's report is in his letter to Horace Mann, April 4, 1750, in Letters of Walpole, ed. Paget Toynbee, 19 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903-25),2:440.

8. Hume to Clephane, April, 1750, in Letters of David Hume, 1:141. 9. Immanuel Kant optimistically observes that:

If it is now asked, "Do we presently live in an enlightened age?" the answer is, "No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment." As matters now stand, a great deal is still lacking in order for men as a whole to be, or even to put themselves into a position to be able without external guidance to apply understanding confidently to religious issues. But we do have clear indications that the way is now being opened for men to proceed freely in this direction and that the obstacles to general enlightenment - to their release from their self-imposed immaturity - are gradually diminishing. Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?," in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983),44-5.