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But if we blame for its intolerance, and stigmatise as belonging to the "dark ages," the age that persecuted the Chiliasts with fire and sword, we certainly ought not to show a still greater intolerance to the Chiliasts of our own day.
Indeed, May 2d had become a fixed idea in their heads; it had become a dogma with them something like the day on which Christ was to reappear and the Millennium to begin had formed in the heads of the Chiliasts.
The Anarchists are not, after all, so very original; they are a modernised version of the Chiliasts of more than a thousand years ago, and differ from them only as the mental conception of the present differs from that of Irenæus. For he sought to justify his dreams by an appeal to religion, while the Anarchists appeal to modern science. That is all.
"Many of the Divines here," wrote Baillie, September 5, 1645, "not only Independents, but others, such as Twisse, Marshall, Palmer, and many more, are express Chiliasts." In his Dissuasive, however, where he devotes an entire chapter to this heresy of Chiliasm, he attributes the grosser form of the heresy chiefly to the Independents.
We should now call this a kind of Pantheism; but probably it was coupled with that disposition to privacy, and indifference to creeds and controversies, which has been mentioned as the peculiarity of Familism. Even the Familists, however, it seems, had their subdivisions. MILLENARIES OR CHILIASTS: "An Heresy," says old Father Ephraim, "frequent at this time.
Of this opinion are many of our Apocalyptical men, that study more future events than their present only." In fact, however, the Chiliasts or Millenarians were hardly a mere sect. The expectation of a Millennium near at hand was very prevalent, or was becoming very prevalent, among the English Divines of the Assembly itself.
Next came the Chiliasts, who fondly believed that the end of all things was at hand, that the millennial reign of Christ would soon begin, and that all the righteous that is, they themselves would have to hold the world at bay in Five Cities of Refuge.
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