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The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Restoration of Israel in the “Judeo-centric” Strand of Puritan Millenarianism1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
For the American Puritan minister Increase Mather, the battle of Armageddon would be “the most terrible day of battel that ever was.” “Asia is like to be in a flame of war between Israelites and Turks,” he wrote in The Mystery of Israel's Salvation, “[and] Europe between the followers of the Lamb and the followers of the beast.” In the Asian and European spheres of action, or so Mather anticipated, God's Israelite and Protestant armies would “overthrow great Kingdoms, and make Nations desolate, and bring defenced Cities into ruinous heaps.” The inevitable victory would reshape the course of history, for the destruction of Roman Catholic and Ottoman power would be accompanied by the conversion of the Jews and the lost tribes of Israel to Christianity and by their restoration to their ancestral homeland in Palestine. Then would come the birth of the millennium in Jerusalem and the subsequent spread of the kingdom of Jesus Christ throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the rest of the world.
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References
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