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Comment on ‘Two Roads to the Puritan Millennium’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

John F. Wilson
Affiliation:
Princeton University

Extract

Recently Millenarianism has received increasing attention in Puritan Studies. The heretical character of Millenarianism (as well as the apparent failure of all past prophecies concerning that age) has contributed to the essential neglect of the phenomenon by historians who have stood in denominational traditions which were shaped by that revolutionary age. The new interest in Puritan Millenarianism is linked to an awareness of the role of the Spirit in Puritan thought. It is also part of a broader appreciation of the apocalytic ideological ingredient which is present in revolutionary periods. Thus Mr. Cohen's discussion is timely as a contribution to a developing analysis both of Puritan Millenarianism and also revolutionary apocalypticism more generally. In my comments on the paper I would like to distinguish between the thesis itself and several assumptions which are implicit in Mr. Cohen's application of it. I will suggest that if other assumptions were to be substituted it would be necessary to find a different significance in the thesis, but that in that process the thesis would be sustantiated.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1963

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References

1. The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (1947), pp. 104fGoogle Scholar. Cf. Solt, Leo P., “The Fifth Monarchy Men: Politics and the Millennium,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, XXX, 3 09., 1961), pp. 315f.Google Scholar

2. Nuttall, G. F., The Welsh Saints (1957), p. 21.Google Scholar

3. A History of the Puritan Movement in Wales (1920), p. 182.Google Scholar

4. The Welsh Saints, p. 21.

5. Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1961), pp. 321ff.Google Scholar

6. Hill, Christopher, Puritanism and Revolution (1958), pp. 325f.Google Scholar

7. Canne, John, The Time of the End (1657)Google Scholar, “An Epistolary Perambulation to everyone by John Rogers.”

8. Maclear, James F., “Quakerism and the End of the Interregnum: A Chapter in the Domestication of Radical Puritanism,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, XIX, 4 (12., 1950), pp. 240270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. The Holy Spirit …, passim; The Welsh Saints, pp. 71f.

10. The Welsh Saints, p. 71.

11. Ibid., p. 72; Cf. Maclear, op. cit.

12. Ohel or Beth-shemesh (1653), pp. 523, 537.