# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S272
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

272 The So-called Thousand-Year Kingdom.

From every side it showed itself that the state as such was no longer capable of any rebirth.

It is further claimed that what the Apocalypse attributes to the millennium cannot be historically demonstrated in the thousand years that began with the conversion of the Germanic peoples. In general we would remark the following in reply. In the books of Moses, Canaan is described in the most delightful colors. It appears as "a good land and large, a land flowing with milk and honey," "a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey." The enemies of religion, especially the English deists, have attacked Moses vigorously for this description and accused him of exaggeration and falsehood. They drew out of the travel accounts everything that told against this land. What was the error in such a procedure? They failed to recognize that Moses speaks from the standpoint of the wilderness, the great and terrible wilderness, where fiery serpents and scorpions were, and drought, and no water (Deuteronomy 8:15). Likewise John also writes at a time when the people of God found themselves in a dreadful wilderness (ch. 12:6, 14), into which they were yet to be led still deeper. In the time when heathendom had begun its war of annihilation against the church of God, when the seemingly all-powerful Roman state had thrown itself crushingly upon her, that which the thousand years of the dominion of the Christian principle offer must have presented itself as something exceedingly great, even though, on closer inspection, one discovers a good many flaws and defects.

It is especially urged that the most significant advances of Muhammadanism fall within this millennium. This, it is said, fits poorly with the binding of Satan, by which he is prevented from seducing the nations into war against the church of Christ. But the point at issue concerns first of all the binding of Satan with respect to the very peoples whom he had until then seduced. And moreover the Christian heartlands were not overwhelmed by Muhammadanism; rather, in the struggle against it, they were in the main victorious. "At first," says Ranke,*) "the western tribes withstood it, and carried it back from Spain, Italy, and Sicily as far as Syria. If they did not conquer it completely, they nonetheless held their ground in Europe. Everyone knows what impulse and occasion for the most manifold development grew for them out of the struggle itself." But insofar as the assault of Islam really did succeed, it is to be viewed less under the aspect of Satan's seduction than under that of the divine judgment upon what had already died. This very aspect the Apocalypse itself opens up to us. In the letter to Ephesus, which now lies in the center of Islamic territory, it says: "Do