# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S273
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The So-called Thousand-Year Kingdom. 273

penance and do the first works; but if not, I will come to thee quickly and remove thy candlestick out of its place." Wherever Islam has gained the victory, a preceding deep fall will be found to have gone before, as for example in Constantinople. In the regions that have resisted the dominion of Islam, and that stand in the same relation as the conquered lands, as for example in Ethiopia, it becomes plain how just the divine judgment has been, and how the devastation has fallen not upon life but upon death.

Still less weight attaches to the objection: "In these thousand years, in which so very much was sinned in Christ's own name by Catholics, Rationalists, and Orthodox alike, the devil is supposed to have been bound!" The devil is bound in his character as the dragon, as the background of the God-hating, bestial world-power, not as the one who steals upon individual souls and leads them into error and sin. What is meant, in relation to what precedes and what follows, is the seduction of the nations (it is the nations that are named, not individuals) into a great, open, and general war, a storming against the Lord and his church, into a complete renunciation and a decided and general hostility toward the Christian principle. That cannot be demonstrated within the thousand years. They differ from the time that went before and the time that followed, on the whole and in the main, in that the Christian principle was the ruling one within them. In acknowledging this the Waldensians and their persecutors were agreed, despite the atrocious deeds committed by the latter — the Inquisition and its victims, the Huguenots and the authors of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew — and how great the significance of this agreement was is shown quite clearly by the experience of our own day, in which an anti-Christian public opinion points us, at every step, to the fact that Satan has broken loose from his prison. But whoever does not yet acknowledge the difference will surely be forced to acknowledge it in the future. For it is evident that the opposition to the church is on the increase. Moreover, it is an unfortunate, and now happily outdated, way of viewing history that fixes its gaze one-sidedly on the offenses within the thousand years of the dominion of the Christian principle. If one steps into Cologne Cathedral or Freiburg Minster, in which the answer to the question, "where does the soul find its home, its rest," resounds so loudly and audibly; if one immerses oneself in Anselm's Why a God-Man, and in Thomas of Celano's Dies Irae, in Luther's A Mighty Fortress, Nicolai's Wake, Awake, and Paul Gerhardt's A Little Lamb Goes Forth, in Quesnel's New Testament and Scriver's Treasury of the Soul, in Pergolesi's Stabat Mater and in Bach's Passion — then one will gain a wholly different stance toward these thousand years, from whose rich yield we still largely live even now.

Very especially, however, the Chiliasts rest their case on this, that the resurrection of the faithful confessors is assigned to the beginning of the thousand years.