The great defect of Dr. Brown's reasoning here, as elsewhere, is the assumption that things are to abide essentially as they are now till the eternal state closes the present. This is unequivocally to ignore Scripture, which speaks of the age to come in contra-distinction to that which now is, as of course before eternity. It is in vain to take advantage of those who ignorantly mix up the heavenly and the earthly, and to break forth into the exaggerated cry— “What a mongrel state! What an abhorred mixture of things totally inconsistent with each other!” The millennium differs from all that has been. The transfiguration was but a partial and passing sample. Joshua Perry's desertion of his friends for the opposite view here will avail little against Scripture. Take John 17:22-23, and compare with it Eph. 1:10-12, and Rev. 21:9-27. Are not the glorified saints, made perfect in one, to be a proof to the world that the Father sent the Son, and loved the saints as He loved Christ? How deny it when they appear in the same glory? In what condition will “the world” be? Is not this the display of the glorified to men in flesh? And when can this be save in the millennium? Will there be “the world” in the eternal state to know anything of the sort?
The effort to make the millennium a mere extension of present blessing, more converts, &c., with “not one(!)” element in it that has not been already realized, needs no refutation to those who accept what has been before us. The question is not one of salvation but of God's ways in the government of the world. The end of the age is when the Son of Man takes (not, gives up) the kingdom, and, having received it, returns. He will then judge the habitable earth (τὴν οἰκουμέην, Acts 17), as He will judge the dead before He gives up the kingdom.
Eph. 2:14-19, and John 4:21-23 apply solely to Christians now since redemption, and neither to believers before Christ, nor to those of the millennium. Isa. 2:2.3, Mic. 4, and Zech. 14 are equally explicit as to a wholly different order, accompanied by marks which are certainly not seen under Christianity. When the prophets are fulfilled, Christ will be judging among the peoples, not as now gathering out a people for His name by the gospel; and nations shall learn war no more; and Israel shall be restored to their land, and the Gentiles shall be thoroughly humbled. You cannot safely Christianize Judaism any more than Judaize Christianity. Distinguish this age from that which is to come, as Scripture does, and those objections vanish; confound them, and you have the main source of Christendom's ruin, and the chief mischief of Dr. Brown's work, because it denies the distinction, place, and responsibility, both of the Christian now, and of the Jew by-and-by.
One evident consequence is, that those who deny the revival of Jewish pre-eminence in the millennium find themselves hopelessly dumb in presence of such scriptures as the closing chapters of Ezekiel; and the efforts after the figurative makes the late Duke of Manchester the ally, so far, of Dr. Brown, blending thus in one vague company the upholders and the deniers of Israel's national hope. Such is the effect of error. The strongest evidence has been already adduced to prove that the condition which the prophet depicts is the most striking contrast with the Christian state. If it was only the absence of Pentecost, when the feasts shall be once more celebrated by restored Israel, how distinctive of their future, as compared with their past (or with our present) of which that feast is the standing type!