This is another of the attempts at a Blackburn booklet. The writer ought to be silent, knowing nothing as he ought and having all to learn beyond the elements. He confounds “the man of sin, the willful King of the land,” not only with the imperial Beast or apostate Roman empire that is to be, his ally, but with the king of the north, the antagonist of both! Compare his pages 5 and 6. Such confusion is unworthy of the first form in the school of prophecy. Nevertheless it reflects their chief.
But even one so crude as Mr. M. is not so unprincipled as to count all Christians gathered unto the Lord's name (p. 9); he owns it as the real living distinction of those subject to Him and His word. In p. 10 he confounds the countless crowd of Gentiles who come out of the great tribulation in Rev. 7 with the heavenly saints (including the church), distinguished from them in that very scene as the twenty-four elders, which in p. 15 he does not deny to express the royal priesthood. See also pp. 16, 17. He raises the question as to “the guests” in Rev. 19, but has no answer save the childish tradition of Christendom that all saints are the church or bride of the Lamb. But this is confusion worse confounded. For to say nothing of the O. T. saints who best correspond with those invited to the heavenly bridals, the marriage is consummated above before the Lord destroys His enemies, and Satan is bound, and the Apocalyptic martyrs are raised, and the millennial reign ensues; wherein will be a harvest of saints on the earth whom it is sheer folly to call the church or part of it.
It is equally so to count Rev. 4-6 “a forecast of millennial rule”? It is really to show the heavenly saints (after the church-state here below closes in Rev. 2; 3) around God's throne before the preparatory judgments, the great tribulation, with the Beast, and the False Prophet, and other wicked agents at the end of the age. How can people overlook that, when the prefatory vision is fulfilled, out of the throne proceed lightnings and voices and thunders? Now this is as different from “the throne of grace” which we now know, as it is from the millennial day when a river of life bright as crystal proceeds out of the throne of God and the Lamb Who can fail to recognize that the day of grace, the brief interval of judicial dealings when we are caught up, and the era of the glorious kingdom, are thus discriminated? But all beyond the prophetic alphabet is a muddle here. Rev. 4-6 in no way indicates the form of rule, as he says, during the thousand years, but an interval after the rapture of those symbolized by the twenty-four elders, before the millennium begins.
As little does the writer understand the unities of John 17 “All mine are thine, and thine are mine,” are things, not persons. The first unity in ver. 11 was for those around Him in respect of their unique work. Again, the “all one,” in 21 were (from ver. 20) demonstrably prospective, but only up to the Lord's coming (not subsequently), as pointedly distinguished from the unity of glory in vers. 22, 23, when the world will (not believe but) “know” that the Father sent the Son and loved the then glorified saints as He loved Christ. For they are manifested in glory with Him. It is the Newtonian scheme which involves this tract in utter darkness, and hinders its writer from seizing the truth which he vainly opposes with no small self-complacency.
Needless to say that to Mr. Darby belong his Collected Writings, of which I was simply Editor, not author, as he strangely seems to think. What he cites thence is as sound, as his objection is futile. Till I read p. 20, I had no notion that A. Pridham had departed so far from the truth he once seemed to hold. O these days of declension! How long too they have been in progress! For his volumes on the Scriptures were widely circulated and much cried up by the company he joined some years before his death. Did they know no better than such earthly views? What sufficient proof has even been given that the judaizing root of error has ever been thoroughly extirpated?