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The Christian Messenger and Reformer (1843)
The Christian Messenger and Reformer - 1843 Author:James Wallis Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: that they did not relume the ancient hope of the church. It may easily be proved, that whatever corruptions might be among the fathers of the first and second ce... more »nturies, yet they all held and rejoiced in the living hope of Christ's second advent and reign upon the earth. It was through the instrumentality of that wild and miserable dreamer, Origen, that the brightest lamp of the primitive church was extinguished. By his doctrine of refining away the one literal meaning of scripture into mystery and allegory, of seeking, in every bright, unambiguous statement, some latent recondite meaning, all the substantial realities of Christ's glorious appearance, the resurrection of the holy, the glorification of the living righteous, the renovation of the earth which has been accursed by sin, and the thousand years sublime reign of the saints as priests and kings with Christ their triumphant Lord, vanish away. The sun of the church went down while it was yet day : the morning star was obscured by sombre masses of cloud, and seemed to wander into trackless darkness. And what remained after this impulsive doctrine was buried ? the bodiless phantasy of complete enjoyment in the intermediate state; a thing which can neither be proved from the word of God, nor apprehended by the mind of man. If Plato, Ammonias Jaccas, and Origen will not divide the honour of it among them, we must seek for its source in the smoke of the bottomless pit. Had the reformers enkindled afresh that splendid hope which sustained the early christians amid all their extreme sufferings, it might have lighted them out of many of the swamps and morasses in which, though partially delivered from Rome, they still continued to plunge. And most assuredly those who wish to effect a reformation now, or rather a restoration, by retu...« less