Two Roads to the Puritan Millennium: William Erbury and Vavasor Powell

By about 1650, the seventeenth century Puritan search for the New Jerusalem led many an English enthusiast to the conviction that the millennial Kingdom of Christ was at hand. This current in Puritan thought had been gaining force since Thomas Brightman wrote his exegesis on Revelation at the beginning of the century.l With the coming of the civil war, the trickle begun by Brightman (and taken up by a few others before 1642)2 soon developed into a major stream. John Archer, Robert Maton, Jeremiah Burroughes, and William Bridge, to name but some, penned works that increased interest and heightened expectation in the subject during the decade of the forties.3 The infection even caught John Milton who briefly seemed convinced that the great millennial age was imminent.4 As long as these ideas remained pretty much in the realm of imaginative theory with only the vaguest reference to contemporary realization, the views expressed by those authors lacked precision. There was a good deal of fuzziness with respect to the nature of Christ's coming and much uncertainty about the type of reign he would establish. Would Christ's coming be physical or spiritual? Would it require any active work on the part of the saints? Would his reign be political and external or would it be solely ethical and internal? On most of these questions the writers of the forties tended to hedge; Christ would provide the answers himself in due time. But as the tempo of events quickened during and after the second civil war, and as the pressure for a political and ecclesiastical reorganization of the nation heightened during the period of the Commonwealth, the advocates of Christ's earthly rule were forced to turn their attention to a more clear and forthright statement of their aims and ideas. One result of this pressure was that the vague and general millenarianism of the forties soon broke down into several discernible types. While one group of writers remained rather moderate and theoretical,5 two other groups began drifting toward radical though opposite extremes. These latter two were radical in their rejection of the prevailing conditions in England, yet they were to differ markedly in their prescriptions for the world to come. One of these radical groups, seeing in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit the whole or essence of Christ's truth, developed a concept of the Kingdom of Christ that "spiritualized" the external manifestations of the apocalyptic hope to the point where they virtually vanished. The other radical group, a group that later became identified with the Fifth Monarch Men, center