The Real History of the End of the World (23 page)

Portrait of Robert Boyle (1627-1691). British chemist. Engraving.
Image Selection / Art Resource, NY

Boyle was also a fervent Anglican who wrote many treatises on religion, especially noting that the clockwork universe that the New Science was proposing was so complicated that it was all the more likely to have had a divine mind to create it and set it running. He was also devoted to the conversion of the Indians of North America, the Irish, and any other pagans and papists around. He sponsored missionaries and underwrote the cost of translating the Bible into Arabic Turkish and Malayan.
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He also wrote against the semi-Christian mystical beliefs common in the seventeenth century about secret societies, such as the Rosecrucians.
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During the Revolution and the time of Oliver Cromwell, England considered itself the New Jerusalem from which the armies of Christ would spread over the world to bring about the millennium. The restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II in 1660 threw their expectations a curve. The radical Puritans, like the Fifth Monarchists who saw the Revolution as proof that the thousand-year reign of Jesus was about to begin, lost most of their followers, either through execution or a return to a less aggressive practice. The Quakers, for instance, dropped their militant stance and became pacifists, as they remain today.

Oddly, the Anglican Church, the state church of England, seems to have picked up the millennial flag. “A group of Anglican clergymen, led mainly by the followers of Robert Boyle, used millennial ideas in conjunction with Newtonian scientific principles to promote only those changes they thought would lead to political stability in England.”
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Perhaps made wary by the number of predictions of the end during the early 1600s, Boyle seems to have kept his millennial opinions low key. His sister, Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, with whom he lived in his last years, wrote him of their shared belief that “all this old frame of heaven and earth must pass and a new one be set up in its place.”
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In the same letter, she discussed the signs that this new world would arrive soon.

One of Boyle's followers was John Evelyn, trustee of the Boyle lectureship. His leadership in Anglican circles allowed him to bend doctrine toward the Boyle/Newton “natural religion.” He employed this term in his many tracts and letters on the coming Apocalypse. Thus, although Boyle never wrote on Revelation in the way that Isaac Newton did, his determination to meld science and religion led to the formation of a view of the universe as orderly with a pattern ordained by a creator. It was a universe in which with the guidance of the Church it would be possible to establish a New Jerusalem through the continuing progress of humanity that would put off the final days indefinitely.
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Isaac Newton (1642/3-1727) is still spoken of with reverence by mathematicians and scientists the world over. He is the man who set out to discover the rules by which nature operates. His work on gravity is legendary, and his basic laws of motion have yet to be repealed. He invented integral calculus and, in a dead heat with Leibniz, came up with differential calculus. He had the luck to have lived long enough to see his theories accepted and to be honored by his peers.

Even though in recent years, both academic and popular articles have concentrated on Newton's neuroses and interest in alchemy, his religion has been glazed over. One reason for this is that in the course of Newton's long life, his religious ideas changed or were refined. His own writing indicates that he was a devout Christian who believed that the Bible was the source of all wisdom.
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In his scientific works, Newton began with the supposition that there were rules governing the universe that were made by God. Everything he discovered only strengthened the opinion. It was not until near the end of his life that he took time for an in-depth study of the books of Daniel and Revelation. He acknowledged their obscurity but insisted that the symbolism must be clear to those of good will and, even more, honest faith.
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His book on the prophecies was not published until after his death, perhaps because his livelihood depended upon being at least publicly a supporter of the Anglican Church. The explanations in Newton's commentaries, for the most part, are not radical. He sees the Book of Daniel in terms of history that traces the fall of Jerusalem and Rome, the barbarian invasions, and the rise of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne. When he arrives at the seventy weeks and the other calculations concerning the end, Newton is in his element. He scoffs at earlier interpreters who used sloppy math. He insists that they don't know where to start. They “either count by lunar years or by weeks not Judaic: and which is worse, they ground their interpretations on erroneous Chronology.”
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Newton then consults the Jewish historian Josephus for dates of events that occurred around the time of the Crucifixion. He adds those to the information in the Bible and what he knows of Roman and Jewish festivals as well as the years when historical people are mentioned outside of the Bible. After several pages of meticulous analysis and giving reasons for each date excluded, Newton finally concludes that Jesus died on Friday, April 23, 34 C.E.
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Unlike those who have studied the end times as foretold in Daniel, Newton never associates any of the beasts or kings of the north, or other enigmatic characters with people or institutions of his own day. He assumes that Daniel was prophesying for the people living in the first five hundred years of Christianity.

He also criticizes those who say that the Apostle John wasn't the man who received the revelations. Using both apocryphal gospels and the writings of the second-century fathers of the Church, Newton proves to his own satisfaction the apostolic source of Revelation and the date it was written.
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Yet, even in material that he didn't expect to be published, Newton does not give any dates for the Second Coming. He tells the reader, “The follow of Interpreters has been to foretel times and things by the Prophecy, as if God designed to make them Prophets. . . . [W]e must content ourselves with interpreting what hath already been fulfilled.”
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Newton's method of approaching the prophetic books is the same as his scientific method. He breaks each book into component parts, analyzes each one separately, and then decides how they fit together. One biographer called this work a “rambling muddle.”
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I didn't find it so, although he did make some statements that I found historically inaccurate, and I wasn't convinced by his assignments of historical figures to the horns, beasts, and so forth. What the work implies is that for Newton there was no difference between discovering the mechanics of the universe and deciphering the Bible.

Newton carried this even further in his ongoing investigation into the actual dimensions of Solomon's Temple. He felt that this was the real key to understanding the Apocalypse. He used information from the Book of Ezekiel as well as the philosophical writings of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. With these he worked out a time line, checking his findings with both mathematics and astronomy.
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In this study he actually came up with some interesting dates. He felt that 1944 would end the tribulation of the Jews and that Christ would return in 1948. But the beginning of the idyllic millennium wouldn't begin until sometime between 2336 and 2370, with the Last Judgment occurring around 3370.
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Some of Newton's comments remind me of those who advocate the existence of the Bible Code. He felt that the answers were all clear but were written in imprecise language unsuitable for the masses to understand.
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But for Newton, the book of nature and the book of God were both written in clear, mathematical terms.

By the end of the eighteenth century, science and the millennium had joined forces. The end of the world and events that would precede it were being studied empirically. Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) is considered the father of modern chemistry for his discovery of oxygen and his research into the composition of air. His papers given at Royal Society meetings show that he also proved experimentally that electricity is carried by copper wire. He mentioned to Benjamin Franklin in 1769 that he was unable to use electricity to set off gunpowder. Franklin replied that he hadn't been able to manage that either.
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Although Priestley hoped that the millennium would come peacefully, perhaps he felt it didn't hurt to be prepared for the worst.

He also was a dissenting minister in England who later founded the first Unitarian Church in America. He saw no break between religion and science, believing that “matter contained an in-dwelling force, power or spirit.”
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His was a new kind of millenarianism. It was not only based in logic, as many earlier mathematical calculations of the end had not been, but it also was more optimistic. Priestley felt that the world was progressing toward the millennium, not with sudden shocks but through gradual improvement of man and society.

In 1771, he wrote on his hope for the future:

To this end, Priestley was at the forefront of education reform and believed strongly in republican governments. It was because of many of these religiously motivated convictions that his home and laboratory were destroyed in the Birmingham Riot of 1791. Priestley, his wife and sons were forced to move to America. He arrived in 1794. There he became friends with John Adams.

Adams was impressed with Priestley, but could not understand how such an intelligent man could be convinced that the millennium was about to begin. Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson that Priestley saw the French Revolution as a sign because the execution of Louis XVI meant the removal of one of the horns of the beast from Daniel.
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Priestley apparently examined newspapers for a hint that the Ottoman Empire was about to fall, as this would open the way for the reclamation of Israel.
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He saw the revolutions in both France and America as “a change from dark to light, from superstition to sound reason.”
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While the behavior of the revolutionary government of France discouraged him, the news that Napoleon had taken the Papal States gave him hope, just before his death, that the papal Antichrist had been defeated and that Napoleon would become the legendary Last World Emperor who would pave the way for the Second Coming.
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NAPIER, Boyle, Newton and Priestley were not exceptions among the people who laid down the rules for scientific experimentation and made some of the more exciting discoveries of the last millennium. While their religious beliefs varied, all stated at one time or another that they thought the prophetic books of the Bible were accurate if only they could be rightly interpreted. This scientific scrutiny gave support to the belief that the Bible was a source of information about the future and that the most brilliant men of the age were attempting to decipher it.

1
Robert G. Clouse, “John Napier and Apocalyptic Thought,”
The Sixteenth Century Journal
8, no. 1 (1974): 103.

2
Ibid.

3
Christopher Hill,
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 9.

4
Clouse, 106.

5
Clouse, p. 109.

6
D. Thorburn Burns, “Robert Boyle, Analytical Chemist,”
Philosophical Transactions: Physical Sciences and Engineering
333, no. 1628 (1990): 3-4.

7
Loc. cit.

8
John F. Fulton, “The Honourable Robert Boyle, F.R.S. (1627-1692),”
Rites and Records of the Royal Society of London
14 (1960): 130-132.

9
J. R. Jacob, “Robert Boyle and Subversive Religion in the Early Restoration,”
Albiion
6, no. 4 (1976): 278-280.

10
Hubert Seiwart,
Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects
(Boston: Brill, 2003), 14.

11
Quoted in, J. R. Jacob, “Boyle's Circle in the Protectorate: Revelation, Politics and the Millennium,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
38, no. 1 (1977): 133.

12
Margaret C. Jacob, “Millenarianism and Science in the Late Seventeenth Century,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
37, no. 2 (1976): 339-341.

13
Howard Stein, “Newton's Metaphysics,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Newton,
ed. I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 390.

14
Ibid., 391.

15
Isaac Newton,
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John,
rpt. ed.(n.c.: Fillquarian, 2008): 114.

16
Ibid., 131-136.

17
Ibid., 193-200.

18
Ibid., 204-205.

19
Michael White,
Isaac Newton, The Last Sorcerer
(Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1997),. 158.

20
Scott Mandelbrote, “ ‘A Duty of the Greatest Moment': Isaac Newton and the Writing of Bible Criticism,”
The British Journal for the History of Science
26, no. 3 (993), 301.