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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Alfred Cohen
Alfred Cohen
Affiliation:
Trenton State College
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Extract

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. With the coming of the civil war, the trickle begun by Brightman (and taken up by a few others before 1642) 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. The infection even caught John Milton who briefly seemed convinced that the great millennial age was imminent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 1963 , pp. 322 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1963

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References

1. Brightman, Thomas, The Revelation of St. John (Leyden, 1616)Google Scholar. The original edition wan published in 1609.

2. Mede, Joseph, Clavis Apocolyptic (London, 1627)Google Scholar; Goodwin, Thomas, An Exposition of the Revelation (London, 1939)Google Scholar;A Glimpse of Syons Glory (London, 1941).Google Scholar

3. Archer, John, The Personall Reign of Christ Upon Earth (London, 1642)Google Scholar; Maton, Robert, Israels Redemption(London, 1642)Google Scholar; Burroughes, Jeremiah,An Exposition of the Prophesie of Hosea (London, 1642)Google Scholar; Bridge, William, Christs Coming Opened (London, 1649).Google Scholar

4. Barker, Arthur A., Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto, 1942), pp. 195–96.Google Scholar

5. See, for example, Owen, John, The Advantage of the Kingdom of Christ (Oxford, 1651)Google Scholar and A Sermon to Parliament (London, 1652)Google Scholar; Homes, Nathaniel, The Resurrection Revealed(London, 1653).Google Scholar

6. Powell is treated extensively in Nuttal's, Geoffrey P. Welsh Saints (Cardiff, 1957)Google Scholar, where Erbury receives only passing mention. See also, Richards, Thomas, Puritan Movement in Wales (London, 1920)Google Scholar and Jones, R. Tudor, “Vavasor Powell and the Protectorate,” Congregational Historical Society Transactions, XVII (08, 1953), 41–50.Google Scholar

7. Bolt, Leo F., Saints in Arms, Puritanism and Democracy in Cromwell's Army (Stanford, California, 1959), pp. 30–38.Google Scholar

8. Law, in other words, was converted into an internal phenomenon. Law as an external thing, as something which connoted external compulsion (be it the older Mosiac code or the newer “ordinances” of the Protestant Churches) was anathema to them. At the same time the absence of an externally binding law did not mean they sanctioned licentious behavior (Ibid., p. 48).

9. Erbury, William, The Testimony of William Erbury (N.P., 1658), p. 8.Google Scholar

10. Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Fairlawn, N.J., 1957), pp. 99–100.Google Scholar

11. Saltmarsh, John, Sparkles of Glory (London, 1647), p. 68.Google Scholar

12. Erbury, op. cit., p. 248.

13. Joachim went so far as to calculate the time of the third age in the best millenarian tradition, of unraveling the biblical numbers. He came to the conclusion that the age of the Spirit would come during the first half of the thirteenth century, forty-two generations after Christ (Cohn, op. cit., p. 102).

14. Solt, op. cit., pp. 6–24.

15. Erbury, William, Nor Truth, Nor Error (1646)Google Scholar, reprinted in Testimony, pp. 1–18. This work grew out of a debate with Francis Cheynell over Erbury's “Socinianism.” See also McLachlan, H. John, Socinianism in Seven teenth the Century England (Oxford, 1951), pp. 226–33.Google Scholar

16. Testimony, p. 13.

17. Ibid., pp. 4–6.

18. Ibid., pp. 14–15.

19. Lord of Hosts (1648), reprinted in Testimony, pp. 19–42.

20. Ibid., pp. 24–7.

21. Ibid., pp. 36–9.

22. Ibid., pp. 40–41.

23. Richards, op. cit., Chapter XI.

24. In a letter dated August, 1652, Erbury reproved Powell for advocating the idea that Christ's second coming would have a “fleshly presence.” By such notions Powell was hindering the saints “from looking for the Spirit,” which was their primary duty. “Doth not that preaching of yours,” Erbury asked his friends, “Cause many Saints to be more carnall, earthly, looking for a Kingdom here below; for they begin to raign already as kind, but not with Christ, not in righteousness” (Testimony, p. 248).

25. A Scourge for the Assyrians (1652), in Testimony, p. 66.Google Scholar

26. Testimony, p. 248.

27. Ibid., pp. 67–8.

28. See Nuttall's Welsh Saints, for a discussion of Erbury's relationship to three Welsh saints: Walter Cradock, Vavasor Powell, and Morgan Lloyd.

29. Testimony, p. 238.

30. Ibid., pp. 207, 238.

31. Ibid., pp. 204–5.

32. Ibid., p. 151.

33. An Olive-Leaf (1654), in Testimony, p. 192.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., p. 206.

35. To Lloyd, Morgan in Testimony, p. 110.Google Scholar

36. See Solt, op. cit., pp. 59–72.

37. Testimony, p. 185.

38. Erbury, William, Apocrypha (London, 1652), p. 5.Google Scholar

39. Testimony, p. 206.

40. See Aprocrypha, pp. 5–6, in which Erbury predicts that the kingdom of Christ will “first arise, and be revealed in Wales” just as it was in “these Northern Isles” that Christ was first acknowledged: “Lucius, the first Christian king was a Britian, and Canstantine, the first Christian emperor in the world was a Britian, or Welshman!!” The phrase “Scripture arithmetic” is that of Tudor Jones.

41. Testimony, p. 124.

42. See Mad Man's Plea, (London, 1653)Google Scholar, where he rebuked the Baptists for trying to build a visible Church, or the Great Earthquake (London, 1654)Google Scholar, where he dismissed as impossible the Independents' attempt to fashion an external Church on the idea of the indwelling spirit.

43. Ibid., pp. 269–70.

44. Ibid., p. 73.

45. Solt, L. F., “What Was Cromwell's Religion¶”, The Listener, LX (09 4, 1958), 335–6Google Scholar; Hailer, William, “The Word of God in the New Model Army,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, XIX (1950), 30–31.Google Scholar

46. Cromwell, Oliver, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, edited by Abbott, Wilbur C. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1937–1947), II, 64.Google Scholar

47. Testimony, pp. 213–14.

48. Ibid., pp. 185, 213.

49. Richards, op. cit., p. 218.

50. Richards, Thomas, Religious Development in Wales 1654–1662 (London, 1923), p. 262Google Scholar. It is, perhaps, not surprising that Dorcus Erbury became a follower of the most millenarian of the Quakers, James Naylor, the “Messiah of Bristol.”

51. Brauer, Jerald C., “Reflections on the Nature of English Puritanism,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, XXIII (1954), 101.Google Scholar

52. Canne, John, The Snare is Broken (London, 1649), p. 14.Google Scholar

53. Brown, L. F., The Political Activities of the Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men (Baltimore, 1912), p. 17.Google Scholar

54. Certain Quaeres Humbly presented in way of Petition (London, 1649), pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., pp. 3–5.

56. As a preliminary step to the establishment of such a Parliament of Saints, it is the government's task to encourage and protect these “societies,” to resolve the differences between the Presbyterians and Independents so that “both their interests may meet,” and to conduct a purge “that only such as be of approved godliness may have the right hand of fellowship given to them” (p. 7). In outline these were the actual steps that led to the Barebone Parliament.

57. Ibid., p. 8.

58. Oddly enough the more “spiritual” Erbury does not shy away from the possibility of violence, while the petitioners mention no such eventuality. Also, while the petitioners envision a time when “Christ the Head and King appears visibly” (p. 6), this seemed to have been ruled out by Erbury. More than anything else, however, the two works differ most markedly in tone.

59. Walter Cradock, who was influenced by Erbury when the latter was vicar of St. Mary's, Cardiff and Cradock was his curate, in turn had a strong influence on his own “convert,” Powell, , Nuttall, , Visible Saints (Oxford, 1957), pp. 3, 21.Google Scholar

60. Miller, Perry, “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity,” Errand in the Wilderness (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956), pp. 62, 74.Google Scholar

61. Miller, Percy, The New England Mind from Colony, to Province (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1953), p. 56.Google Scholar

62. Miller, , Errand, pp. 83–4.Google Scholar

63. Ibid., pp. 74, 85, 75–81, 89, 90.

64. Powell, Vavasor, God the Father Glorified (London, 1650), p. 80.Google Scholar

65. Powell, Vavasor, Christ and Moses, (London, 1650), pp. 222–27.Google Scholar

66. God the Father, p. 124.

67. Ibid., pp. 142, 136–39.

68. Ibid., p. 104.

69. On Cradock's and Powell's antinomianism see Nuttall, Welsh Saints, passim.

70. To those who maintain that faith is the condition of salvation Powell retorts: “Whereas you say that faith is the only condition of the Covenant consider seriously, whether the Gospel doth not require knowledge, repentenee, conversion, sanctification etc, to be in those that are saved: If so, then I know no reason but that these may be called the Conditions of the Covenant as well as faith. But sure neither these, nor faith, are found in men, when God comes to enter Covenant with them: but they are brought with the Covenants yea they are particular members and branches of the Covenant, and therefora cannot be brought before the Covenant,” p. 58.

71. Ibid., p. 56.

72. Ibid., pp. 75–76.

73. Ibid., pp. 68, 97.

74. Ibid., pp. 209ff.; “I am so far from destroying the Law hereby, that I do rather confirme it, according to the intent, and purpose of God in giving and instituting it” (p. 215).

75. God the Father, pp. 110–111.

76. Powell, Vavasor, Christ Exalted (London, 1651).Google Scholar

77. The full title of the Act was “An Act for the Better Propagation and Preaching of the Gospel in Wales, and Redress of some Grievances.” It is reprinted in Richards Puritan Movement in Wales (pp. 81–89) which also contains a history of the operation of the Act and much on Powell's role in the commission. His optimism is also shown by his declaration, a few months earlier, that “this year, 1650 is to be the Saints yeare of Jubilee.” Quoted in Nuttall, , Visible Saints, p. 88.Google Scholar

78. Christ Exalted, p. 48.

79. Ibid., p. 50.

80. Ibid., pp. 51–2.

81. Ibid., pp. 52–4.

82. Ibid., pp. 57–58.

83. Ibid., pp. 93, 62.

84. Ibid., p. 62.

85. Ibid., p. 57.

86. Ibid., p. 56.

87. Ibid., p. 12.

88. Ibid., pp. 56–7.

89. It is mostly on such hearsay evidence that Richards (Puritan Movement in Wales, p. 185) asserts that before the end of the Propagation period, i.e., by March, 1653, Powell had a “clearer vision” of his millenarian ideas. Richards, however, never spells out exactly what form this clarity took.

90. Christ Exalted, p. 90.