Roman Empire Under Hadrian
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Time has proved that the anticipations of the Author of Eureka in regard to the return of Christ were premature. And this reveals that with all its value Chronikon Hebraikon fails to provide a satisfactory chronology of the Scriptures in relation to the time periods of the future. Those time periods seem to introduce consecutive epochs of time, rather than specific datings.
It is with no little satisfaction that the author is at length enabled to place this volume of his Exposition of the Apocalypse in the hands of its subscribers. To subscribers and authors in general, the issuing of books by subscription must always be a work of anxiety; especially where, as in the instance of Eureka, the subscribers thereto have made its author the depository of nearly two thousand dollars in advance of the performance of what he had proposed in his prospectus.
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The “little strength” of the Philadelphian state of the Christian community was now exhausted, at the end of the “little season" of ten years, during which the “fellow-servants and brethren” were being killed by Diocletian, Galerius, and Maximin, as foretold in the prediction of the Fifth Seal.
In the apostolical state of the Christian community the faith, hope, and love of the brethren was conspicuous and strong. But after the One Body had passed through the Ephesian, Smyrnean, Pergamian, Thyatiran, and Sardian, states, it was greatly enfeebled in all its primitive forces; so that when it was fairly established in the Philadelphian, its brightest examples, who had kept the word and had not denied the name of the Spirit, constituted but “a little strength” for the whole.
The state of things deplored by Cyprian was that which resulted in the Sardian, characterized by the Spirit as a death-state. By the generation of professors contemporary with it, it was not so considered.
The apostasy from “the truth as it is in Jesus" must have progressed very far when two such chiefs of the Roman Dragon, as the emperors Alexander and Philip, could be recognized as Christians.
This state of the Christian community is illustrated by the writings of Tertullian, Pantaenus, Clemens Alexandrinus, and the Alexandrian School of “Divinity.”