The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

The History of an Interpretation 45
published the 100-page pamphlet Evidences for the Coming of the Lord
in 1873; or the Midnight Cry, the second edition of which has been
quoted above. 41 In 1873 he started a monthly of his own called The
Midnight Cry, and Herald of the Morning, the circulation of which
within three months ran up to 15,000 copies. 42 When the target
year of 1873 had nearly passed, Barbour advanced the time of the
second advent to the autumn of 1874. 43 But when that year, too,
came and went, Barbour and his followers experienced great
concern:
When 1874 came and there was no outward sign of Jesus
in the literal clouds and in a fleshly form, there was a general
reexamination of all the arguments upon which the ‘Midnight Cry’
was made. And when no fault or flaw could be found, it led to the
critical examination of the Scriptures which seem to bear on the
manner of Christ’s coming, and it was soon discovered that the
expectation of Jesus in the flesh at the second coming was the
mistake . . . . 44
An “invisible presence”
One of the readers of the Midnight Cry, B. W. Keith (later one of
the contributors to Zion’s Watch Tower),
. . . had been reading carefully Matt. xxiv chapter, using the
‘Emphatic Diaglott’ , a new and very exact word for word
41 Nelson H. Barbour (ed.), Herald of the Morning (Rochester, N.Y.), September 1879,
p.36. Actually, Barbour’s new date for the second advent was adopted by an
increasing number of Second Adventists, especially within the Advent Christian
Church, with which Barbour evidently associated for a number of years. One
reason for this readiness to accept the 1873 date was that it was not new to them.
As Barbour points out in his Evidences . . . (pp. 33, 34), Miller himself had
mentioned 1873 after the 1843 failure. Prior to 1843, several expositors in England
had ended the 1,335 years in 1873, for instance John Fry in 1835 and George
Duffield in 1842. (Froom, Vol. III, pp. 496, 497; Vol. IV, p. 337) As early as 1853
the “age to come” Adventist Joseph Marsh in Rochester, N.Y., concluded, 1ike
other expositors before him, that the “time of the end” was a period of 75 years
that began in 1798 and would expire in 1873. (D. T. Arthur, op. cit., p. 360) In
1870 the well-known Advent Christian preacher Jonas Wendell included Barbour’s
chronology in his pamphlet The Present Truth; or, Meat in Due Season (Edenboro,
PA, 1870). The increasing interest in the date caused the Advent Christian Church
to arrange a special conference, February 6 to 11, 1872, in Worcester, Mass., for
the examination of the time of the Lord’s return and especially the 1873 date.
Many preachers, including Barbour, participated in the discussions. As reported in
the Advent Christian Times of March 12, 1872, ‘The point on which there seemed
to be any general unanimity was the ending of the thirteen hundred and thirty-five
years in 1873.” (p. 263)
42 Nelson H. Barbour (ed.), The Midnight Cry, and Herald of the Morning (Boston,
Mass.) Vol. I:4, March, 1874,p. 50.
43 N. H. Barbour, “The 1873 Time,” The Advent Christian Times, Nov. 11, 1873, p.
106.
44 Zion’s Watch Tower, October and November 1881, p. 3 (= Reprints, p. 289).
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