The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

46 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
translation of the New Testament [translated and published by
Benjamin Wilson in 1864]; when he came to the 37th and 39th
verses he was much surprised to find that it read as follows, viz.:
‘For as the days of Noah thus will be the presence of the son of
man’. 45
Keith thus found the Greek word parousia, usually translated
“coming,” here translated as “presence.” A widely held idea among
expositors at this time was that Christ’s second coming would take
place in two stages, the first of which would be invisible! 46 Could it
be that Jesus had come in the fall of 1874, though invisible, and been
invisibly present since then?
To Barbour this explanation not only seemed attractive, but as
he and his associates could find no faults with their calculations,
they saw in it the solution to their problem. The date was right,
although their expectations had been wrong.
Once again, it was seen as a case of having expected “the wrong
thing at the right time”:
It was evident, then, that though the manner in which they had
expected Jesus was in error, yet the time, as indicated by the
‘Midnight Cry,’ was correct, and that the Bridegroom came in the
Autumn of 1874 . . . . 45
Most readers of the Midnight Cry, and Herald of the Morning
magazine, however, could not accept this explanation, and the
15,000 readers rapidly “dwindled to about 200.” Barbour himself
was convinced that the Millennial morning had already begun to
dawn, and therefore he thought that the Midnight Cry no longer was
a suitable name for his paper. He remarked: “Will some one inform
me how a ‘Midnight Cry’ can be made in the morning?” 47 The paper,
which had ceased publication in October 1874, was therefore
45 Zion’s Watch Tower ,February 1881,p. 3, and October–November 1881, p. 3
(=Reprints, pp. 188 and 289).
46 This idea of Christ’s return was originally presented in about 1828 by a banker
and expositor of the prophecies in London, Henry Drummond. It soon became very
popular among the expositors of the prophecies during the rest of the century,
especially among the Darbyists, who did much to popularize the idea. It was much
discussed in the leading millenarian periodicals, in England in the Quarterly
Journal of Prophecy (1849–1873) and The Rainbow (1864–1887), and in the United
States in the Prophetic Times (1863–1881). The chief editor of the last mentioned
paper (which was widely read also in Adventist circles, including that of C. T.
Russell and his associates) was the well-known Lutheran minister Joseph A.
Seiss.—An examination of the origin and dispersion of the “invisible presence” idea
is found in The Christian Quest magazine (Christian Renewal Ministries, San Jose,
CA), Vol. 1:2, 1988, pp. 37–59, and Vol. 2:1, 1989, pp. 47–58.
47 Ibid., April 1880, p. 7 (= Reprints, p. 88).
46