I hope that this book, devoted mainly to the questions of the eschatology of sectarianism, will prove to be a modest and necessary help to the reader in defending the truths of the Holy Church of Christ, both from the attacks of the sectarian Jehovah's Witnesses, and from the false teachings of modern false Christs and false prophets.

Chapter I. A Brief Historical Sketch of the Sect of Jehovah's Witnesses

Section I. C. Russell: "Prophet", "Innovator" or Follower

1. Historical prerequisites for the emergence of Jehovism

"If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, and the word does not come to pass and is not fulfilled, then the Lord did not speak this word, but the prophet spoke this in his boldness, do not be afraid of him." (Deuteronomy 18:22)

Any heretical teaching, taking a part of Christian truth as a whole, the further it departs from the fullness of truth, the more it parasitizes on a part of this truth. Thus, many sectarians in America and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were very much agitated by the question of the date of the Second Coming. The era of the Reformation, which "modernized" a number of dogmatic tenets of Christianity, eventually gave rise to many sectarian denominations. But, as inevitably happens with false teachings, a lie can only give rise to a lie. Those who had just shouted loudly about their attainment of the truth, having seduced the faint-hearted, often soon renounced their recent convictions, rushing into self-imposed searches and increasingly moving away from the attainment of the true Church, which to the inflamed consciousness of heretics had always seemed to be a great error.

The transfer of the center of Christian's life from the field of soteriology (the teaching of salvation) to the field of eschatology (the teaching of the end of the world) is a sign of the religious illness of the soul. Beginning in the 1820s, sects were gaining strength, the members of which were obsessed with the desire to announce to mankind the exact time of the Second Coming of Christ.

The earthquake of 1775 in Lisbon, which claimed many lives, was the first significant symptom of the approach of the "tribulation of those days" and was perceived by contemporaries as an important eschatological sign of the coming of the "day of the Lord"1. In 1780, many scientists observed an eclipse of the Sun. All these natural phenomena have been interpreted by those eager to know the timing of the Second Coming as the "fulfillment of the prophecies" of the Revelation of St. John. Moreover, rumors began to circulate in sectarian circles that the Roman high priest was none other than the Antichrist. In 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte, as a result of his military successes in Italy, deprived the Pope of his rights to secular domination. Subsequently, sectarians from eschatology will present this event as a sign of the end times. Among the many preachers of the approaching end of the world, Joseph Wolff (1795-1862) soon attracted special attention. For many years he preached his ideas among Europeans, and in 1821 he began missionary work in Egypt, Palestine, Persia, Georgia, declaring the coming of Christ in 1847.

At about the same time, the Englishman William Canignem (1776-1846) traveled around the world with similar sermons. He wrote more than twenty works full of prophecies, biblical chronology and eschatology.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Society for the Spread of Christianity among Jews was founded with headquarters in London. The Society spread among the Jews the ideas of the imminent Coming of the Savior and the need for their conversion to Christianity in connection with the coming events.

In 1819, Henry Draymond and Robert Helden established the Continental Society for the Dissemination of Religious Knowledge, and seven years later the Society for the Study of Prophecy appeared in London. The Protestant Society, created in 1835, was also engaged in eschatological searches. The first Interconfessional Conference convened in 1825 was marked by a pronounced eschatological orientation. In England alone, in the nineteenth century, about 150 titles of books2 were published on eschatology. In a number of countries, magazines devoted to this problem are published with deliberately high-sounding titles: "Signs of the Times", "Cry of the North", "Herald of the Advent", "Bible Observer", "Voice of Truth", etc.

All of them named different dates for the imminent Second Coming. However, the most painful for the newly-appeared eschatologists was the collapse of the prophecy about the end of the world in 1843, which was spreading on the American continent. This movement was led by William Miller, who wrote in 1844: "In the course of 12 years I organized 450 conferences, which gathered about 500 thousand people."3 It was he who named 1843 as the date of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which, however, was later postponed by him twice. At the height of the eschatological movement, it had about 100,000 sympathizers, but after the first failure of the prophecy, many departed from it. In October 1844, it broke up into six independent religious groups, and by 1855 it already represented 25 sectarian groups that had left the "community" of Miller. Some of them preached the doctrine that Christ did come in 1843, but invisibly, being a spiritual being, others taught that he secretly ascended to His heavenly sanctuary.

After the crushing eschatological crisis of 1843, Adventists of various denominations no longer named specific dates for the Second Coming, only noting that it was near.