In studying the seventeenth-century, I have twice encountered a curious eschatology. The eschatology states that the gospel will move westward around the globe until it returns to its starting point with the Jews, at which time Christ will return to judge the world. The two advocates of that doctrine whom I have read are George Herbert and John Eliot. Though Herbert was an MP and an Anglican priest and Eliot was a New England clergyman, they share both that eschatology and a connection to the evangelism of the Indians.

Herbert’s eschatology can be seen in his poem “The Church Militant.” First published as a part of The Temple in 1633, “The Church Militant” represent the prophetic parts of the Scripture in Herbert’s larger work. The first part of the poem describes how the gospel has moved from Jerusalem west, to Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, and England. As it moved, the gospel was pursued by sin, which corrupted took over each region as the gospel moved west. With a pessimistic view of England’s situation, Herbert continues:

And the late reformation never durst
Compare with ancient times and purer yeares;
But in the Jews and us deserveth tears.
Nay, it shall ev’ry yeare decrease and fade;
Till such a darknesse do the world invade
At Christs last coming, as his first did finde:
Yet must there such proportion be assign’d
To these diminishings, as is between
The spacious world and Jurie to be seen.

In other words, religion will continue to decline until Christ’s coming. The extent of the decline will be proportional to distance between the current stronghold of the gospel and “Jurie,” or Jewry—that is, Jerusalem. Religion thus is ready to go to the New World:

Religion stands on tip-toe in our land,
Readie to passe to the American strand.
When height of malice, and prodigious lusts,
Impudent sinning, witchcrafts, and distrusts
(The marks of future bane) shall fill our cup
Unto the brimme, and make our measure up;
When Sein shall swallow Tiber, and the Thames
By letting in them both pollutes her streams:
When Italie of us shall have her will,
And all her calender of sinnes fulfill;
Whereby one may foretell, what sinnes next yeare
Shall both in France and England domineer:
Then shall Religion to America flee:
They have their times of Gospel, ev’n as we.

Sin will continue to pursue the church until they return to their starting point:

Yet as the Church shall thither westward flie,
So Sinne shall trace and dog her instantly:
They have their period also and set times
Both for their vertuous actions and their crimes.
And where of old the Empire and the Arts
Usher’d the Gospel ever in mens hearts,
Spain hath done one; when Arts perform the other,
The Church shall come, & Sinne the Church shall smother:
That when they have accomplished their round,
And met in th’ east their first and ancient sound,
Judgement may meet them both & search them round.
Thus do both lights, as well in Church as Sunne,
Light one another, and together runne.
Thus also Sinne and Darknesse follow still
The Church and Sunne with all their power and skill.
But as the Sunne still goes both west and east;
So also did the Church by going west
Still eastward go; because it drew more neare
To time and place, where judgement shall appeare.

When Herbert wrote this poem before his death in 1633, he was probably thinking of the Virginia Company. During his time in Parliament from 1624-45, Herbert had become acquainted with the Virginia Company, and one of his relatives was a pious backer of the company who supported evangelizing the Indians.[1]

John Eliot’s thinking about the end times built on the eschatology of the New England Puritans. Predictions that the millennium would be established in New England were common, notably in Thomas Hooker’s A Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline (1648). (Eliot had taught school with Hooker.) It was also predicted that worldwide conversions would precede the millennium. John Cotton’s sequence for those conversions was widely accepted. He argued that first the Jews would be converted, then the Roman church would be destroyed at Armageddon, and then pagans would be converted worldwide.

John Eliot was convinced by Thomas Thorowgood’s Jewes in America (published in 1650) that the American Indians were actually the lost tribes of Israel. Edward Winslow, the diplomat of Massachusetts Bay to the Indians, acquainted John Eliot with Thorowgood’s theory before it was published. Eliot was soon converted to Thorowgood’s opinion. He wrote a detailed letter to Thorowgood, which was published as the preface to the second edition of Jewes in America in 1652. The letter expounded the history of the movement of Noah’s descendants after the Flood, taken from Genesis. Eliot theorized that as the Jews who moved east and became the Indians met with the Englishmen who moved west into New England, the unity lost at Babel would be restored. Their meeting would be the beginning of the end of time. The Indians would be not the last but the first wave of worldwide conversions, for they were not heathens but Jews.[2]

I don’t know how these men came to share this unusual eschatology. They were at Cambridge together for several years, Eliot working on his BA and Herbert serving as university orator. Religiously they had some similarities, but Eliot was a Puritan and Herbert was at least mildly anti-Puritan. The literary tradition translatio studii held that learning moved west, and Herbert’s poem is considered an example of that tradition. That tradition is part of the explanation for Herbert, I think, but the connection between learning and the gospel and the connection between Herbert and Eliot needs further explaining. Perhaps studying the eschatology of other seventeenth-century religious figures will reveal the explanation, or perhaps the secondary literature already has an answer.

1. Helen Wilcox, “Herbert, George (1593–1633),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13025, accessed 15 Feb 2008). ↩
2. Michael P. Clark, ed., The Eliot Tracts: With Letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and Richard Baxter, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 410-27. ↩