But Mr. Coates has proclaimed that next year will see the Lord back again in the world. and has. if I understand him richtly, offered the fulfilment or falsification of this anticipation as a final test of the truth of Scripture.
For this I do not think he has authority in the Scrivture. and apart from Scripture, he himself has admitted, he has no knowledge.
The presence of a chronology in Serinture prophecy is indeed admitted. Not only the crying need of the times, but also chronological prediction in Daniel, auickendd expectations of Messiah about the time when He was born. And chronological prophecies influence students in regarding this age as near its completion now.
For example, one of the most profound and earnest students of prophetic cycles, the late Dr. Gratton Guinness, has given special attention to the predicted time of Jewish snbiection to the. nations. He anticipated that as Jewish independence was lost gradually, so, if the predicted period was reckoned in turn from the successive stages of the subjection, the resulting dates would mark turning points in the promised restoration. His anticipations have been remarkably fulfilled in the dates of the foundation of the Universal Tsraelite Alliance and of the Zionist movement, as well as in the events connected with the capture of Jerusalem from the Turks, and the present Mandate for Palestine. Two dates yet remain, which,-it is anticipated, will mark the final stages in the complete restoration of Jewish independence, viz. the years 1923 and 1934.
Now students of prophecy all think that the resto: ation of Jewish independence is a necessary _preliminary to the introduction of the new age. The return of the Lord to this world is also bound up with the re-establishment of the Jews in their own land. May we not think then that this return is now really not far distant?
But Mr. Coates gees further than this. He says it will take place next year. This positive statement rests, as he-has told us, not on plain statements of Scripture, on which we depend for the knowledge of the Lord's Return, but on a complicated series of deductions from ture.
The statement then bears the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.