This story clearly illustrates the stupid credulity and superstition of the primitive age of the church, and the faculty of imposing any fictions upon the people, which their leaders saw fit to inculcate. The doctrine of the _millennium_ designates a certain period in the history of the world, lasting for a long, indefinite space (vaguely a _thousand years_, as the word "_millennium_" implies) during which the kingdom of _Christ Jesus_ will be visibly established on the earth. The idea undoubtedly originated proximately in the Messianic expectation of the Jews (as Jesus _did not_ sit on the throne of David and become an earthly ruler, it _must be_ that he is _coming again_ for this purpose), but more remotely in the Pagan doctrine of the final triumph of the several "Christs" over their adversaries. In the first century of the Church, _millenarianism_ was a _whispered_ belief, to which the book of Daniel, and more particularly the predictions of the _Apocalypse_[236:1] gave an apostolical authority, but, when the church imbibed _Paganism_, their belief on this subject lent it a more vivid coloring and imagery. The unanimity which the early Christian teachers exhibit in regard to _millenarianism_, proves how strongly it had laid hold of the imagination of the Church, to which, in this early stage, immortality and future rewards were to a great extent things of this world as yet. Not only did Cerinthus, but even the orthodox doctors--such as Papias (Bishop of Hierapolis), Irenæus, Justin Martyr and others--delighted themselves with dreams of the glory and magnificence of the millennial kingdom. Papias, in his collection of traditional sayings of Christ Jesus, indulges in the most monstrous representations of the re-building of Jerusalem, and the colossal vines and grapes of the millennial reign. According to the general opinion, the millennium was to be preceded by great calamities, after which the Messiah, _Christ Jesus_, would appear, and would bind Satan for a thousand years, annihilate the godless heathen, or make them slaves of the believers, overturn the Roman empire, from the ruins of which a new order of things would spring forth, in which "the dead in Christ" would rise, and along with the surviving saints enjoy an incomparable felicity in the city of the "New Jerusalem." Finally, all nations would bend their knee to _him_, and acknowledge _him only_ to be _the Christ_--his religion would reign supreme. This is the "Golden Age" of the future, which all nations of antiquity believed in and looked forward to.