FIFTH-MONARCHY MEN:--At first sight this does not appear a new sect, but merely a continuation of the old MILLENARIES or CHILIASTS (Vol. III, pp. 152-153), who believed that the Personal Reign of Christ on Earth for a thousand years was approaching. The change of name, however, indicates greater precision in the belief, and also greater intensity. According to the wild system of Universal Chronology then in vogue, the past History of the World, on this side of the Flood, had consisted of four great successive Empires or Monarchies--the Assyrian, which ended B.C. 531; the Persian, which ended B.C. 331; the Macedonian, or Greek Empire of Alexander, which was made to stretch to B.C. 44; and the Roman, which had begun B.C. 44, with the Accession of Augustus Cæsar, and which had included, though people might not see how, all that had happened on the Earth since then. But this last Monarchy was tottering, and a Fifth Universal Monarchy was at hand. It was that foreshadowed in Rev. xx.: "And I saw an Angel come down from Heaven, having the key of the Bottomless Pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the Dragon, that great serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season. And I saw Thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the worship of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished." This prophecy was the property of all Christians, and might receive different interpretations. The literal interpretation, favoured by some theologians, was that, at some date fast approaching, Christ would reappear visibly on Earth, accompanied by the re-embodied souls of dead saints and martyrs, while the rest of the dead slept on, and that in the glorious reign of Righteousness and the subjugation of all Evil thus begun for a thousand years men then living, or the true saints among them, might partake. This interpretation, though scouted by the more rational theologians, had seized on many of the more fervid English Independents and Sectaries, so that they had begun to see, in the great events of their own time and land, the dazzling edge of the near Millennium. The doctrine had caught the souls of Harrison and other men of action, hitherto classed as Anabaptists or Seekers. Now, so far there was no harm in it, nor could any of the orthodox who rejected it for themselves dare to treat it as one of the heresies to be restrained by the Civil Magistrate. Evidently,