e.reislnauer.aworld in crisis and transition:the millennialand the modern in britain 1914-1918

7/30/2019 e.reislnauer.aworld in crisis and transition:the millennialand the modern in britain 1914-1918

1/17

This article was downloaded by: [176.241.225.15]On: 30 December 2012, At: 01:24Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

First World War StudiesPublication detai ls, including instructions for authors and

subscr ipt ion inf ormat ion:

h t t p : / / w w w. ta n dfo nl i ne . co m / l oi / r fw w 2 0

A world in crisis and t ransit ion: the

mil lennial and the modern in Brit ain,

19141918Eric M. Reisenauer

a

a Division of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education,Universit y of Sout h Carol ina, Sum t er, SC, USA

Version of record f irst publ i shed: 04 Nov 2011.

To cite this art icle: Eri c M. Reisenauer ( 2011) : A w or ld in cr is is and tr ansi t ion: t he mi l lennia l an d

t he m odern i n Brit ain, 19141918, First World War St udies, 2:2, 217-232

To link t o thi s art icle: ht t p : / / dx .do i .o rg/ 10.1080/ 19475020.2011.613244

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representationthat the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of anyinstructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primarysources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19475020.2011.613244http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfww20


2/17

A world in crisis and transition: the millennial and the modern in Britain,19141918

Eric M. Reisenauer*

Division of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education, University of South Carolina, Sumter,SC, USA

The link between modernism and the First World War is, by this time, a standardtopic in the historiography of the conflict. Discussion on this topic often centreson the nature and strength of this connection with debate rising as to whether thewar, as Vincent Sherry states, locates the moment in which the new sensibility ofEnglish and international modernism comes fully into existence or not(Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003, 6). Disagreement as to the wars impact on literature andother aspects of Western culture is well known and the debate spawned by thisdisagreement is a vigorous one. One of the deepest wells of this vigour is theshifting definition and application of the term modernism with regard to thevarious intellectual and artistic forms that emerged in the wartime and post-warcultural landscape. While not entering into this debate directly, this articleexamines elements of religious thought that attended the war years, specificallymillennial expectation and theological modernism, assessing their relationships to

each other and to the broader culture, especially the emergence of aestheticmodernism. These responses to the cataclysm of the war interacted in ways thatcontributed to and reflected the sense of rupture that is so often associated withthe First World War. While often overlooked, this aspect of the religious historyof the war years adds a new complexity to the debate swirling around the war andits relationship to modernism.

Keywords: aesthetic modernism; millennialism; religious modernism; Britain;prophecy

The millennialist anticipation that accompanied the war was in its language and its

concepts thoroughly unmodern, sharing nearly identical claims and arguments with

virtually all eschatological texts written since the sixteenth century.1 Jay Winter has

identified the abundance of apocalyptic imagery that appeared in response to the war

as an avalanche of the unmodern.2 Millennialists themselves rejected any notion

of their belief as something modern, regarding it as one of the oldest most precious

truths of Scripture.3 Yet its resurgence in the early twentieth century, at a level of

intensity not seen in generations, suggests that millennialism was not devoid of all

engagement with modernity nor with the other responses to it, specifically with the

theological and aesthetic modernisms. To the first, millennialists reacted with deep

and sweeping contempt, regarding modernist theologians as among the most

*Email: [email protected]

First World War Studies

Vol. 2, No. 2, October 2011, 217232

ISSN 1947-5020 print/ISSN 1947-5039 online

2011 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19475020.2011.613244

http://www.tandfonline.com


3/17

pernicious enemies of the faith. Their push to rationalize and critically examine

Christian history, documents, and doctrine in the name of preserving the faith,

millennialists argued, constituted nothing less than the Great Apostasy predicted to

take hold of the Church in the End Times.4 To the second, millennialists had less to

say directly, though they did reject the centrality of the self and the attempts at self-

redemption found in much modernist culture. This interiority denied the necessity

for an exterior agent, namely Christ, in mankinds moral and spiritual advancement.

Yet for all of its anti-modernist sensibilities, this wartime burst of millennialism

was as much a response to the conditions of modernity as the modernisms were and, as

a consequence, held much in common with them. It shared with religious modernism a

desire to persuade an increasingly secular society of the continuing relevance of

Christianity. Along with the aesthetic modernist, the millennialist possessed an uneasy

ambivalence about the modern world, finding in its pace, complexity, and social,

religious and political upheavals every indication of an impending crisis. This crisis has

long been predicted and its progress and outcome were graphically portrayed in the

pages of Scripture. Some authors, for instance, expressed their belief that manyrealities of modern life including addictions to coffee and tea, the printing press,

railways, artificial light, global trade, science, revolution and imperialism were

represented in the Book of Revelation and were leading the modern nations of the

world towards Armageddon. In this way, Frederic Jamesons assessment that aesthetic

modernist works were not simply transcriptions or symptoms of a profound cultural

upheaval, but at the same time responses wherein their authors sought to pictorialize

their understanding and so make sense of that upheaval, could easily be applied to the

millennialist visions of the time as well.5

The place of the millennialist response to the war in the cultural and religious

history of the period has received little attention. This is partly because historicalinquiry into the relationship between popular religion and the First World War is

still in its infancy. As Michael Snape has noted, the lack of detailed research into

the popular religious life during the war years remains a major lacuna in the

extensive historiography of British society.6 While a number of works have

emphasized the presence and responses of organized religion just prior to and

during the conflict,7 those which attempt to explore the impact of the war on the

religious feelings and attitudes in other words, the popular culture of religion

are only now beginning to appear.8 None of these, it is telling to note, addresses

the spike in millennialism that erupted in Britain during the conflict and its

relationship to the wider intellectual ruptures of the period.9 One of the most

recent scholars to explore the link between the apocalypticism and modernity

virtually elides the Great War in his sweeping and insightful analysis.10 This is

despite the frequency with which the term Armageddon has been used to

describe the war almost from the very day it broke out up to today. Indeed, in

1918 Londons Daily News reported that the Great War has been called

metaphorically the Battle of Armageddon numberless times by writers in all

countries.11 The Apocalypse, understood either literally or figuratively, clearly

was on many peoples minds during the war years. The wide appeal of

apocalyptic language is quite easy to understand. In 1917, the Senior Chaplain to

the Forces explained that for a great many people, only imagery like that of

Patmos can express the trials and experiences through which we are passing.12

Of course, the Christian response to the war was hardly limited to those who

professed a progressive theology or the imminence of the eschaton. Countless more

218 E.M. Reisenauer


4/17

traditional and evangelical pastors and theologians preached and published on the

war, guiding the faithful in an understanding of its meaning. I do not focus on

these in this article not because I believe them to be unimportant to the spiritual

history of the period, but because they lie beyond my arguments scope. For many

of these Christian writers and preachers, the war represented a call to a renewal of

Christian virtue and righteousness. Ideals of duty, honour, service, justice, mercy,

sacrifice, atonement, and even love were intoned again and again from the pulpit

as the moral underpinnings of the conflict a Just War if there ever was one. The

war was often presented as an expression of the Will of God, a judgment upon the

nations, a new crusade, a call for redemption of both self and nation, and even a

war between Christ and the devil.13 In a sermon delivered in his cathedral on the

very opening edge of the war, the Dean of Norwich, Henry Charles Beeching,

voiced his belief that it is a holy war in which we have taken our part; a war of

Christ against anti-Christ.14 But for all of this intensity of feeling, much

traditional Christian thought still viewed the war in continuity with the past.15 It

was bigger, more demanding and more deadly, to be sure; but not fundamentallydifferent from those past conflicts that had called upon the righteous to pledge

their lives and service to God. Theological modernism and millennialism (along

with aesthetic modernism) are the focus here precisely because they viewed the war

in terms of rupture rather than continuity. The world was not simply to be

cleansed by the war, but a whole new reality was to replace it, based on new

assumptions with a fundamentally changed character. The war was to be the great

pivot-point in human history when the relationships between God and man and

between man and man would be re-forged along new lines. While traditional and

mainstream Christianity called upon those both at home and on the front to

embrace with a renewed spirit the truths and demands of their faith, moderntheologians and millennialists expressed their belief that everything was about to

change and a new dispensation was ready to unfold. An apocalypse literally, an

unveiling of something hitherto hidden was surely at hand.

Certainly, the term apocalypse was invoked much of the time purely as

metaphor; nonetheless, there were many thousands of people in Britain who

intended nothing allegorical or metaphorical at all in their use of such language. For

them, the war was indeed the Biblical Armageddon or, at the very least, its

immediate precursor. The popularity of such anticipation can be gauged in part by

the torrent of literature that flowed from British presses propounding the imminence

of Christs Second Coming. More than 300 new works, or reprinted editions of older

ones, appeared in Britain and the Empire during the war or shortly thereafter.

Moreover, several of these saw multiple reprintings such as E.L. Langstons

Ominous Days, which went through five editions between 1914 and 1918, and Robert

Middletons The Coming Great World Changes (1918), which underwent five

impressions in a single year. Also, while millennialist speculation was either ignored

or derided in the scholarly theological literature of the time, a number of more

popular religious periodicals regularly and sympathetically addressed this topic.

These included the evangelical Church of England paper, The Record, and the even

more evangelical non-sectarian Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times, which, at

more than a quarter million sales per week, boasted the largest circulation of any

non-sectarian religious paper in the country. In addition, preachers and apologistsdelivered numerous and well-attended lectures on the topic, and various groups met

regularly to discuss it.16 By 1918, prominent clergy in both Great Britain and Ireland

First World War Studies 219


5/17

signed documents styled Advent Testimonies expressing their belief that the war was

indeed in preparation for Christs coming. At the end of the war, a new organization,

the Advent Preparation and Prayer Union, began to issue a monthly bulletin to keep

watch on the times.17

The spike in wartime millennialism did not go unnoticed. Literary critic Fernand

Baldensperger remarked in 1918 that while other nations had shown some tendency

toward employing prophecies in times of war, it was the British who have specially

indulged in interpretation of the Scripture; and the world war in the light of the

religious or biblical prophecy has been a current topic on the English bookmarket.18

A former principal of Westfield College, London, noted that a widespread

conviction has taken hold of the Church of Christ that the Coming of the Lord is

close at hand. All may not agree as to the definite promises and events on which this

great hope is founded, but that it prevails as something verging on certainty in the

hearts of many of the most devoted we cannot doubt.19 As Baldensperger made

plain, not since the Napoleonic wars had there been such an outburst of millennialist

expectation nor has this level been reached since.The magnitude and general character of the war was itself sufficient to

stimulate prophetic inquiry. Armageddon was to be an unprecedented conflict

involving all the nations of the earth and, as one commentator noted, so it is now

on everyones lips that no war comparable to the present has been waged since the

world began.20 The nature of modern warfare, with its technological efficiency

enhancing the pace of death and destruction, brought the present diabolical war

even more in line with the descriptions of the Apocalypse. Referencing the portion

of Revelation that speaks of devils working miracles of destruction upon the face

of the earth, one author advanced the idea that one of these unclean spirits may

well be the spirit of War, which has been abroad of late years, inciting the kingsof the Earth to vie with each other in armaments. The modern engines of

destruction on land, and in the air, and on and under the sea might well have been

described by the prophet as devilish and to have appeared to him to work

miracles.21 The Rev. William Tytler, who had spent nearly 25 years delivering

public lectures on prophecy, addressed the prophetic place of these new deadly

machines in 1916:

Ten nations in Europe at war give a forecast of wars and rumours of wars, nation risingagainst nation, kingdom against kingdom, famines, pestilences and earthquakes. Theflying machines will be required for the great battle that is to take place in the air, which

will be carried on by the Prince of the Power of the Air; every gun, every sword, everybattleship, every dreadnought and super-dreadnought. Every air-ship and flyingmachine will be brought into requisition, fulfilling the many Scriptures which foretellthese solemn events.22

The visions of demons and monsters descending upon mankind that had so terrified

St. John in his exile were now brought to fulfilment through humanitys own

technological ingenuity.

The horrific nature of the war, however, was necessary but not sufficient to

establish its bona fides as the eschaton. After all, every significant conflict brought

out wide-eyed enthusiasts proclaiming the end of days, all of them being so far

disappointed by the ensuing events. Even millennialist authors warned their readersagainst being carried away by a general sense of upheaval; rather, they were exhorted

to look for only specific and unmistakable signs.23 Yet this war did seemingly possess

220 E.M. Reisenauer


6/17

most of the required hallmarks of the Apocalypse, eerily fitting the description of the

end times as found in both the Scriptures and in exegetical works on prophecy

produced over the previous two centuries.24 The most important of these hallmarks

were confirmed by events in the Eastern theatre of the war, especially the entry of the

Ottoman Empire into the conflict and its ensuing fortunes. Turkeys expulsion from

Palestine and the promise of a Jewish homeland in the region near the end of the war

only further cemented millennialist conviction regarding the imminent Second

Advent. The events of the last two months of 1917 namely, the issuance of the

Balfour Declaration, which promised the British governments best efforts in

establishing a Jewish state in Palestine and General Allenbys entry into Jerusalem

filled millennialists with unmitigated glee.25 These events, as well as the revolutions

in Russia and the various proposals for a league of nations, thoroughly convinced

many of the wars prophetic significance as it reached its end in 1918. It is generally

admitted, one author wrote, that the sands of this dispensation are running out,

that the pages of prophecy are being fulfilled before our very eyes, and preachers of

all denominations are proclaiming the approaching Advent of our Lord.26 For allthe certainties shattered by the war, then, the one that was increasingly shored up

during its course was that concerning its place in the prophecies.

At the other end of the theological spectrum, modernist theologians also

responded to and were shaped by the war. Theological modernism, though first

appearing as a term designating a movement in Catholic thought during the late

nineteenth century, came to be applied (especially after its formal condemnation as

the synthesis of all heresies in 1907 by Pius X) to a liberal-progressive form of

Protestantism early in the twentieth century. Religious modernists adopted the latest

findings in the fields of history, linguistics, psychology, archaeology and the natural

sciences, as well as much of the Biblical criticism originating in Germany, anddiligently employed these in an attempt to construct a Christian faith deemed

suitable for the modern age. In their view, the Christian faith needed to be reshaped

in light of new scholarly and scientific discoveries. Suspicious of rigid doctrine and

downplaying the miraculous, the prophetic, and the apocalyptic, these modernists

concentrated instead on the moral example set by Jesus and his message of Gods

love for mankind. In short, as Alfred Fawkes explained, modernism may be

described as the shape religion takes in the mind of the modern as distinct from the

medieval man.27 Religious modernists in general also embraced an Enlightenment

notion of human progress and envisioned Christian beliefs and morality as powerful

instruments in progressive and ameliorative social, economic, and political change.28

Traditional Christianity, with its emphasis on the mysterious and miraculous as well

as its anticipation of the physical return of Christ, belonged to a more primitive age.

Ultimately, they predicted, such simplistic beliefs would be put aside like toys that a

child has outgrown. Should Christianity refuse to embrace modernity, then it would

not survive: for life is movement, Fawkes went on to explain, and where movement

is extinct or excluded, death is near.29

By the eve of the First World War, many such modernists were confident that

this new day had indeed begun to dawn for Christianity, though none was so

sanguine as to believe that it was as yet universally embraced. In 1913, Neville

Talbot, chaplain of Balliol College, Oxford, assessed this Modern Situation in the

following way. He proposed that the current generation of Britons was modern inthe sense that it is not Victorian essentially meaning that its education and mindset

had changed, from a reliance upon, to the criticism of, assumptions.30 This change



7/17

was still slow in coming to the realm of religious faith, as the engrained dominance

of Scripture ideas in British minds has given them a watertightness against currents

which have been ready to flow into them ever since the time of Copernicus and the

Renaissance. Despite this, ever since Charles Darwin, the ultimate triumph of these

currents seemed assured; and Talbot was confident that before long the

contemporary British Christian cannot wholly escape he is not escaping

convulsion.31 Thus outlined here is the great divergence and concurrence of two

great visions: between what Talbot deemed the older, more limited, world of

millennial expectations and the modern one composed of endless vistas.32 The

outbreak of war the next year provided the opportunity for both these visions to find

voice and contend to be heard. For the millennialists, the war seemed to be the event

toward which all their attention indeed, the plan of the whole world had been

tuned for ages. Theological modernists, on the other hand, hoped that the war would

serve as Gods great purgative and usher in a new age when the Christian ideal of

universal brotherhood and cooperation could finally flourish and mankind would

truly build for itself the Kingdom of God.A consideration of these two religious strains, each contending to make sense out

of the war for a modern British public, adds a new complexity to the debate

regarding the war and modernism. Millennial expectation, modernist theology, and

aesthetic modernism converged with and defied each other on many levels, blurring

the lines between the modern and the unmodern. Beyond the name, the two

modernisms shared important characteristics, most essentially that of a rebellious

spirit and a willingness to challenge traditional beliefs or those received as either

revealed knowledge or metaphysically self-evident truths. That this basic spirit of

disruption should exist within both is hardly surprising in Gary Leases view since, if

one accepts Stephen Kerns understanding of modernism as a cultural revolutioninvolving the essential structures of experience and basic forms of expression, no

more fundamental area of human experience and expression can be found than that

of religion.33 They also shared a contemporary stage, emerging and flourishing

together.34 Moreover, though not born out of the war, they each certainly derived

energy from its upheavals.35 Yet despite being coeval and somewhat kindred in

spirit, it would be a mistake to align the two modernisms too closely. As James

Livingston succinctly notes at the end of his sweeping survey of nineteenth-century

religious thought in Britain, literary and artistic Modernism did not emerge from

the same intellectual or cultural sources as did theological and religious modernism.

And their identification has proved to be the source of confusion in recent

discussions of religion.36 After all, theological modernisms central methodology

was to embrace the very rationalism, liberalism, faith in human progress, and

political optimism that aesthetic modernism deliberately called into question. That

both preached rebellion is true, yet each rebelled against very different things.

Millennialisms relationship to both modernisms is also complicated. As

indicated above, their literalist acceptance of the biblical Apocalypse, being very

unmodern, set millennialists apart from both theological and aesthetic modernists.

Yet the impulse of apocalyptic thought was alien neither to the aesthetic modernist

nor to the religious modernist. Like the millennialists, modernist authors and artists

shared a conviction, as Frank Kermode writes, that they existed at the end of an

epoch, in a time of transition, on a ridge of history from which the contours of thewhole are visible. Indeed, the raw literalism of the millennialists has much more in

common with D.H. Lawrence than might have been suspected.37 In their seminal

222 E.M. Reisenauer


8/17

work on modernist culture, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane explain that

the apocalyptic themes found in modernism are in fact central to the movement and

that one reason why the post-war period was considered so crucial in the history of

modernism is that the war itself can be considered as the apocalyptic moment of

transition into the new.38 Rennie Schoepflin reminds us also that the modernists

critique of modernity grew, in part, out of the apocalyptic horrors of modern

warfare.39 An apocalyptic spirit possessed most modernist theologians as well. They

were clearly embarrassed by the increase in millennial frenzy that had gripped their

countrymen since the beginning of the war, seeing it as an antiquated and atavistic

characteristic of Christian faith. Percy Gardner, who served as president of the

modernist Churchmans Union during the war, lamented its impact on the religious

landscape of his country, noting that at present among ourselves in England, we

may find traces or even more than traces of primitive phases in the history of

religion. This has been strikingly the case since the Great War, for war drives the

passions and impulses of men back to a more primitive level.40 Even more

threatening to the goals of the religious modernists, however, was the millennialistsinsistence on the Second Advent of Christ as the necessary event in the worlds

salvation. This enthusiasm, they contended, has the potential to divert the thoughts

of the Christian Church away from social problems and various systems of

reconstruction adapted to things as they are in the world today.41 Yet, while

rejecting a literal reading of the prophecies, such theologians did accept the idea of a

coming earthly Kingdom of God. In their view, however, God would work in history

through the efforts of the righteous, not from outside it by means of direct divine

intervention. Ultimately, Christs kingdom would be brought about through political

and social progress, albeit divinely driven. The war, though brutal beyond measure,

would contribute to this progress. A cataclysm of such proportion could not help butto sweep away the old world and clear a path for a new vision of heaven and earth.

F.W. Orde Ward concluded in 1918 that the war

which has shaken the whole world, both civilized and uncivilized, and shattered so manyillusions and will shatter so many more, which proves that they were but prelusions ofhigher things, must, unless it prove a failure that we know to be impossible, produce acomplete reconstruction of everything, of religion and morality, and, therefore, ofSociety.42

In the estimation of the modernist theologian the Rev. Dean William R. Inge, the

myth of progress is our form of apocalypticism.43 In a strange twist, therefore,

though they might recognize little of themselves in the millennialists, the war brought

these religious modernists into some agreement with them; at the very least in their

mutual recognition, according to Richard Gamble, that in one sense or another, the

war on earth was linked up with a war in heaven.44

The commonalities between millennialists and aesthetic modernists were in some

ways even more evident. What Arthur Williamson writes regarding the shared

characteristics of the millennialists and modernistic Futurist movement of the pre-

war years could easily be claimed for the larger modernist movement as a whole.

Both movements, he notes, bristled with expectations of cataclysmic change. Both

rejected long familiar continuities. Both discounted linear time. [. . .] Both separated

themselves from the confident, optimistic assumptions that seemed to characterizethe era they inhabited.45 The malleable and layered nature of time evident in both

the modernist and millennialist understanding of the human experience is worth



9/17

exploring. For all their biblical literalism, millennialists were not above bending the

literal word of the Bible in order to make sense of the prophecies. This is especially

evident in their use of temporal terms and concepts which, despite such terms

centrality to the millennialist vision, possessed a fluidity which nearly emptied them

of any objective criteria. One finds this most clearly in the practice of prophetic

chronology that had emerged in the nineteenth century and played an important

role in establishing the Great Wars eschatological credentials.46 A central

component of this chronology was the dayyear theory, which had established

itself as a mainstay in millennialist writings by the time of the war. This theory

argued that in the language of the prophets, the terms day, week and year did not

necessarily correspond to their literal meaning but rather to another period, most

commonly (but not uniformly) a day signifying a year. Even more elastic was the

prophetic term times, which could be applied to all sorts of periods. It was by this

method of interpretation that Dr. H. Grattan Guinness had been able to predict, as

early as the 1880s, that 1917 would see the collapse of Turkish control over the Holy

Land a prediction which, to the millennialists great delight, was fulfilled almostexactly.47 But for days to be years and for weeks of days to be centuries,

millennialists needed to embrace an almost relativistic understanding of time where

its passage is not a constant but a variable. Moreover, the application of prophetic

chronology depended wholly on the selection of a starting-point from which the

predicted periods could be applied to determine their terminus. These starting-points

also proved to be highly interpretive, often bridging and overlapping various periods

and timelines and connecting past, present, and future in an integrated whole. A

similar conception of time its relativistic structure, its interpretative and flexible

nature, its ability to fold back onto itself so that all chronology becomes subjective

rather than objective can be found among aesthetic modernist authors and artistsand philosophers.

More concretely, both groups emphatically rejected the decadence of the present

order of things and embraced a deep irrationality that angrily dismissed liberalism,

socialism, democracy, for an elitist world of transcendent authority.48 Such

sentiment is easily seen in the writings of millennialists. Jonathan Bayley in 1915

wrote plainly: the world is disjointed, corrupted, profligate, fraudulent, turbulent,

immoral, and miserable; it is time it were judged and burnt up.49 Nietzsches thought

especially, Williamson notes, gave an unintentional boost to millennialist assertions,

in that it made all significant truth claims untestable and thereby equally valid.

Both Nietzsche and the millennialists were, then, manifestations of a growing unease

with cold ineffectual knowledge and its putative progress.50 As a result, both

millennialists and aesthetic modernists shared an apprehensive response to the crisis

of modernity and foretold a precipitous decline and fall.51 Michael Levenson, in

discussing the bases of modernism, has identified crisis as the central term of art in

discussions of this turbulent cultural movement.52 A similar sense of present and

impending crisis was prominent in early twentieth-century millennialist analyses of

society. In 1903, John Ellam remarked that everywhere one looked in modern

society, one witnessed the ever increasing sweep of the rapids, bringing with it

apprehension, insecurity and a recognition that things are in a state of tension,

everyone feels that a crisis of some sort is approaching.53 Writing on the very eve of

the war, Robert Middleton noted with trepidation the nature of his era: We live inan age of rapid transitions, he writes in his A Message for the Times. It is an age of

change in almost every department of life: an age of evolution and revolution; an age

224 E.M. Reisenauer


10/17

when everything is put in the melting pot to be tested; an age when ancient

landmarks count for little if they fit not in with modern needs; an age when the

established customs of millenniums are shattered and replaced by modern ideas in

less than a decade.54

This foundational agreement between millennialists and modernists concerning

the emergence of the modern world and the conditions of crisis that permeate its

unfolding is striking. Most millennialists believed the war to be a result of a long-

smouldering fire, stoked to terrible conflagration by a host of changes cultural,

religious, political, and scientific that had unmoored mankind from its traditions.

It was a traumatic disruption in the timeline, a unprecedented trauma that would

replace linear time, as it had been known since the foundation of the world, with a

vague and uncertain vision of the future. For as much as millennialists were

confident in the imminence of the coming and earthly reign of Christ, none spoke

with any clarity as to how such a reign would be actually experienced by those who

lived to see it. Millennialism was, in this respect, a decidedly modernist response to

the war.55 The entire millennialist approach to modernity, in fact, aligns nicely withSusan Stanford Friedmans understanding of modernism as the expressive

dimension of any given modernity a modernity that she describes as consisting

of, in part, a powerful vortex of historical conditions that coalesce to produce sharp

ruptures from the past that range widely across various sectors of a given society.56

As such, Williamsons contention that the intellectual thrust of the early twentieth

century, even at its most sophisticated, melded surprisingly well with premillennial

expectations and spirituality and that millennialism, far from being isolated from

the larger cultural issues of the age, was rather a manifestation of [the periods]

central preoccupations, seems well justified.57

Despite these broad lines of agreement, however, millennialists nonethelessrejected important driving concepts behind both modernisms. Millennialists were

most threatened by religious modernism, which they characterized as the great

enemy.58 Religious modernists, by rejecting Biblical literalism, undermined true

and traditional Christian faith. More immediately, however, many millennialists

saw in theological modernism one of the major factors in the decayed state of the

world, some even viewing it as the cause of the war. It was no accident, they

asserted, that Germany was the birthplace of both Biblical higher criticism and

the World War. Works such as Sir Andrew Wingates Modern Unrest and the

Bible (1914) and Sir Robert Andersons The Higher Criticism and the War (1915)

contended that Continental-based biblical criticism constituted, in itself, a kind of

invasion the most subtle attack that has ever been launched against the faith. 59

Leonard Argyle was even more explicit in his claims connecting the attack on

traditional Christian faith to the war: The men who are largely responsible for

all this misery, this awful catastrophe, he argues, are the destructive Higher

Critics. The link between them and the war was seemingly self-evident. As a

result of their insidious theories, the Bible, with its power over the consciences of

men, has been steadily mutilated, its truth and historicity repeatedly questioned

and perverted by the so-called higher critics, and finally supplanted in the

estimation of the nations by the writings of Haeckal, Bernhardi, Nietzsche,

Treitschke, and others believing in the all-conquering power of brute force.60 The

scepticism and doubt that higher criticism had sown among the faithful hademptied mankinds souls of the truths of Christianity and left them vulnerable to

other beliefs. As the Prophetic News noted in 1915: Most of our Higher Critics



11/17

of to-day imbibed their heterodoxy [. . .] from German sources, and German

theologians, thinkers, and militarists built their faith on the pernicious doctrines

of Nietzsche and Bernhardi doctrines that are bearing such terrible fruit in the

godlessness and the barbarities of the German Army.61

Repugnant too was theological modernisms progressive spirit. Though Dean

Inge had equated the idea of progress with the apocalyptic hope, the millennialists

regarded any belief in the ameliorative role of the Christian church as inimical to the

prophecies, and thus doomed to failure. Modern theologians had blasphemously

replaced the Christian millennium with the modern and popular doctrine of the

upward progress of the race.62 Marr Murray, in his Bible Prophecies and the

Present War (1916), explained that

we were, they informed us, growing better and better; soon we should reach the gloriousman-made millennium towards which everything was steadily marching. [. . .] Even so-called ministers of God, who evidently had never even glanced at the prophecies whichcomprise a third of the Book which they professed to hold sacred, were found to bearguing on these lines.63

The war, of course, had proved them all wrong. The storm clouds finally broke, and

the crimson flood swept away the vain fancies that had been idly woven in the days

of peace. 64 Indeed, all that modern progress had achieved, far from the redemption

of mankind, was its bloody near-extinction. But it was not only modernist

theologians who had brought about destruction. The entire trajectory of the modern

world the structures of which modernists theologians depended upon was to

blame. We are living in days when all past human calculations have been rudely

swept into the background, Hope Charles Tiarks wrote in 1918:

The Great War which burst upon the world like a bolt from the blue, found men of allconditions, religious and non-religious, planning and working for world-progress, underthe fixed but mistaken belief that world betterment, and the human emancipation fromevil, must come from within. That man, as represented by organized society, in thisenlightened age was incapable of anything that would violate the public conscience. [. . .]Working out his own salvation by means of culture, education, enterprise, andinvention, man was honestly believed to be on the high road of self-justification, and theattainment of undisputed inherent moral supremacy.65

For millennialists, only the personal reign of Christ brought about by the event of

the Apocalypse could bring about the perfection for which the modern world hoped.

It would be a perfection brought about by the end of human society (for Christs

kingdom would replace all human social structures with divine ones) rather than by

its progress.

While aesthetic modernists did not inspire the same depth of antagonism among

most millennialists (who probably rarely gave them much thought), there existed a

deep incompatibility between them. Modernisms bedrock conception of man as a

solitary, asocial being for whom honest relationships with others are an impossibility

is at odds with the traditional Christian anthropology found in millennialism. For

millennialists, individual humans may find themselves isolated and even excluded

from the millennial Kingdom of Christ upon the Earth damned, if you will but

such exclusion does not form the central fact of, or most authentic expression of,human existence in relation to co-equal membership in the Body of Christ.

Furthermore, the nihilism that characterized modernist works is also incompatible

226 E.M. Reisenauer


12/17

with Christian millennialism. Modernisms uncertainty about the origins and

ultimate meaning of mans existence, not just in their content but in their very

reality, made the hope for any objective realization of these difficult. Such nihilism

was soundly rejected by millennialist authors, who described it as contributing to the

present crisis and indeed as being itself a manifestation of the Antichrist.66 Millennial

expectation was fundamentally about hope a certain and specific hope, the

culmination of which would fully complete and make evident to all mankinds origin

and purpose. At core, modernism offered neither redemption nor consolation; at

least, not in anything outside the narrow confines of a broken humanity and its own

limited powers of expression if even there.67 This limitation was even more

profound in the experience of the war. As Tammy Clewell convincingly shows,

modernist authors and artists (Clewell focuses on Virginia Woolf) deliberately

denounced any consolatory effects of the vast national and personal mourning

occasioned by the war losses.68 Any notion of a limited (and ultimately illusory) self-

redemption was rejected by millennialists, for whom complete and divine redemption

and consolation were fundamental realities. Whatever value their belief had wasfound almost solely in them. We thus rest in the belief that the present European or,

rather now, world wide war is the Armageddon of Scripture, John MacKay told his

readers in 1915, and our consolation is that, as in nature, the darkest hour oft just

precedes the dawn, so now, in the midst of our present sorrows, Scripture assures us

that our redemption must be drawing nigh.69

Recognizing the intersections and divergences of millennialism, modernist

theology and aesthetic modernism that occurred in the crucible of the First World

War reshapes the debate regarding the link between the war and modernism by

blurring the definition of what was and what was not modern. The radical nature of

aesthetic modernism, so deeply dependent on an apocalyptic apprehension ofrupture and crisis as well as its focus on the irrational and the concept of personal

redemption (even in its denial), was perhaps not so new or radical after all. Although

absent from it is any appreciation of the Christian eschaton beyond the

metaphorical, it is perhaps best seen to be in continuity with, rather than violently

breaking from, a long millennialist tradition in the West. Religious modernism, too,

straddles the line between the accepted notions of the pre- and post-war worlds.

While its progressive, secular, anti-metaphysical focus is surely in line with the

secularization of European society that gained pace in the wake of the war, religious

modernism never relinquished a faith in the rationalist, positivistic, and scientifically

verifiable world that characterized much of the nineteenth century and which

aesthetic modernism challenged. Yet while offering a strikingly different approach to

understanding mankinds relationship to God than did the millennialists, theological

modernists nonetheless attested to a belief that human morality, and the unity of all

truth, ultimately rests in the divine.70

Millennialism serves, then, as perhaps a missing link connecting the pre- and

post-World War I understandings of mankind and culture. Its self-evident and self-

confessed unmodern nature places it squarely within a pre-modern world view. And

yet, as has been shown, its success in the war years was absolutely determined by its

ability to speak to and engage with the very conditions of an emergent and disruptive

modernity that engendered the modernist responses. And though it is impossible to

align it nicely and completely with either theological or aesthetic modernism, it isalso clear that it was completely alien to neither, and perhaps linked them not only to

itself but, in limited ways, one to another and each to the war. The notion that the



13/17

triumph of modernist Nietzschean nihilism should be the ultimate fruit of Biblical

higher criticism and a cause of the Great War is one example of such a connection.

Wartime millennialism helped to orchestrate, in a profound way, what Jay Winter

calls the overlap of languages and approaches between the old and the new, the

traditional and the modern, the conservative and the iconoclastic, [which were]

apparent both during and after the war.71 It can thus be argued that as a cultural (in

this case religio-cultural) response to the war, millennialism helped to bridge and

connect the two modernisms to each other, and these to the prevailing world-views

as they were experienced both before and after the Great War ripped the world

asunder.

Notes

1. As standard-bearers for either side in this debate see Fussell, Great War; Jay Winter,Sites of Memory; and Mackaman and Mays, Introduction: The Quickening ofModernity, in Mackaman and Mays, World War I, xxv.

2. Winter, Sites of Memory, 178.3. Archer, Coming King, 34.4. Maddox, Promise, 756.5. As quoted in Richard Sheppard, The Problematics of European Modernism, in

Theorizing Modernism, 5.6. Snape, God and the British Soldier, 4.7. Marin, Last Crusade; Wilkinson, Church of England; Marshall, Methodism Embattled;

Moses, British and German Churches; Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain; Brown,Solemn Purification; Rider, Reflection on the Battlefield.

8. Though Warren Wagers 1961 complaint, in his H.G. Wells and the World State (30), thatthat the spiritual history of the First World War remains to be written has not beencompletely rectified, progress is being made. Contributions to this progress are made by

Hoover, German Nationalism; Runic, God of Battles; Becker, War and Faith; Becker,Histoire Religieuse; Strachan, First World War; and Gamble, War for Righteousness.9. The nearest to do so is Hilberts Preludes to Armageddon, yet even he stops his analysis

right as the war begins. Wilkinson noted, merely parenthetically, that the war waspressing certain theologians towards a more eschatological faith, but does not elaborate(Church of England, 249).

10. Williamson, Apocalypse Then.11. Armageddon: Sacred History Recalled by Familiar Names in To-Days Dispatches,

Daily News (London), 23 September 1918, 1.12. Macnutt, Preface, in Church in the Furnace, ixx.13. See especially Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain, chapter 7; Wilkinson, Church of

England, chapter 10. Patrick Porter emphasizes the importance of the ideas of sacrifice,redemption, and continuity in both wartime and post-war Christian thought in hiswritings. See Beyond Comfort and (with Alexander Watson) Bereaved and Aggrieved.

14. Beeching, Armageddon, 6, 1314. See similar remarks preached at roughly the same timeby the Bishop of London, Arthur F. Winnington-Ingram, Sermons for the Times No. 4:Sermons on the Holy War (1914), as quoted in Wilkinson, Church of England, 253.

15. Porter, Beyond Comfort, 2889.16. The Prophecy Investigation Society held meetings regularly throughout the war and

issued the papers read before it as standalone publications. In December 1917, an AdventTestimony Meeting was held in Queens Hall, London, attended by several thousands.Such meetings continued monthly. These meetings inspired the convening of a largeconference in Philadelphia in 1919 called the World Conference on ChristianFundamentals, which drew some 6000 delegates from America, Canada, and Britain.This conference gave rise to the Worlds Christian Fundamentals Association, one of the

most important organizing forces of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States ofthe early twentieth century. Report on the World Conference on ChristianFundamentals, Philadelphia, Monthly Bulletin of the Advent Preparation Prayer Union

228 E.M. Reisenauer


14/17

3 (August 1919): 212. See also The Record: The Churchs Oldest Newspaper, 20December 1917, 3 January 1918, 14 February 1918.

17. The English Advent Testimony Manifesto was signed on 8 November 1917. The Irishone appeared early the next year. In addition to professing the belief that the presentcrisis points to the close of the Times of the Gentiles, the English Manifesto alsodeclares, among other things, that the completed Church will be translated for everwith the Lord, and that all human schemes of reconstruction must be subsidiary to theSecond Coming of the Lord. Among those clergy who signed the English Manifestowere the Biblical scholar and pastor of the Westminster Chapel, G. Campbell Morgan;Amzi Clarence Dixon, pastor of Charles Spurgeons Baptist Metropolitan Tabernacle;Dinsdale T. Young, superintendent pastor of the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster;H.W. Webb-Peploe, prebendary of St. Pauls Cathedral, London; and FrederickBrotherton Meyer, senior pastor of Christ Church, London. The Irish version hadamong its signatories John C. Dowse, Canon of Christ Church; William Dowse, Dean ofConnor; James Hamilton, Dean of Clonmacnoise; and J.T. Waller, Canon of Limerick.

18. Baldensperger, Prophesying, 1089.19. Constance L. Maynard, Waiting for the Lords Return, The Record, 14 November

1918, 711.

20. MacKay, Armageddon, 23.21. Jessie Collis, Great War, 14.22. William Tytler, Plain Talks, 778.23. Moore, Nearness of Our Lords Return, 14.24. For an analysis of the ways which the Eastern theatre of the War fit the prophecies in the

minds of many at the time see, Reisenauer, Tidings Out of the East.25. Langston, Preface, in Great Britain, 24.26. Dean, Britannias Epiphany, 523.27. Fawkes, Studies in Modernism, 373.28. Pannenberg, Modernity, History, and Eschatology, 4947.29. Fawkes, Studies in Modernism, 386.30. Talbot, Modern Situation, 4.

31. Talbot, Modern Situation, 10.32. Talbot, Modern Situation.33. Lease, Modernism and Modernism, 4.34. Whitworth, Introduction, in Modernism, 3940.35. Mackaman and Mays, Introduction: The Quickening of Modernity, World War I, xxv.36. Livingstone, Religious Thought, 280.37. Kermode, Apocalypse and the Modern, 94.38. Bradbury and McFarlane, The Name and Nature of Modernism, Modernism, 501.39. Schoepflin, Apocalypticism, 432.40. Gardner, Modernism, 161.41. A.B. Simpson, Britain Fulfilling Prophecy, The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times

(London), 11 April 1918, 257.42. Ward, Two Dispensations, 260.

43. Inge, Outspoken Essays, 24.44. Gamble, War for Righteousness, 25.45. Williamson, Apocalypse Then, 296.46. For the importance of this method see Augusta Cook, Book of Daniel; Dawson, Close of

the Present Age; de St. Dalmas, Time of the End; and Wynn, Revelation.47. Guinness, Light For the Last Days, 326, 346. Though not the originator of this practice,

Grattan Guinness became its champion in the late nineteenth century and it informedmuch of the content of his work. He provides a rousing defence of the method in anappendix to Light for the Last Days, Appendix A: The Scientific Basis for PropheticChronology, 63571.

48. Williamson, Apocalypse Then, 296.49. Bayley, Second Coming, 3; emphasis mine.

50. Bayley, Second Coming, 297.51. Armstrong, Modernism, 2. Roland N. Stromberg notes that among the European

intelligentsia during these years, the war as apocalypse ran through everyones mind.



15/17

[. . .] This image of apocalyptic decline and fall, prelude perhaps to a total renewal, wasan almost archetypical image for Westerners (Stromberg, Redemption by War, 53, 1812).

52. Levenson, Introduction, in Cambridge Companion to Modernism, 4.53. Ellam, Prophetic Studies, 9.54. Middleton, Message for the Times, 12.55. For this idea of the war as a traumatic rupture in time, see Randall, Modernism, chapter

4: War Days: H.D., time and the First World War.56. Friedman, Periodizing Modernism, 435, 433.57. Williamson, Apocalypse Then, 298.58. World Conference on Christian Fundamentals, Monthly Bulletin of the Advent

Preparation Prayer Union (August 1919): 21.59. Anderson, Higher Criticism, vi. See also Wingate, Modern Unrest.60. Argyle, Sixth Vial, 1920.61. Fruits of Higher Criticism, Prophetic News and Israels Watchman (January 1915): 18.62. Close, Divine Programme, vi.63. Murray, Bible Prophecies, 28.64. Ibid.

65. Tiarks, Eternal Certainties, 13; see also Agnes Weston, The War and Prophecy, TheChristian Herald and Signs of Our Times, 24 February 1916, 146.

66. Blackett, Manifestation of Antichrist, 910, 59. Blackett believes that the Antichrist,rather than being an individual, is in fact, the spirit of the age. See also Middleton, NotFar Off, 4359.

67. For an examination of the quest for and failure to achieve a sense of redemption by theintelligentsia of the war period, see Stromberg, Redemption by War.

68. Clewell, Consolation Refused.69. MacKay, Armageddon, 24.70. Livingstone, Religious Thought, 280.71. Winter, Sites of Memory, 3.

References

Anderson, Sir Robert. The Higher Criticism and the War. London: James Nisbet & Co., 1915.Archer, W.H. The Coming King and the Future Kingdom. London: Jarrold & Sons, 1915.Argyle, Leonard. The Sixth Vial. London: Robert Scott, 1918.Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.Baldensperger, Fernand. Prophesying in the Time of War. Columbia University Quarterly 20

(1918): 97115.Bayley, Jonathan. The Second Coming of Christ. London: New Church Press, 1915.Becker, Annette. War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 19141930. Oxford:

Berg, 1998.Becker, Annette. LHistoire Religieuse de la Guerre, 19141918. Revue dhistoire de lEglise

de France 86, no. 217 (2000): 53949.Beeching, Henry Charles. Armageddon: Sermons Upon the War Preached in Norwich

Cathedral. London: SPCK, 1914.Blackett, John. The Manifestation of Antichrist. With an Appendix on the Sounding of the Last

Trumpet. London: Elliot Stock, 1917.Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature,

18901930. London: Penguin, 1990.Brown, Stewart J. A Solemn Purification by Fire: Responses to the Great War in the

Scottish Presbyterian Churches, 19141919. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994):82104.

Clewell, Tammy. Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, the Great War, and ModernistMourning. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 197223.

Close, Albert W. The Divine Programme of the Worlds History. London: Protestant TruthSociety, 1916.

Collis, Jessie. The Great War as Foretold in the Bible. London: Skeffington & Sons, 1915.

230 E.M. Reisenauer


16/17

Cook, Augusta. Light from the Book of Daniel on History Past, Present, and Future. London:Robert Banks & Son, 1916.

Dawson, W. Bell. The Close of the Present Age In the Light of the Periods Predicted inProphecy. London: Marshall Brothers, 1917.

Dean, George Williams. Britannias Epiphany. London: Robert Banks & Son, 1919.de St. Dalmas, H.G. Emeric. The Time of the End and the Weeks of Daniel: A Discovery and

Restatement. London: Charles Thynne, 1917.Ellam, John. Prophetic Studies; or, Some Present Day Facts as Seen in the Light of Prophecy .

London: C.J. Thynne, 1903.Fawkes, Alfred. Studies in Modernism. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1913.Friedman, Susan Stanford. Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space

Time Borders of Modernist Studies. Modernism/Modernity: The Official Journal of theModernist Studies Association 13 (2006): 42543.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Gamble, Richard M. The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and

the Rise of the Messianic Nation. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003.Gardner, Percy. Modernism in the English Church. London: Methuen & Co., 1926.Guinness, H. Grattan. Light For the Last Days: A Study Historic and Prophetic. London:

Hodder & Stoughton, 1886.Hilbert, Ernie Preludes to Armageddon: Apocalyptic Clamor and Complaint in Britain,

18501914. Journal for Millennial Studies 1 (1999): 122.Hoover, A.J. God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War: A Study in Clerical Nationalism.

New York: Praeger, 1989.Hoover, A.J. German Nationalism and Religion. History of European Ideas 20, nos. 46

(1995): 76571.Inge, William Ralph. Outspoken Essays. First Series. London: Longman Green, & Co.,

1919.Kermode, Frank. Apocalypse and the Modern. In Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth?, ed.

Saul Friedla nder, 84106. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985.Langston, E.L., ed. Great Britain, Palestine, Russia and the Jews. London: J. Thynne, 1918.

Lease, Gary. Modernism and Modernism: Christianity as a Product of its Culture. Journalfor the Study of Religion 1 (1988): 323.Levenson, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999.Livingstone, James C. Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: Challenges and Reconceptions.

New York: Continuum, 2007.Mackaman, Douglas, and Michael Mays, eds. World War I and the Cultures of Modernity.

Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.Macnutt, F.B. The Church in the Furnace: Essays by Seventeen Temporary Church of

England Chaplains on Active Service in France and Flanders. London: Macmillan & Co.,1917.

MacKay, John R. Armageddon: Two Discourses on the Great European War. 4th ed. Inverness:Northern Counties Publishing, 1915.

Maddox, Henry Edward. The Promise of His Coming: A Book of Comfort to Those Who LoveHis Appearing. London: Marshall Brothers, 1919.

Marin, Albert. The Last Crusade: The Church of England in the First World War . Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 1974.

Marshall, David B. Methodism Embattled: A Reconsideration of the Methodist Church andWorld War I. Canadian Historical Review 66 (1985): 4864.

Middleton, Robert. Not Far Off: The Gathering Signs of Christs Speedy Return . London:Jarrold & Sons, 1911.

Middleton, Robert. A Message for the Times. London: Jarrold & Sons, 1914.Moore, Reginald William Bickerton. The Nearness of Our Lords Return, as Inferred from

Studies in the Comparison of Prophecy with History. London: Robert Scott, 1913.Moses, John A. The British and German Churches and the Perception of War, 19081914.

War and Society 5, no. 1 (May 1987): 2344.Murray, Marr. Bible Prophecies and the Present War. 2nd ed. London: Hodder & Stoughton,

1916.



17/17

Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Modernity, History, and Eschatology. In The Oxford Handbook ofEschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls, 4939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Porter, Patrick. Beyond Comfort: German and English Military Chaplains and the Memoryof the Great War, 19191929. The Journal of Religious History 29, no. 3 (October 2005):25889.

Porter, Patrick, and Alexander Watson. Bereaved and Aggrieved: Combat Motivation andthe Ideology of Sacrifice in the First World War. Historical Research 83, no. 219(February 2010): 14664.

Randall, Bryony. Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007.

Reisenauer, Eric Michael. Tidings Out of the East: World War I, the Eastern Questionsand British Millennialism. In End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity toModernity, ed. Karolyn Kinane and Michael A. Ryan, 14272. London: McFarland &Co., 2009.

Rider, R.J. Reflection on the Battlefield: From Infantryman to Chaplain, 19141919. Ed. AlanC. Robinson and P.E.H. Hair. Liverpool Historical Studies, no. 19. Liverpool: LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2001.

Runic, Robert A.K. The God of Battles and the Fight For Faith. The Army Quarterly and

Defense Journal 119, no. 2 (1989): 15363.Schoepflin, Rennie B. Apocalypticism in the Age of Science. In The Encyclopedia of

Apocalypticism, ed. Stephen J. Stein, 42741. New York: Continuum, 1999.Sheppard, Richard. Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory. London: Routledge,

1993.Sherry, Vincent. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2003.Snape, Michael F. God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and

Second World Wars. London: Routledge, 2005.Strachan, Hew. The First World War, Vol. I: To Arms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.Stromberg, Roland N. Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914. Lawrence, KS: Regents

Press, 1982.

Talbot, Neville S. The Modern Situation. In Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief inTerms of Modern Thought, by Seven Oxford Men, 324. London: Macmillan & Co., 1913.Tiarks, Hope Charles. Eternal Certainties; or, The War the World and the Future. London:

Marshall Brothers, 1918.Tytler, William. Plain Talks on Prophecy; or, The Great Prophetic Cycles of Time . London:

Pickering & Inglis, 1916.Wager, Warren. H.G. Wells and the World State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1961.Ward, F.W. Orde. The Two Dispensations. The London Quarterly Review 130 (1918): 256

60.Whitworth, Michael, ed. Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.Wilkinson, Alan. The Church of England and the First World War. London: SPCK Press, 1978.Williamson, Arthur H. Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World.

Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008.Wingate, Sir Andrew. Modern Unrest and the Bible: Being a Paper Read Before the Victorian

Institute. London: Worlds Evangelical Alliance, 1914.Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History .

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.Wynn, Walter. Revelation in the Light of the War and Modern Events. London: Charles

Thynne, 1916.

232 E.M. Reisenauer

e.reislnauer.aworld in crisis and transition:the millennialand the modern in britain 1914-1918

Documents

Transcript of e.reislnauer.aworld in crisis and transition:the millennialand the modern in britain 1914-1918