“Drying up the Euphrates”:
Muslims, Millennialism, and Early American
Missionary Enterprise
Timothy Marr
When the first American missionaries set foot on the lands
associated with the Bible in the early 1820s, they believed they
were also entering the “the strong holds of Satan’s kingdom”
under the control the Ottoman Turks. “What would you
think of a man approaching you of gigantic stature, long
beard, fierce eyes, a turban on his head, which if stretched out
would make a blanket, long flowing robes, a large belt, in
which were four or five pistols and a sword?”1 The formidable
nature of the fearsome Turk is clear here in the interrogative
tone of Levi Parsons, who felt himself confronted by the enig-
ma of a contemporary Goliath. “What are we in such an
empire?” he humbly asked, “what is our strength before
Leviathan?”2 In their efforts to fathom the terrible status of
the Turk, early Americans in the Near East sought out various
models to explain the perplexing problem of their political
ascendancy over the Holy Land. To William Goodell, who
arrived in Turkey in 1823, the proud and pistol-bearing Turk
reminded him of “the Anakims of old”—the gigantic foes
eventually subdued by the ancient Hebrews.3 When Jonas
King accompanied Pliny Fisk on the overland journey from
Egypt to Jerusalem in 1823, the desert of Sinai seemed to him
a Sodom filled with Bedouins like “fiends from the world
Timothy Marr, Assistant Professor
Department of American Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
North Carolina, USA
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Drying up the Euphrates
below” ready to spring upon him at any time. King wrote
home after arriving in Jerusalem: “Oh, that you could be with
me in Calvary, where I am writing, and hear the roaring of the
Turks from the minarets, and see the deep iniquity with which
this Holy Land is polluted! . . .Everything around me seems
blasted and withered by the Curse of the Almighty.” 4
Exporting Christian purity back to the Holy Land was a
crucial divine duty that many Americans of the early republic
felt would culminate in the establishment of the New
Jerusalem. The fact that the Holy Land was in the hands of the
Turkish “empire of sin” remained one of the major obstacles
and therefore one of the central themes of eschatological inter-
est. If the United States were to live up to its Puritan image as
a type of the spiritual Israel, it could not avoid the religious
struggles in the actual Holy Land; it would in fact have to be
instrumental in the conversion of the Jews.5 However, before
the Jews could be restored to Jerusalem—not to a Jewish
nation like the present state of Israel but to a redeemed
Kingdom of Christ—Islam’s hold over the Holy Land would
have to be loosened. Just before Levi Parsons sailed in 1819 to
inaugurate the mission of the United States to the Holy Land,
he professed this clear path: “Destroy the Ottoman empire
and nothing but a miracle will prevent the Jews’ immediate
return from the four winds of heaven.”6
Since Christians resisted viewing Islam as a legitimate
religious dispensation, they were forced to invent explanations
of why God had permitted so much power to such a false
religion. The earliest images of Muslims in the west had been
fabricated out of fear and ignorance and demonized Muslims
as fabulous monsters with the heads of dogs.7 Medieval
polemicists employed what R.W. Southern called “the
ignorance of triumphant imagination” to devise the earliest
orientalist legends which emerged largely because Islam was a
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distant religion claiming a direct revelation from God after
that of Christ that therefore could not easily be placed within
a Christian world-view. Its very existence was a “divine
scandal” that shook the foundations of Christian belief—
spelling spiritual ruin, a return to moral chaos, and the
justification for crusade. 8
From the earliest years of the Reformation, when the
Turkish threat to Europe was a topic of intense public concern
to the west, the notion that the antichrist and his empire was
split into an eastern and western manifestation—with Islam
and Catholicism as the two legs of a satanic colossus—was a
common belief of Protestant biblical exegetes. The Turks, a
label frequently and often indiscriminately applied to all
Muslims, were frequently viewed as the newest type of Eastern
horde and assumed the status previously held by the
Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians, and they were also
linked with the mysterious tribes of Gog and Magog.9 To
Protestants, the idea of a violent assault against Islam smacked
of antichristian pride. Their crusade was staged on the discur-
sive level of prophetic promise, where believers—like the early
American missionaries— faithfully wielded the sword of scrip-
ture and its arsenal of analogy and explanation as assurance of
their spiritual supremacy.
Martin Luther defined the Turk as the fleshly embodiment
of antichristian spirit who, like their biblical forebear Ishmael,
confused temporal power with divine election. Protestants
interpreted Islam not as an independent religion but rather as
the physical manifestation of corruption within the Church,
viewing the Turks as a rod of divine wrath raised up to chas-
tise Christians for their infidelities. The ultimate defeat of the
military hegemony of the Turks thus corresponded integrally
with the spiritual reform of the Church, and Luther exempli-
fied the emergent Protestant belief that any weakening of the
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Drying up the Euphrates
Turkish position directly signalized the imminence of the
“Judgment Day.”10
As a faith in a future millennium became a respectable
tenet of Christian belief, Protestants became attuned to the
high stakes of the divine drama between the Church and
Antichrist and sought out scriptural indications of the nature
of the coming apocalypse. They believed that the hand of
providence had placed verses within the Bible that prophesied
the glorious future of Christian victory and intimated the
prior stages through which history had to pass on the way to
the promised millennium. One of the most important of
these stages was the disappearance of Islam. Early American
religious understanding of Islam thus emerged most fully nei-
ther from substantial comparative dialogue with Muslims nor
from scholarly study of Islamic texts but rather from a process
of eschatological exegesis that involved harmonizing sequences
of scriptural symbols describing the “time of the end” with the
chronology of secular event.
Biblical commentaries established strong and persistent
interpretive communities around consensual readings of scrip-
tural verses, especially those from the Books of Daniel and
Revelation, and their conclusions—sanctioned as they were
with some of the power of the sacred—comprised an impor-
tant fundament of Christian belief. This process of eschato-
logical projection formed a deeply influential genre of orien-
talist narration through which Protestants biblically contained
the transgressive threat of Islam and reprocessed it into a con-
firmation of Christian superiority. Protestant eschatology in
this way helped to form powerful dispositions about Islam and
Muslims that implanted dehumanizing notions about one of
the world’s major religions within the cultural perspective, and
even the religious faith, of many educated Americans.
133
Indeed it was in large part the power of this millennial
promise that had encouraged the missionaries to assume their
mission to Western Asia, fortifying them with the faith that,
despite the clear ascendancy of Muslim “foes” over the entire
territory of the eastern Mediterranean, the “dark dominions”
of Islam would soon be illumined by the light of Christianity.
Pliny Fisk, sent out with Levi Parsons by the American Board,
conquered his fears with the assurance that “[I]t is not more
certain, that the walls of Jericho fell before the ancient people
of God, than it is, that the whole Mahommedan world will be
subdued by the Gospel.” 11
If the early American missionaries figured the Turks as
such Old Testament nemeses as Goliath, Leviathan, and the
sons of Anak, the phantasms of the Book of Revelation
enabled them to place an even more terrible face on those they
saw as enemies of Christ. For the eschatological imagination
was deeply teratological in its typology of the forces of
antichrist. According to a transatlantic interpretive tradition
established by major European millennialists, carried on in
America beginning with the first generation of Puritan settlers
(and even persisting in premillennialist circles today), the rise
of Islam was foretold in the first twelve verses of the ninth
chapter of the Book of Revelation.12 Called the fifth trumpet
or the first of three trumpets of woe, these verses tell of the
“angel of the bottomless pit” who was commissioned to take
vengeance on a corrupt Christianity. Commentators saw the
smoke which this angel summoned out of the abyss as an
appropriate symbol of the false religion of Islam that had
occluded the teachings of Christianity. The locusts with tails
like scorpions that emerged from that smoke likewise suggest-
ed the early Muslims (or Saracens) who, while spreading their
religion from France to the further East, tormented Christian
lands with both the force of their arms and the poison of their
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Drying up the Euphrates
doctrines. Protestant exegetes linked Muhammad with the
“angel of the bottomless pit” and viewed the epithets Abaddon
and Apollyon (which mean “destroyer”) as apt titles for the
Prophet and his Caliphs. Interpreters also found it fitting that
Islam, conceived of as a delusion introduced by the Arabian
destroyer, emerged from some subterranean hell and not from
any heavenly inspiration. By seeing Islam as prophetically fig-
ured by smoke, commentators at once emphasized both its
eclipse of the sun of Christian truth and its status as an empty
and superstitious form of worship that would soon vanish.
Readers associated such a smoke with pestilence and plague as
shown by Cotton Mather’s justification of the Eastern practice
of inoculating individuals against smallpox by claiming that
the disease itself had “been brought into Europe throe’ Africa;
on the Wings of those Arabian Locusts, that in the Saracen
Conquests did spread over the Face of the Earth.”13
While the fifth trumpet had sounded well before the
Reformation and the torment of the Saracens was therefore a
matter of the historical record, there was less agreement about
the duration of the sixth trumpet (or second woe)—the last
plague prior to the great Day of Judgment. Many commenta-
tors viewed this woe as prefiguring the rise of the Ottoman
Turks. Exegesis of the sixth trumpet described at the end of
Chapter nine of Revelation explained how Ottoman horse-
men had been permitted to overrun the Byzantine Empire
(“the third part of men”) because their idolatries had drawn
forth divine displeasure in the very form of the Turkish armies.
The fire, smoke, and sulfur emerging from the mouths of the
horses seemed to a number of interpreters a “most manifest
allusion” to ordinance and gunpowder believed to be invented
by the Turks.14
Interpreters sought to determine the exact dates when this
scourge of divine wrath had commenced and, more
135
importantly, how long its woe would endure. After intricate
reasoning about calendar schemes and consultation of
available secular histories, most commentators became
convinced that the Turkish woe had terminated in the late
seventeenth century after the further spread of the Ottoman
Empire in Europe was checked.
Cotton Mather’s reflections offer a fascinating example of
the salience of the Turkish woe to American millennial
thought. Mather preached to the Artillery Company of
Massachusetts in 1691 about the nearness of the time when
the swords the soldiers were holding would be turned into
plowshares, arguing that a “dying Mahometanism” was a clear
“symptom” of approach of the second advent of Christ. Using
Thomas Brightman’s dating scheme of the duration of the
sixth trumpet, Mather prophesied that “within less than Seven
Years from this Time, the Turk should be under such
Humiliations, as might Obstruct his ever giving Europe
Trouble any more.”15 Mather interpreted news of any reversal
in the fortunes of the Turkish Empire as confirmatory
“Declarations” of “the Second Wo Passing Away.”16 As the date
for the final termination of the Turks approached, Mather’s
prayers that Christ would deliver on his promise became fer-
vent. Mather proclaimed in a 1696 sermon that he wished he
could “speak with a voice as loud as the seventh trumpet” that
the most wonderful revolution in history would be experi-
enced within the lifetimes of most of his listeners: “The Day is
at Hand, when the Turkish Empire, instead of being any longer
a Wo to Christendome, shall it self become a Part of
Christendome.”17 Mather was confirmed in his belief after
reading the meticulous 1706 calibration of William Whiston
that the signing of the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699 signified
the termination of the sixth trumpet. In 1716, Cotton Mather
still viewed the “astonishing Destruction” of the Turkish
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Drying up the Euphrates
armies invading Europe as confirmation of the expiration of
the second woe. “Is this not a Token for Good?” he reasoned,
“Yea, a Token, that it will not be long, before the Great
Trumpet shall be blown; And Oh! The Glorious Things to be
done in the Days thereof!”18
The belief that Turkish spiritual hegemony was at its
prophetic end, as it had with Cotton Mather, continued to
stimulate apocalyptic speculation in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, especially since it served as a visible sign of
the imminent onset of the seventh trumpet bringing on the
Day of Judgment when “the mystery of God shall be fin-
ished.” However, the fact that the Ottomans still held their
ground after the apparent sounding of the sixth trumpet
forced prophetic-minded exegetes to seek out additional
explanations for their perplexing persistence. For example, the
notorious American eschatologist William Miller and his fol-
lowers revised the prophetic timetable of the sixth trumpet
and argued—in a similar logic as Mather’s—that Mehemet
Ali’s refusal to accede to peace terms dictated by several
European powers in 1840, a event which guaranteed their
support of the Ottoman Empire, signalized the passing of the
second woe.19 Most commentators, however, promoted
another prophetic sign of the end times from the Book of
Revelation—the pouring out of the sixth vial— as the key to
explaining the perplexing persistence of the Ottomans after
the ostensible completion of their time of woe. Chapter six-
teen, verse twelve describes how “the sixth angel poured out
his vial upon the river Euphrates; and the water thereof was
dried up, that the way of the kings might be prepared.” If the
sixth trumpet had loosed and then thrown back the tide of
Turkish invasion from the Euphrates, exegetic logic reasoned
that it was up to the pouring of the sixth vial to effect a com-
plete evaporation of Islamic power, after which the wrath of
137
God would destroy all antichristian forces in the battle of
Armageddon. The Euphrates was thus transformed from a
spiritual type of ancient Babylon into a scriptural symbol of
the Ottoman Empire. It was in large part the conjuncture of
this heritage of biblical commentary, the continuing conun-
drum of Turkish control over Jerusalem, and the apocalyptic
desires raised by the American and French revolutions, that
led Islamic history to emerge in late eighteenth century as
what the historian Ruth Bloch has called a “major theme in
American millennial literature.”20
Commentators gave the sixth vial such prominence during
the early national period not only because it explained why the
Turks had failed to fall despite the passing of their time of woe
but also because it helped thinkers to resolve the “Eastern
Question”—the troubling secular events occurring in Europe
and western Asia—within a religious world-view. This escha-
tological connection of the end of the Turkish hegemony over
the Holy Land with passionate faith in the promise of Christ’s
imminent return led prophecy-watching Americans of the
early national period to pay an surprising amount of attention
to the historical events of what was for them a distant and
satanic empire.
Commentators frequently employed the fact that the
Sultan’s Empire was shrinking in the face of European
encroachment as secular proof of the desiccation of the escha-
tological Euphrates. Other expositors charted the weakening
of the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the internal dissension
in the politics of the Sublime Porte. The rebellion of Mehemet
Ali, the Wahabi movement, and Shi’ite sectarianism each sig-
nified to different Americans the impending doom of the
Ottoman Empire. Several thinkers viewed the Turks’ loss of
Greece as manifesting the pouring out of the sixth vial.21
Mention of natural calamities in the press, travel narratives, or
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any other form of intelligence that made its way from the east,
was promoted as evidence of the overdue extinguishing of the
vitality of Islam. To watchers of the signs, the sanctuary
seemed to be becoming more cleansed by the year.
The progress of these historical events stoked the millen-
nialist aspirations of the evangelism enterprise by encouraging
missionaries that they could accomplish mighty deeds.
However, the deaths of the first two missionaries Pliny Fisk
and Levi Parsons and the fact that Ottoman law punished
apostasy from Islam made the conversion of Muslims to
Protestantism a daunting task. William Schauffler canceled his
proposed mission to the Muslims in 1826 partly because of
the hostilities surrounding the Greek rebellion against the
Turks. Henry Augustus Homes, a missionary that the
ABCFM sent to Constantinople to proselytize the Muslim
population, soon retired because he found “no access to the
mind of Islam.”22 Although missionaries in the Near East
remained committed to the ultimate conversion of Muslims,
their “long-avowed and oppressive enemies,”23 they turned
their efforts to redeeming the eastern churches viewing their
ritualistic belief in saints and relics as central impediments pre-
venting the non-idolatrous Muslims from perceiving the mer-
its of Protestant salvation.
However, in the 1830s, missionaries redoubled their
efforts at the direct conversion of Muslims with revived confi-
dence that their efforts would bring on apocalyptic success.
The waning of conflict in the Mediterranean following Greek
independence and the institution of Ottoman political
reforms opened doors for new traffic into the Levant.
Attempts to read “the signs of the times” as it related to the
Turks centered on speculation about who was east and north
of the Ottoman Empire. The object of the drying up of the
Euphrates was to “prepare the way for the Kings of the East,”
139
and Daniel 11:44 had spoken of “tidings out of the east and
out of the north” that would provoke antichrist to set in
motion the train of events that would culminate in his
destruction.
This curiosity about the further east prompted the
American Board to envision expanding its stations beyond the
Mediterranean littoral and as a result they initiated “Christian
Researches”—or exploratory journeys deep into the Asian
continent for the purpose of locating areas for future evangel-
ical effort.24 The first fruit of these ventures was a trek east out
of Constantinople through Armenia and into Persia. The pub-
lication of Researches in Armenia in 1833 helped to heighten
interest in the populations lying east of the Ottomans and
encouraged the ABCFM to establish a mission to the
Nestorian Christians living in northwest Persia. One of its
authors, Eli Smith, felt that that “providential preparation”
had set in motion changes that were “humbling” the “wall of
arrogance” that had prevented earlier access to Muslims. “I
have seen the wrath of the Turk restrained,” he testified.
Reminding his audience that those in the dark ages Christians
had been able to muster whole armies to challenge Muslim
hegemony, Smith exhorted his listeners to enter these emerg-
ing fields so there would be “some one . . . ever at hand to
throw the light of divine truth into the opening mind of every
Mohammedan inquirer.” 25
Smith’s researches and sermons and the renewed interest in
the martyr-model of Henry Martyn—a British missionary
who had preceded Parsons and Fisk to Muslim lands dispens-
ing his translations of the New Testament in Hindi and
Persian—were part of the forces that inspired two young
American seminarians to devote their lives to proselytizing
Persia. The Episcopalian Horatio Southgate and the
Presbyterian James Lyman Merrick each journeyed into Persia
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Drying up the Euphrates
performing “Christian researches” for their respective denom-
inational boards. Even very brief sketches of their experiences
dramatize the conclusion that actual encounter with Islam as
a persistent religious tradition frustrated the eschatological
myth that Islam was nothing but an insubstantial error to be
swept aside by Christian fact.
In 1836, “thoroughly convinced that the time has come
for a successful attack on the religion of the false prophet,”
Horatio Southgate was funded by the Protestant Episcopal
Church to travel to Turkey and Persia.26 Southgate imagined
the missionary as a conquering crusader: “If we can but gain a
stand-point within the entrenchments of Mohamedan preju-
dice, we have little to fear from a religion which exerts so fee-
ble a control over the mind, is so corrupted by superstition,
and so weakened by defection.”27 Yet when he returned to
New York four years later, Southgate wrote how his experience
in the Near East forced him to reevaluate his ardent beliefs
about the capacity of American Protestants to convert
Muslims. Southgate made the error of many of his generation
of misinterpreting the political weakness of the Ottomans and
the resulting decrease in bigotry as a sign of the waning of
Muslims’ faith in Islam. “At the end of my first month’s resi-
dence in Constantinople, I might have promulgated my opin-
ions on Turkish institutions and customs with the utmost con-
fidence,” confessed Southgate, “[a]t the end of three months,
I began to perceive the fallacy of most of my conclusions, and
when six months had passed, I found that I knew next to
nothing of the object of my study.”28 Southgate’s exasperation
was evident is his description of the Persian as a “wily antago-
nist” who “likes nothing better than to display his subtlety in
disputing about essences, substances, and spirits . . .a meta-
physical chaos, where there is neither shore nor bottom.”29
For Southgate, the bottomless pit served as a fitting metaphor
141
for his own capacity to comprehend the religion of Islam. Like
many missionaries, Southgate then turned his efforts to the
Eastern Churches. But, by 1850, after serving as the
“Missionary Bishop in the Dominions and Dependencies of
the Sultan of Turkey,” he had rejected the fundamental
assumptions of the foreign missionary enterprise that human
effort was necessary to bring on the hoped-for millennium.
Despite Southgate’s retreat from the Orient, he never gave up
his hopes that the religions of the east would be redeemed; yet,
these desires were expressed through the nostalgic form of
romantic fiction, published as The Cross above the Crescent in
1876. “I call the work a Romance,” wrote Southgate in its
preface, claiming also that “it might, with equal truth, be
called a Reality.”30 A similar effacement of the boundaries
between romance and reality, as we have seen, characterizes
early American imagination of the Muslims of the Eastern
Mediterranean.
Unlike Southgate, James Lyman Merrick never gave up
the calling to evangelize the Persians that he experienced as a
student at Amherst College, but his career ended up one of
deep frustration. After years of preparing himself for his cho-
sen mission, the American Board charged him to acquire an
intimate understanding of the languages and doctrines of
Muslims, and to travel extensively through the cities of Persia
and, if possible, beyond to cities in Central Asia where the
mysterious “kings of the east” may be awaiting the stimulus of
the Gospel to play their prophetic parts.31
After three years in the Islamic orient, Merrick wrote can-
didly about the difficulties and dangers of direct proselytiza-
tion. More importantly, Merrick’s obedience to his instruc-
tions “to become intimately conversant with
Mohammedanism” had caused him to reassess the common
attitude that Islam and its teachings were nothing more than
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Drying up the Euphrates
a “powerless hush.” In this sensitive statement Merrick grasped
part of the reason why Islam continued to endure.
Perhaps the general impression in Europe and
America respecting Mohammedanism is, that is such
a flimsy, frostwork structure, that a few rays of science,
a smattering of literature, or a modicum of the arts
would annihilate it at once. Whatever may have been
the origin of the materials of Mohammedanism, they
have been so artfully built on truth, and cemented by
excellent sentiments, that the fabric, the more I exam -
ine it, appears in every joint and angle a master-piece
of skill and power. If I should take my own experience
as a criterion, I should say that few have understood
Mohammedanism, who have not bestowed laborious
research on the subject. The small advantages I have
hitherto enjoyed to arrive at the truth of the case, only
convince me, that it is a “bottomless pit,” not easily
fathomed or filled up. 32
By revising the traditional meaning of the “bottomless pit”
and applying it to Christians’ own inability to adequately
appreciate Islam, Merrick challenged the eschatological status
quo and displayed an appreciation of Islam as a religious sys-
tem that few Americans of his era were capable of perceiving.
Unfortunately, this sensitivity was not the intelligence that
the ABCFM was looking for. and the Board eventually cur-
tailed Merrick’s mission to the Muslims in 1839. He and his
wife were eventually recalled in February of 1845, apparently
in part for Merrick’s unwillingness to abandon the Muslims as
the primary focus of his efforts. His services rejected, Merrick
could only find solace once again in the divine promise that
even if the ABCFM might “conclude to abandon a people as
given up by God,” the prophetic scheme had a different agen-
143
da. He felt assured that the divine will was “carrying forward
a providential work among the people of my choice and ten-
der interest, which no resolution of missionary organs can
repress.” Merrick ended his lengthy appeal to the Board by
quoting a dream of Henry Martyn taken from the prophecy of
the sixth vial, one that he himself had hoped to help bring
about, proclaiming that “[t]he way of the kings of the East is
preparing; thus much may be said with safety, but little more.
The Persians will also probably take the lead in the march to
Zion.”33
The predominant missionary response to Islam was to pit
it as a strong Satanic force that would ultimately bend to the
power of the Holy Spirit, which the signs of the times seemed
to be accomplishing regardless of their own direct efforts.
Most ante-bellum American missionaries stationed in
Ottoman lands redoubled their faith in the prophetic promis-
es and increased the fervency of their declamations against
Islam rather than launch new efforts at direct evangelism.
This eschatological faith absolved them of the need for
meaningful dialogue with Muslims about the tenets of their
religion, thereby limiting the ultimate effectiveness of their
missionary approach. The meaning and status of Islam was
explained through prophetic projection and not as part of the
struggle of understanding intercultural difference. Forcing
diverse human communities into the procrustean bed of
biblical metaphors—especially those describing them as
locusts and scorpions—was a process of dehumanizing
violence that sanctioned a religiously motivated prejudice. By
failing to engage Muslims as humans with highly developed
cultures of belief, these Christian thinkers demonstrated the
degree to which the orientalism of eschatology produced
ideological blinders that prevented the perception of diversity.
The fatalism that Christians saw as elemental to Muslim belief
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Drying up the Euphrates
ironically serves as both an apt description of their own
prophetic enterprise and a sign of the strength of Islamic faith
even at a time of political weakness and incipient colonization.
Notes
1 Daniel O. Morton, ed. Memoir of Reverend Levi Parsons (Burlington:
Chauncey Goodrich, 1830), 248.
2 Morton, 286, 255.
3 The Old and the New; or, The Changes of Thirty Years in the East (New
York: M.W. Dodd, 1853), 43. George Rapelje, a secular tourist traveling
the same time as Fisk, found Muslims to be more “horrid in aspect…than
the wild savages of America, in their war dress.” A Narrative of Excursions,
Voyages, and Travels (New York: West & Trow, 1834), 250.
4 F. E. Haines, Jonas King, Missionary to Syria and Greece (New York:
American Tract Society, 1879), 123.
5 Reiner Smolinski discusses this important point in his article “Israel
Redivivus: The Eschatological Limits of Puritan Typology in New
England,” New England Quarterly 63 (1990): 357-95.
6 Quoted in James L. Barton, Daybreak in Turkey (Boston: The Pilgrim
Press, 1908), 86.
7 John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 62-9. R. W. Southern, The
Western View of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1962), 28.
8 Hichem Djait, Europe and Islam. Peter Heinegg, trans. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985), 13.
145
9 Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Oxford: Sutton Courtenay, 1978),
99. Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptical Visions
from the Reform to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1978), 17.
10 Luther’s Works. 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortune Press, 1965), V, 88.
Luther contemptuously called the Turkish Empire “nothing but a morsel
of bread which a rich head of a household throws to his dogs” claiming that
they “have no promise of God only their stinking Koran, their victories,
and the temporal power on which they rely.” IV, 29. See also George W.
Forell, “Luther and the War Against the Turks,” Church History 14 (1945):
264, and Harvey Buchanan, “Luther and the Turks 1519-1529,” Archiv
Für Reformationsgeschichte 47 (1956): 155.
11 Alvan Bond, Memoir of the Rev. Pliny Fisk (Boston: Crocker and
Brewster, 1828), 114. William Goodell viewed his mission in these terms:
“We have had to go into the very heart of the kingdom of darkness, ‘where
Satan’s seat is,’ and there, amidst conflict, noise, and strife, and deadly hate,
to break open the prison doors, and proclaim liberty to the miserable cap-
tives.” The Old and the New, 64.
12 See, for example, Joseph Mede, The Key of the Revelation (London,
1650); Thomas Brightman, The Revelation of St. John (Amsterdam,1644);
Charles Daubuz, A Perpetual Commentary on the Revelation of St. John
(London, 1720). The Adventist Le Roy Edwin Froom, in his massive four-
volume study of the historical development of prophetic interpretation,
argues that the application of verses from the Book of Revelation to
account for the rise and fall of the Saracens and Turks was “almost axiomat-
ic” and that “the final drying up of the Turk and his crucial place in the
closing events of earth were of deepest and immediate interest, and fre-
quent exposition.” The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers: The Historical
Development of the Prophetic Interpretation (Washington, D.C.: Review and
Herald, 1946-54), II, 786; IV, 399-400. Paul Boyer, in his 1992 study of
prophecy belief in American culture, argued that there has existed a “con-
stant” interest in Islamic leaders and their prophetic significance since the
time of the Crusades. When Time Shall be No More: Prophecy Belief in
Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Har vard University Press, 1992),
78.
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Drying up the Euphrates
13 Cotton Mather, The Angel of Bethesda (New London, Conn., 1722),
112, as quoted in Mukhtar Ali Isani, “Cotton Mather and the Orient,” The
New England Quarterly 43 (1970): 49-50.
14 Bishop Thomas Newton, Dissertations on the Prophecies (1754; London:
B. Blake, 1840), 554.
15 Cotton Mather, Things to Be Look’d For (Cambridge, 1691), 31-4.
Already by 1690, Cotton Mather was eagerly awaiting “the Happy
Chiliad,” because “tis now past Question with me, That the Second Wo is
past, and the Third you know then cometh quickly.” The Present State of
New England (Boston, 1690), 35.
16 Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston, 1693), 39-
40.
17 Cotton Mather, Things for a Distress’d People to Think Upon (Boston,
1696), 34-5.
18 Cotton Mather, Menachem: A Very Brief Essay on Tokens for Good
(Boston, 1716), 40. In Theopolis Americana of 1710, Mather likewise
asserted “[w]e have a world of Reason to Believe, That the Second Wo is
passing away” and that the world was entering the “black Time” of the sev-
enth trumpet. (Boston, 1710), 3-4.
19 William Miller, Evidences from Scripture (Brandon, Vt.: Vermont
Telegraph, 1833), 43. Josiah Litch, The Probability of the Second Coming of
Christ (Boston: David H. Ela, 1838), 154-8.
20 Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American
Thought, 1756-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
145.
21 Ethan Smith, Key to the Revelation. In Thirty-Six Lectures (New York: J.
& J. Harper, 1833), 318. George Stanley Faber, The Sacred Calendar of
Prophecy. 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: W.E. Painter, 1844), III, 353, 287.
147
22 Cyrus Hamlin, My Life and Times. 2nd ed. (Boston and Chicago:
Congregational Sunday School and Publication Society, 1893), 203-4.
23 Isaac Bird, Bible Work in Bible Lands (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board
of Publications, 1873), 16.
24 The model of this approach was the Christian Missionary Society’s pub-
lication of William Jewett’s Christian Researches in the Mediterranean in
1824 which includes reflections on the “deeply painful” fact of the contin-
ued prevalence of Islam in the region.
25 Smith noted these changes in a sermon titled “Trials of Missionaries,”
given in 1832 at the departure of new missionaries for the Holy Land that
“[t]he Turks are so kept in check by fear of the power and vengeance of
Christian nations, that, where you go, your life will rarely, if ever, be
endangered by their wrath.” (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1832). The
influence of Smith’s points can be seen in a sermon called “The Aspect of
the Age, with Respect to Foreign Missions.” “Let the spirit of inquiry once
be diffused and the refinements of European habits and character become
popular, and the absurdity of the Moslem faith must and will be
exchanged....” The Princeton Review 5:4(October 1833): 454.
26 Letter to George Boyd, November 9, 1835 in The Horatio Southgate
Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale
University. For an introduction to Southgate, see Kenneth Walter
Cameron, “The Manuscripts of Horatio Southgate—A Discovery,”
American Church Monthly 152 (October 1937), 155-73.
27 Encouragement to Missionary Effort among Mohamedans. A Sermon, by
the Rev. Horatio Southgate, Jun. Missionary of the Protestant Episcopal
Church in the United States of America, to Persia, &c. (New York:
Prostestant Episcopal Press, 1836), 8, 18- 9.
28 Horatio Southgate, Narrative of a Tour Through Armenia, Kurdistan,
Persia and Mesopotamia. 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1840), I,
72.
148
Drying up the Euphrates
29 “On Missionary Efforts among the Mohammedans,” in The Spirit of
Missions 9(February 1844): 55.
30 Southgate, The Cross above the Crescent: A Romance of Constantinople
(Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1878)
31 “Instructions of the Prudential Committee, to the Rev. James Lyman
Merrick” in The Missionary Herald 30(1834): 402-5.
32 “Letter from Mr. Merrick, Dated at Ooroomiah, June 19, 1837” in The
Missionary Herald, 34(1838): 64.
33 Rev. J.L. Merrick, An Appeal to the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Mission (Springfield: John Wood, 1847), 82, 125. Merrick’s life-
long devotion to his calling is manifested in his bequests to educational
institutions to support the study of the Persian language.
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