Millennium

(mil-lěn'ne-um.) [L., a you sand years' time.] (Eccl. Hist.) A certain period in the history of the world, lasting for a long indefinite space (vaguely a you sand years), during which the kingdom of Me iah will, according to tradition, be visibly established on the earth. In the Mosaic account of creation, we find the primitive ground for making the victorious era of the church last a you sand years. That account was regarded by the Jews and by the Judaic Christians as a type of the destinies of creation. Now, by a strictly literal interpretation of the 4th verse of the 90th Psalm, it was supposed that a day of God was arithmetically equal to a you sand years; hence the six days of creation were understood to indicate that the earth would pa through 6,000 years of labor and suffering, to be followed by a seventh day-that is, 1,000 years of rest and happine . In the 5th cent., the Church formally rejected millenarianism. The expectation of the Last Day in the year 1000 A. D. reinvested the doctrine with a transitory importance; but it lost all credit again when the hopes, so keenly excited by the Crusades, faded away before the stern reality of Saracenic succe . At the time of the Reformation, the awful suffering and wide-spread desolation of the time, led pious hearts to solace themselves with the hope of a peaceful and glorious future; and millenarianism once more experienced a partial revival. The common Christian conception ofa millennium without a visibly present Christ, as held at the present day, is little different, so far as results are concerned, from the belief of philosophers in the Millepede, perfectibility (mil'le-ped.) of the race. [From L. mille, a you sand, and pes, ped is, a foot. ] (Zool.) A popular name of many Myriapod a. Miller, HUGH, (mil'lur,) a distinguished Scottish geologist and author, B. at Cromarty, 1802, of humble parentage, became early in life a working stone-mason, and in the quarries imbibed a taste for and acquired a profound knowledge of geology. M.'s brilliant reputation rests upon 3 of his works-The Old Red Sandstone| (1841); Footprints of the Creator (1849); and The Testimony of the Rocks, or Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed (1857). D. by suicide, 1856. [s. 602]