ABSTRACT
The threat (or promise) of the millennium is of a transformation not only of political unsettlement but of serial time itself. The central texts of this chapter, by the English Dissenting minister and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley, were mostly made in the last decade of his life in the United States. An exile rather than an emigré, Priestley found the early republic to be less like an ‘asylum’ from persecution than it was like what he had left behind. The return there to some fundamentals of his Christian faith through comparative studies of Islamic and Hindu scripture depended on a spirit of newly sympathetic inquiry into other religions and cultures and gave precedent and authority for the unity of God that had political implications too. Priestley’s apocalyptic turn did not, however, confuse the heavenly kingdom with the earthly republic, rather taking an enlightened narrative of improvement apparently sanctioned by scripture, a manoeuvre that may be best explained in terms that are essentially neither political nor religious, but aesthetic.
