III. National Fast Day Evokes Sermons on Prophecy

The special day of “Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer,” appointed by Presidential proclamation for May 9, 1798, witnessed an impressive number of sermons on the prophecies by various clergymen. ^{9President John Adams proclamation dated March 23, 1798 recommended May 9, 1798 as a day of “Solemn Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer,” to acknowledge before God our “manifold Sins and Transgressions,” that our country might be “protected from all the dangers which threaten it,” and which call for “repentance and reformation”; and to pray that “our civil and Religious privileges may be preserved inviolate, “acknowledging God as the “Best ower of every Good Gift” and the preserver of our “Religious and Civil Freedom.” (original Broadside at Library of Congress.) Such national fast days were an occasional continution of the older Colonial practice of annual fast days in New England. The religious fasts at the end of the eighteenth century, when the clergy were more prominent in civic affairs, became increasingly political after the organization of the Federal Government. There was deep concern over the influence of French infidelity, especially during the last decade of the century. Most were statewide fasts. A few, such as this, were nationwide. (W. De Loss Love, Jr., The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England, chap. 25.)} (See facsimile above.) February 15 of that year had marked the dethroning of Pope Pius VI, in Rome, followed by his exile, and later his death in France. Word of his arrest had reached this country, and many keen students of prophecy told their Protestant congregations of the prophetic significance of the event and of the widespread conviction that mankind had evidently entered “the time of the end”—the latter—day epoch that would finally see the overthrow of the papal Antichrist. One of these sermons, based on prophecy, was delivered by Jeremy Belknap, CongregationalistPFF4 61.1

Interestingly enough, in the Roman Catholic Church of Boston, on the same appointed Fast Day of May 9, Father John Thayer attempted to neutralize the common Protestant charge that the Papacy is the prophesied Antichrist, through ridiculing the scholarly acumen and logic of such an interpretation and by seeking to thrust Antichrist’s appearance into the future—the standard Catholic position. ^{10On this see Prophetic Faith, Vol. II. chap. 22.} So prophecy became the vortex of eddying currents of discussion evoked by President Adams’ proclamation in the year 1798. We will first note M’Corkle in North Carolina and Belknap in Boston, and then turn to Thayer. Catholics, be it remembered, were distinctly in the minority in Massachusetts at this time.PFF4 62.1