Historic (Classic) Premillennialists: Free Online Books

August 20, 2013

Update (addition) to the resources listed here:  an online discussion group for Historic (Classic) Premillennialism.

Barry Horner, in Future Israel and other writings (see page 5 here and page 14 here) has mentioned several names of classic (Judeo-Centric) historic premillennialists.  The list mentioned by him, and mentioned elsewhere in connection with Horner’s work, includes well-known preachers such as Charles Spurgeon and J.C. Ryle, and many others as well:  Adolph Saphir, David Baron, Andrew and Horatius Bonar, Robert Murray M’Cheyne, George N.H. Peters, Nathaniel West, Henry Grattan Guinness, B.W. Newton, S. P. Tregelles, Joseph Seiss, and Charles Simeon. These men lived and wrote during the 19th and early 20th century, and much of their work is now available in the public domain, free in online and e-book format.

See this previous post for many available works from Adolph Saphir and David Baron.  The following is a links-reference to the many available works by these other Christian premillennialists, as well as a good resource from a 20th century writer, Robert D. Culver.  Note that many, but not all, of the titles here relate to prophecy and premillennialism.  Google Play is one of the formats available, but for those desiring e-pub or PDF format, note that Google Play includes options to download e-pub and/or PDF formats available for many of the titles.

Robert D. Culver (1916-) :  Daniel and the Latter Days (1954)

Andrew Bonar (1810-1892):

Horatius Bonar (1808-1889):

Volume 1 (1849)
Volume 2 (1850)
1854 
1855
1857
1858
1864
Volume 19 (1867)
Volume 23 (1871)

J.C. Ryle (1816-1900):

George N.H. Peters (1825-1909):

Nathaniel West (1826-1906):

Henry Grattan Guinness

Joseph A. Seiss  (1823-1904):

 Benjamin Wills Newton (1807-1899)

Many of the titles are tracts less than 50 pages.  Full-length books include:

Tracts relating to eschatology:

Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813-1875)

Alexander Keith (1791-1880)

Websites:

Categories: Barry Horner, Bible Prophecy, Christian Authors, church history, eschatology, Horatius Bonar, J. C. Ryle, premillennialism, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,
  1. John T. Jeffery
    August 20, 2013 at 1:40 pm

    You have provided a valuable service in posting the links to these historic resources. Those who remain in ingnorance of such scholarly defenses of premillennial doctrine now have at least one excuse removed! Those who value them now have but to study them! Thank you!

    • Lynda O
      August 20, 2013 at 1:51 pm

      You’re welcome. Yes, there are many of these works available, and this is what I’ll be using for my reading list. After finishing an Adolph Saphir book I hope to start on Culver’s Daniel work next.

  2. SLIMJIM
    August 20, 2013 at 11:40 pm

    Wow thank you for this labor of love!

  3. Christian
    October 5, 2013 at 2:58 pm

    Some additional must-have’s for the list:

    Alexander Keith: “Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion Derived from the Literal Fulfillment of Prophecy.” This went through many editions and was reportedly very popular in its day. He was part of the “Inquiry” as well and advocated a homeland for the Jews in what was then commonly called Palestine.

    “The Quarterly Journal of Biblical Prophecy” edited by H. Bonar. I think it lasted about 25 years. I haven’t found the full set of this online, but it is available in the Horatius Bonar CD-ROM put out by Lux Publications some years ago. That disc apparently includes all of Bonar’s works. Like AGES Software I’m guessing they are probably defunct at this point. However, I was able to land one one of those CDs a while back. I think all of the files are PDF so I might be able to pass some of them along. Several more of his books could be listed, perhaps most notably “God’s Way of Holiness” and “The Everlasting Righteousness.”

    I assume that you must have J.C. Ryle’s “Coming Events and Present Duties” listed somewhere. Also, his “Expository Thoughts on the Gospels should be consulted, perhaps especially Luke Vol 2 on the Olivet Discourse since he went into more detail with each Gospel as he continued on through the four Gospels.

    With regard to B.W. Newton, after expending much time and effort, some time ago I found that some if not all of those tracts that the Sovereign Grace Advent Testimony lists can be found in the massive “Works of Benjamin Wills Newton” volumes that are available on Google Books. (This was before they came up with Google Play, which apparently has a few additional items.) I printed some of them out and am not quite sure if I could find them on there again! Those volumes tend to have false endings where one section will end but another will start with a new table of contents and new pagination. Someone must have just recently uploaded his “The Second Advent of Our Lord.” To my knowledge it wasn’t available before in a stand alone format.

    It should be noted that Blackstone is thoroughly dispensational. “Jesus Is Coming” did more to popularize dispensationalism than any other publication prior to the release of the Scofield Reference Bible. He is quite probably the foremost Christian Zionist of all time, publishing Zionist material before Herzl did.

    I think Nathaniel West initially embraced pre-trib or else was indifferent toward it. (Note that the Premil essays book that came out of that great prophetic conference includes pre-trib and post-trib contributors. Postmillennialism was seen as the “opponent” at that time.) Then he turned sharply critical, setting forth his views in some articles that I haven’t found anywhere online. Richard Reiter details this rancorous history in his very helpful introduction to the first “Three Views on the Rapture” book, which featured Gleason Archer, Paul Feinberg and Douglas Moo.

    I’ve been thinking of coming up with my own bibliography for a while but I see you’ve beat me to it. I did just start my own page, which is very much a work in progress: http://onepilgrimsprogress.wordpress.com/classic-historic-premillennial-works/ But it has a few that aren’t listed here, perhaps most notably the works by A. Keith.

    • Lynda O
      October 6, 2013 at 7:59 am

      Thanks for the updates. J.C. Ryle’s work, and Horatius Bonar’s Quarterly Journal material are available at the Future Israel site, so I’ll update to include a link to those. I’ll add more updates as well based on this material.

    • Lynda O
      October 6, 2013 at 6:22 pm

      This page has now been updated with Alexander Keith and J.C. Ryle online books, plus a section listing websites.

  4. Mike V
    October 22, 2013 at 12:42 am

    It seems like Prog Disp and Hist Premill (not Laddian) have much in common. Close cousins.

    • Lynda O
      October 22, 2013 at 8:00 am

      Yes, a lot in common — both very futurist premillennial including the future restoration of ethnic Israel.

      • Mike
        October 22, 2013 at 10:53 am

        Lynda, the work you have done on the different forms of Hist Premill is great. Do you believe that Ladd has taken over (hijacked) the traditional view so that when people think of HP today they think of Ladd’s version. It appears that way to me.

  5. Lynda O
    October 22, 2013 at 11:08 am

    Yes, I agree — that is what I have come across in studying the matter over the last two years or so and looking online for the topic historic premillennialism. And so it becomes necessary to continually inform people of the true/classic historic premillennial view. Like someone else said one time, at a blog post that was talking about historic premill as the George Ladd view (paraphrasing), the Ladd view is actually newer than 20th century “classic dispensationalism” so it seems ironic that Ladd is now considered the “standard bearer” for a view that is actually quite different from true historic premillennialism.

    I’ve just been reading and enjoying your recent blog posts about the Kingdom of God, and when I have time plan to listen to your video message from the recent conference you were at. Thanks for your research and the recent articles.

    • Mike
      October 22, 2013 at 11:17 am

      Thanks, I thought so. I think you are on to something. I have been with Barry Horner at several conferences together and we see so much alike.

  6. Daniel
    June 9, 2016 at 5:31 pm

    Thanks Lynda for these resources. Provident Baptist Ministries has changed their stance from historic premillenialism to amillenialism. This has been pretty recent. His mind was change when he read Kingdom Come by Sam Storms. Just thought I would let you know.

    • Lynda O
      June 10, 2016 at 5:30 am

      Thanks for this info, Daniel. That is disappointing.

  7. Christian
    June 10, 2016 at 12:10 am

    Daniel, Thank you for this information. The Theologue site, which had much of the same material on eschatology, was taken down several years ago. One of the reasons the owner gave was that PB Ministries had most of the same things posted that he did. (Both sites had been up since the 90s or early 00s, I think.) You can probably still access the material from both sites using the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive.) But that eventually won’t help with Google results.

    One plus is that more and more of this stuff is available on Google Books and Archive.org, sites that did not exist when PB Ministries and Theologue went online. Fifteen years ago, who would have thought that you could read a scanned copy of a B.W. Newton book online?

    I wonder if the Sovereign Grace Advent Testimony has considered the feasibility of making some of the classic works they reprint available as ebooks.

  8. Lynda O
    June 10, 2016 at 5:58 am

    Chris and Daniel, is there any possibility of someone getting the material that the PB Ministries owner has now removed, to put it up again at another site? I had downloaded a couple items from PB Ministries to my kindle for future reading… but it would be nice even to have a list of all the material that PB Ministries has now removed.

    • Christian
      June 10, 2016 at 7:00 pm

      I would try the Wayback Machine. It’s not guaranteed, but I’ve downloaded PDF files from sites that have been offline for 2-3 years, if not more. I don’t know why it wouldn’t work for other kinds of files.

      Did they have many eschatology resources available in ebook format?

  9. Daniel
    June 18, 2016 at 8:04 pm

    We could ask him about it possibly. umpron@charter.net . Dr. Ron Cooks. He sounds like he will not put them up.

  10. Daniel
    July 30, 2016 at 11:11 pm

    Here Lynda is the latest info I saw on the PBministries.organization site

    This site has been suspended.

    Other organizations claim that they own the
    works that have been hosted on PBMinistries.org.

    We do not have the financial ability to
    fight these claims.

    If you have questions or concerns, please e-mail Dr. Ron Cook at mumpron@charter.net

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