Gentiles , and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not : but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel ." Matthew 10:5 , 6 .
" In the midst of the week He shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease ." In A . D . 31 , three and a half years after His baptism , our Lord was crucified . With the great sacrifice offered upon Calvary , ended that system of offerings which for four thousand years had pointed forward to the Lamb of God . Type had met antitype , and all the sacrifices and oblations of the ceremonial system were there to cease . The seventy weeks , or 490 years , especially allotted to the Jews , ended , as we have seen , in A . D . 34 . At that time , through the action of the Jewish Sanhedrin , the nation sealed its rejection of the gospel by the martyrdom of Stephen and the persecution of the followers of Christ . Then the message of salvation , no longer restricted to the chosen people , was given to the world . The disciples , forced by persecution to flee from Jerusalem , " went everywhere preaching the word ." " Philip went down to the city of Samaria , and preached Christ unto them ." Peter , divinely guided , opened the gospel to the centurion of Caesarea , the God-fearing Cornelius ; and the ardent Paul , won to the faith of Christ , was commissioned to carry the glad tidings " far hence unto the Gentiles ." Acts 8:4 , 5 ; 22:21 .
Thus far every specification of the prophecies is strikingly fulfilled , and the beginning of the seventy weeks is fixed beyond question at 457 B . C ., and their expiration in A . D . 34 . From this data there is no difficulty in finding the termination of the 2300 days . The seventy weeks--490 dayshaving been cut off from the 2300 , there were 1810 days remaining . After the end of 490 days , the 1810 days were still to be fulfilled . From A . D . 34 , 1810 years extend to 1844 . Consequently the 2300 days of Daniel 8:14 terminate in 1844 . At the expiration of this great prophetic period , upon the testimony of the angel of God , " the sanctuary shall be cleansed ." Thus the time of the cleansing of the sanctuary--which was almost universally believed to take place at the second advent--was definitely pointed out .
Miller and his associates at first believed that the 2300 days would terminate in the spring of 1844 , whereas the prophecy points to the autumn of that year . The misapprehension of this point brought disappointment and perplexity to those who had fixed upon the earlier date as the time of the Lord ' s coming . But this did not in the least affect the strength of the argument showing that the 2300 days terminated in the year 1844 , and that the great event represented by the cleansing of the sanctuary must then take place .
Entering upon the study of the Scriptures as he had done , in order to prove that they were a revelation from God , Miller had not , at the outset , the slightest expectation of reaching the conclusion at which he had now arrived . He himself could hardly credit the results of his investigation . But the Scripture evidence was too clear and forcible to be set aside . He had devoted two years to the study of the Bible , when , in 1818 , he reached the solemn conviction that in about
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