bibleexaminer
CTR was counting on a physical return in 1879, but when it failed, he moved it to 1914. To save face, he invented the parousia nonsense as a stop-gap measure.
Sort of.
The original target date of the Millerite/Second Advent movement was 1843/1844. When the fall of 1844 came and went uneventfully, a few of the more prominent leaders within the movement "spiritualized" the prediction, teaching that Christ had in fact, arrived right on schedule, except that instead of descending to earth, he had entered into the most holy of the heavenly temple. Since this was an invisible, spiritual event, it was impossible for any human to either prove or disprove.
Not everyone accepted that explanation. Nelson H. Barbour who had joined the Millerites at the age of 19 lost his faith completely, left the U.S., and became a miner during the Australian gold rush. It was during his voyage home that he found what he believed to be the critical error in Miller's reckoning. Barbour reset the date to 1873/1874, publishing his findings in both the Advent Christian Times and World's Crises. (Two leading papers of the Advent Christian Association.) In 1873, he started a monthly of his own, titled, The Midnight Cry and Herald of The Morning. When the fall of 1874 passed uneventfully, B.W. Keith, a reader of Barbour's periodical noticed that Benjamin Wilson's, Emphatic Diaglott (An interlinear translation of J.J. Griesbach's recension of the New Testament) rendered parousia as "presence." Based upon this rendering, he suggested that perhaps Christ really had come in the fall of 1874 after all and that this had been an invisible event. Barbour, who was unwilling to abandon his intricate chronology found this solution attractive, so once again, the prediction was, "spiritualized."
All of this happened before Russell ever met Barbour.
In 1876, Russell stumbled across Barbour's chronology (By reading Herald of The Morning) and was so intrigued by it that he paid Barbour's expenses to travel to Philadelphia and meet with him. Russell subsequently accepted Barbour's 1874 date for an invisible parousia as well as the prediction that the next forty years would be a period of ingathering, culminating in 1914, at which point God's kingdom would be established on earth.
Therefore Russell did not at any point in his life look forward to the parousia as a future event, which is why the quote from the February Watchtower above is thoroughly dishonest and utter nonsense.
1914 came and although a large war did break out, this is not what was supposed to happen. In 1925, J.F. Rutherford announced that God's Kingdom had been established right on schedule, only this had been a heavenly, invisible event. For a third consecutive time a failure of Adventist date setting was explained away by "spiritualizing" what were supposed to be tangible, visible events.
During the years that followed, the Barbour/Russell chronology was systematically shifted forward forty years so that 1914 became the date for both the parousia as well as the start of the "Time of the end." The first clear, unambiguous reference to 1914 as the year Christ had returned did not appear in The Watch Tower until December of 1933, which means the 1874 date was taught for more than half a century.
