As interest has been expressed from time to time regarding the WTS' oldest publications, I would like to submit a few posts on my observations of Studies in the Scriptures, the original six volumes written by Charles Taze Russell. These are still published by various Bible Student Associations but not by the WTB&TS.
The plan for the Scripture Studies (hereafter SS) was to use the first volume, The Divine Plan of the Ages, as a base or foundation upon which the succeeding volumes would be built. Thus, the Bible Student is (was) encouraged to continually reread and restudy the SS in order to grasp the relationship between the first volume and the succeeding ones.
The "divine plan of the ages" is a dispensational scheme in which the present age is contrasted with the future (Millennial) age, and in which there are two different salvation plans, each applicable depending upon the age in which one lives. For the elect "little flock" there is the Gospel Age resulting in the selection of the 144,000 joint heirs with Christ. These ones are justified by faith, spirit-begotten, and eventually raised to immortal life a spirit beings. Ordinary Christians are merely justified, and others who become spirit-begotten but fail to pass the trials that beset the elect little flock end upon in the Great Multitude as secondary members of the Kingdom of Heaven. But, in the next age, the world of mankind in general is lifted up to human perfection - and this constitutes their justification. The two ages are separated by Armageddon.
Russell held to a realized eschatology - that is, be believed that Christ's second presence was already in progress and that events of the end-time were already occurring. This is something the modern JWs have assigned to the era commencing with 1914. Most of them do not realize that Russell made the same claim for the year 1874. But in The Divine Plan, Russell concealed this realized eschatology and spoke of the Kingdom only in future terms. That is, he wrote from the standpoint of someone still living during the Gospel Age, and not during a transition period from one age to the next. This, no doubt, was for didactic purposes as the concepts which Russell was trying to convey were complex enough for traditional Christians, and he did not want to complicate them any more than was necessary. So the first volume, though published in 1886 (when Russell believed the events of the end-time were well underway) was written from the standpoint of someone living, say, in the 1860's.
It was only when someone was grounded in the basics of the divine plan, and realized the distinction between the two salvations and the different ages, that one could progress to the next two volumes which dealt with the subject of chronology (The Time is at Hand and The Kingdom Come). It was only then that the Bible Student (or prospective Bible Student) would learn that in 1874 a forty-year hearvest period had commenced which would end in 1914. Christ had returned invisibly in 1874 (the first 6,000 years of man's existence having ended in 1873), the sleeping saints had been resurrected in 1878, and Babylon the Great had fallen in 1881. The truly consecrated were now being called out of the churches by the havest workers to associate only with those in "present truth." In 1881 the elect number of 144,000 had been filled, but due to unfaithfulness (the unfaithful ones falling into the Great Company class), replacements were continually being selected. It was on the basis of this replacement process that newly consecrated ones could still entertain a heavenly hope. (Russell did not try to create a secondary earthly class as modern JWs have done. To him, the earthly paradise remained the hope of the world in general.) It must have come as a surprise to the reader of the SS that the glorious hope of attaining to the divine nature with Jesus Christ and Jehovah God which Russell had introduced in the first volume was even then coming to a close!
To be continued . . .