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In yet another anonymous appeal, The Crisis, and Way of Escape, An Appeal for the Oldest of the Oppressed (1856), the idea of justice, ever immanent in the Restoration Movement, found powerful expression:
<<To do justice at once to a people approved of God as His inheritance . . . a simple course is open to us -to the nations. Let us prevail upon the Porte to allow the Jews facilities to return to their own land; to appoint Palestine as a place of refuge for them, from the anarchy and confusion from which they suffer but in which they have no share...
<< If Christians really believe in a Just and Holy God, and that the Bible is His Word; if Mohammedans feel that God is great, who hath appointed them the keepers of His holy place again this time, while their elder brother has been in exile ...if, we say, integrity in belief or duty has any place at all with the parties concerned, this matter of a refuge for the Jews has only to be mentioned to be accomplished?
<< Britons, let us at least be true to the position which the integrity and foresight of our fathers have, in the providence of God earned for us and do an act of tardy justice to a people to whom mankind owe all their higher justice privileges and better civilisation.
In this truly human document, the last trace of conversionism has been removed from the Restoration doctrine. In fact, the very opposite view is here propounded, the nations being urged to live up to the ideals of Justice and Righteousness which they had received from the Hebrew Bible.
A simultaneous phenomenon was the rise of British-Israelism. Its origins go back to the beginnings of Puritanism and, at a later stage, to Richard Brothers (see p. 43), but as a sect British-Israel did not come into being until the middle of the nineteenth century. The year 1845 saw the publication of the first systematic work of this eccentric school, John Wilson's Our Israelitish Origin. The followers of the new creed claimed that the ancestors of the Saxon races appeared in the seventh, or eighth century B.C.E.: at the very place in Asia to which the inhabitants of the Israelitish Kingdom had been removed early in the eighth century. For Israel thus rediscovered in the English people the originators of the theory laid claim to the blessings of Abraham and asserted that it would also perform the Restoration of the descendants of Judah and Levi. "The Jews most assuredly will return to Judaea, but not until we ourselves restore them", said Edward Hine, one of the exponents of British-Israelism.
On this evidence, British-Israelism may be regarded as a branch of the Restoration Movement, though apart from its eccentricity it held an inherent contradiction to the fundamental Messianic principle of the Restoration idea and this provoked violent opposition especially from Restorationists themselves.
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