"The Divine institution of a sabbatical, or seventh year's solemnity among the Jews, has a plain typical reference to the seventh chiliad, or millenary of the world, according to the well known tradition among the Jewish doctors, adopted by many in every age of the Christian Church, that this world will attain to its limit at the end of 6000 years."--_Mede._
"The observance of the Sabbath is essential to the faith; for such only as observe the Sabbath confess that the earth will be renewed: because He who created it out of nothing will renew it."--_David Kimchi, on Isa. 55:5, quoted by Mede._
"In as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years it is perfected; for if the day of the Lord be as it were a 1000 years, and in six days those things that are made were finished, it is manifest that the perfecting of those things is in the 6000th year, when anti-Christ, reigning 1260 years, shall have wasted all things in the world, ... then shall the Lord come from heaven in the clouds, with the glory of his Father." _Irenæus, Bish. of Lyons, A. D. 178._
"In six thousand years, the Lord will bring all things to an end, ... when iniquity shall be no more, all things being renewed by the Lord."--_Epst. of Barnabas, sec. 14, 15._
"Let philosophers know, who number thousands of years, ages since the beginning of the world, that the 6000th year is not yet concluded or ended. But that number being fulfilled, of necessity there must be an end, and the state of human things must be transformed into that which is better."--_Lactantius, B. of Divine Inst., A. D. 310._
Thomas Burnet (Theory of Earth, Lon. 1697) states "that it was the received opinion of the primitive church from the days of the apostles to the council of Nice, that this earth would continue 6000 years, when the resurrection of the just, and conflagration of the earth, would usher in the millennium and reign of Christ on earth."
"God's blessing the Sabbath day, and resting on it from all his works, was a type of that glorious rest that the saints shall have when the six days of this world are fully ended.... He will finish the toil and travail of his saints, with the burden of the beasts and the curse of the ground, and bring all into rest for a thousand years.... None ever saw this world as it was in its first creation but Adam and his wife, neither will any see it until the manifestation of the children of God; _i.e._, until the redemption or resurrection of the saints."--_John Bunyan's Works, vol. 6, pp. 301, 329._