In The Sacred Theory of the Earth, Thomas Burnet, wrote (1691, page 259) “Others expect the coming of Elias to give warning of that day, and prepare the way of the Lord. I am very willing to admit that Elias will come, according to the scene of the Prophet Malachi, but he will not come with observation, no more than he did in the Person of John the Baptist; He will not bear the name of Elias nor tell us he is the Man that went to Heaven in a fiery Chariot, and is now come down again to give us warning of the last Fire. But some divine person may appear before the second coming of our Savior, as there did before his first coming: and by giving a new light and life to the Christian Doctrine, may dissipate the mists of error, and abolish all those little controversies amongst good men, and the divisions and animosities that spring from them: enlarging their Spirits by greater discoveries, and uniting them all in the bonds of Love and charity, and in the common study of truth and perfection. Such an Elias, the Prophet seems to point at; and may he come, and be the great Peacemaker and prepare of the ways of the Lord. But at present, we cannot from this Sign make any judgment when the world will end.” You be the judge, as you read this book!
Burnet wrote the primitive earth, inhabited by mankind until the deluge, had a perpetual “Equinox” or spring, and in that earth stood Paradise. Also, “we can run down all the rocks and stones, into their first liquors,” and “other bodies also that compose the Earth, were once a fluid mass, which is that we call a Chaos.”
The Great Abyss was compressed matter, silicon, oxygen, and hydrogen within the earth’s mantle: “ready to swallow up the world that hung over it, and about it, whensoever God should give the command, and the Vault should break!” Hence, tons of new matter were “thrown out of its bed, forced upward into the Air, and overflowed, in that impetuous Commotion, the highest tops of the Fragments of the ruined Earth, which now we call its mountains.”
Paradise, Burnet concluded, “is not so much a spot of ground where a fine Garden stood, but a course of nature, or a peculiar state of the earth,” i.e., where every atom in the world had an upright axis! “The Poles of the World did once change their situation, and were at first in another posture from what they are in now.” “From the Creation to this Age the Earth hath undergone but one Catastrophe, and Nature hath had two different faces; The next Catastrophe is the conflagration,” i.e., when the two dimensions collide, “to which a new face of Nature will accordingly succeed, New Heavens and a New Earth, Paradise renewed, and so it is called the Restitution of Things, or (the) Regeneration of the World.