1920 PREMILLENNIAL PROPHECY. Hand-Painted 8 Foot Canvas Chart on Second Advent. Rare!

An absolutely irreplaceable and tactile piece of ephemera dating to the 1920's. The present chart was created by Elmer G. Marsh [1880-1972]. 

Marsh was a leader in the God's Revivalist branch of the Methodist Holiness movement founded by Martin Wells Knapp. He attended his first God's Bible School camp meeting in 1910 and enrolled at the school the same year. An earnest student, especially of prophecy and the doctrine of holiness, he graduated in 1912 and immediately began teaching. 

He also began traveling and teaching at camp-meetings on the subject of prophecy, the second coming of Christ, and current events' place in the prophetic timeline. As he was wont to say, "God's clock keeps perfect time."

This likely would have traveled with him, been tied up with rope on the platform, and used as his teaching aid throughout the 1920's and 1930's. 

And here, the uniquely American roots of the Methodist and Methodist holiness movements are evident. Martin Wells Knapp was originally from Albion, Michigan at a time when the Seventh Day Adventist movement was picking up steam in the State under the influence of Ellen G White and James White. And GBS was also deeply influenced by the Niagara and Toronto Premillennial Prophecy Conferences of the 1880's and 1890's, which swarmed with books by the Plymouth Brethren, G. Campbell Morgan's classic premillennial work, and which would influence C. I. Scofield and others [all of which would contain variations of charts similar to the below].

There are fascinating differences between Marsh's and many other of the book printed charts of the time. The attempt to sort of "Map" the trajectory of Satan, Israel, the Church, and the Work of the Spirit seems wholly original and independent of other similar charts, though the eschatological structure itself is well within the premillennial thinking dating back to Edward Irving, John Nelson Darby, William Miller, Ellen G. White, through the Plymouth Brethren, Albury Prophetic Conferences, etc., 

Measuring just under 40 x 96 inches it is stamped on the lower right "From Copyrighted Book | E.G. Marsh 1810 Young St. | Cincinnati Ohio" This was the address of God's Revivalist and probably dates the banner to the late 1920's. 

Colors are very bright, some stains as shown, some of the eyelets with tears, reinforced at corners where years of use and travel caused deterioration. A simply superb, tactile piece of ephemera. Though it is "copyright" we trace no other examples and it appears, for all intents and purposes, entirely unique and likely the one used by Marsh himself.