“We came to recognize,” wrote Russell, “the difference between our Lord as ‘the man who gave himself,’ and as the Lord who would come again, a spirit being. We saw that spirit-beings can be present, and yet invisible to men. . . . we felt greatly grieved at the error of Second Adventists, who were expecting Christ in the flesh, and teaching that the world and all in it except Second Adventists would be burned up in 1873 or 1874, whose time-settings and disappointments and crude ideas generally as to the object and manner of his coming brought more or less reproach upon us and upon all who longed for and proclaimed his coming Kingdom.”

About January of 1876, Russell received a copy of the religious periodical The Herald of the Morning. From the cover, he identified it with Adventism, but its contents were a surprise. The editor, N. H. Barbour of Rochester, New York, understood that the object of Jesus Christ’s return was not to destroy but to bless all families of the earth and that his coming would be thieflike and not in the flesh, but as a spirit. In fact, from Biblical time-prophecies Barbour thought Christ then was present and that the harvest work of gathering the “wheat” and “tares” (“weeds”) was already due.

In 1877, Barbour and Russell jointly published Three Worlds, and the Harvest of This World. This 196-page book combined information about Restitution with Biblical time prophecies. It presented the view that Jesus Christ’s invisible presence and a forty-year period opening with a three-and-a-half-year harvest dated from the autumn of 1874.