his harsh daily reality with fantasy. At the school, this type of behavior was supposedly not uncommon and, combined with the heavily religious curriculum, it produced many boys that harbored mystic Christian beliefs. Monk was definitely one of them, and it would influence him throughout his life, most prominently in his belief in a divine event that brings an end to global suffering: the coming of the Kingdom of God. Aside from the Christian mysticist and millenarian elements, Monk's beliefs also bear resemblances to Jewish Messianism. He wrote that the Kingdom of God's coming would "immediately have the effect of arousing the millions of poverty-stricken Jews in Russia, and elsewhere, so that they would realize that the time has now arrived at last for the fulfillment of Divinely inspired prophecies in reference to the ultimate restoration of their own country." It would seem that the coming of the Great Redeemer, the Messiah, was what he had in mind. Industrialist and modernist aspects During his stay in London, Monk had been greatly impressed with the results of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in the fields of transportation and communication (he would later claim that the Bible had predicted the railroad and the telegraph). He viewed the machine as a liberating force, a means with which to end the poverty-stricken and backwards state of so many of the world's people (in particular, Russian Jewry). In The People and the Policy he wrote that it is not enough for Christians to pray for the coming of the Kingdom of God as they have always done: to realize the Kingdom, there must be prayer, and concrete steps of action on the part of all of Christendom. This emphasis on action, and by extension the human will, as a necessity of creating a better world is of considered to be of a modern nature. Monk kept this modernism rooted in religion though. According to his calculations, he claimed, the Books Daniel and Revelation predicted the "Dark Ages" would last until around 1935. He believed this was an indication that the science of the day would be the shining light of the world, bringing about the "new dawn." Monk also proposed some extremely idiosyncratic theories of planetary motion in several books written during the 1880s. Political aspects Despite believing that the Kingdom of God, as he envisioned it, was divinely preordained, Monk had few or no reservations