Before You Begin
Thesis. The key opens the casket. The method of comparing Scripture with Scripture — the Bible made its own interpreter — is the one key that opens the whole casket of prophetic truth, shut to private cleverness and yielding only to the Spirit-taught comparing of precept with precept. This handbook walks the same chain the Advent pioneers walked from 1816 to 1888 — the method, the great image, the longest line, the seventy weeks, the cry and the disappointment, the foundations laid, and the gospel root — but it proves every link FROM SCRIPTURE ALONE, the key working on the Bible by itself, so that no doctrine in the chain rests on any authority outside the Word.
Method. After Haskell's Bible Handbook: every line is ref → gloss, and every symbol is defined the first time it appears — symbol = meaning, with the Scripture receipts that prove it (Miller's Rule: let the Bible define its own figures). Historicism and the year-day measure govern throughout; each section closes with the DEFINITION the verses built, and the appendix gathers every symbol into one dictionary. Pioneer and Ellen White writings appear only rarely in these pages — never as the proof of a doctrine, but at most for a bare historical date or a single confirmation placed after Scripture has already carried the point.