When people were writing about these things in the 18th and even 19th centuries, the idea was that the world was too big to be destroyed and that God would not do it.

This is a broad historical generalisation about beliefs in the 18th and 19th centuries. Judge it against historians of secularisation, the Enlightenment and eschatology. True: mainstream historical scholarship describes a dominant belief in that era, held widely and not just by a small elite, that the world was too vast to be destroyed and that God would not destroy it. Mostly true: scholarship supports this as the prevailing view among educated or elite Western opinion, while acknowledging minority religious exceptions. Mixed: the shift is documented among Enlightenment elites, but historians show that belief in a divinely ordained end of the world remained widespread in the general population, for example the Great Awakenings, Millerism in the 1840s and popular millenarian movements. Mostly false: the elite shift was real but limited, and popular apocalyptic belief was the norm, so the claim overstates a narrow trend as general. False: scholarship shows no such shift in belief during this period.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Or, Did the Enlightenment Fail? J. C. D. Clark, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies (JSTOR, North American Conference on British Studies) · 2003

   “Centrally, the received picture of a long eighteenth century increasingly dominated by naturalistic ideas of order neglects evidence for Providential discourse not being swept away at an early date but surviving in large quantity into the nineteenth century and later as the prevalent idiom in which the course of events was encountered and reflected upon in England.”

2. E2 Eighteenth-Century Millennialism Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, CW Journal (Autumn 2012), article by James Breig · 2012

   “As in the twenty-first century, when self-anointed prophets, radio talk-show hosts, and ex–vice presidents predict the approach of The End, repeated warnings that the apocalypse was at hand fascinated people in the seventeenth and the eighteenth.”

3. E3 Eighteenth-Century Millennialism Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, CW Journal (Autumn 2012), article by James Breig · 2012

   “Just as popular as the eighteenth-century belief in the end of the world was the notion that a watershed change would usher in the thousand years of the pre-millennium that would conclude with the return of Jesus and the launch the postmillennium.”

4. E4 Millennialism - Eschatology, Apocalypticism, Utopianism | Britannica Encyclopaedia Britannica (article by Richard Landes, Boston University) · 20 July 1998

   “The Great Awakening (*c.* 1720–1740s) and the Second Great Awakening (*c.* 1795–1835) were both inspired by millennial fervour sparked by the teachings of Jonathan Edwards.”

E1 notes a received scholarly picture of a long eighteenth century dominated by naturalistic ideas of order. It argues that this picture neglects evidence that providential discourse survived in large quantity into the nineteenth century as the prevalent idiom in England. E2 and E3 describe belief in the end of the world as popular and widely compelling in the eighteenth century. E4 ties the First and Second Great Awakenings (c. 1720–1835) to millennial fervour. Together these sources show that popular expectation of a divinely ordained end remained common, so the claim turns at most a limited elite trend into a general belief of the era.