They know not what to make of the Words, little time, speedily, shortly, suddenly, soon. They would have me define the Time, in the Prophecies of my ancient Servants. Yet those Predictions carried in them my authority, and were fulfilled soon enough, for those that suffered under them . . . I have seen it best, not to assign the punctual Times, by their Definition among Men; that I might keep Men always in their due distance, and reverential Fear of invading what I reserve, in secret, to myself . . . The Tower-Guns are the Tormenta e Turre aethera, with which this City I have declared should be battered . . . I have not yet given a Key to Time in this Revelation.”

John Lacy, explaining to his followers among a millenarian French Huguenot sect in Britain in 1707 why his prophecies had not yet been fulfilled, cited in Schwartz 1980, p. 99.
Reference:
Hillel Schwartz [1980]:  The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press)