[8] Pember's conversion to Christianity led him to participate in the Brethren, and from within that movement he developed his career as an author and teacher of biblical and theological themes.
[9] Prominent leaders within the Brethren such as Anthony Norris Groves, George Müller and John Nelson Darby were persuaded that there were biblical teachings that were overlooked or not consistently taught by the Protestant churches such as practising adult baptism only (hence rejecting infant baptism), restricting the observance of the Lord's Supper (partaking of the emblems of bread and wine representing Jesus Christ's atoning sacrifice) to baptised members, and biblical prophecies about the imminent return of Christ to the world.
As the Brethren placed great emphasis on understanding biblical prophecy they believed that current events could be signs or signals that Christ's second coming would occur very soon.
[10] As the Brethren upheld strong convictions about living in the end-times, participant members engaged in what they saw as the urgent task of preaching the gospel to persuade other people to become followers of Christ.
"[14] In this book Pember attempted to reconcile the Genesis account of the world's creation with the emerging fossil evidence in geological science about the age of the Earth.
[15] In this theory, God originally created the universe but due to the rebellion of some angels led by Lucifer (or Satan) the Earth descended into chaos and life was destroyed.
[17] The other major feature of Pember's Earth's Earliest Ages was his argument that the emergence of rival non-Christian religious groups were evidence that end times biblical prophecies were being fulfilled.
Three particular religious movements were pinpointed as being examples of the spiritual deception that are characteristic of the biblical signs of the end times: the Spiritualist churches, the Theosophical Society, and Buddhism.
[19] Pember's interpretation of the Spiritualist churches and of the Theosophical Society as prophetic signs of anti-Christian spiritual deception represents a nineteenth-century style of argument that has been subsequently developed and refined in Christian Countercult literature.
[23] Some theologians began to examine passages of the Bible concerned with the afterlife and the prophesied new heaven and new earth, and as those discussions developed Nathaniel Homes (1654) and Stephen Charnock (1660) argued that animals would be included in the resurrection of the dead.
[28] Although Erskine's bill was rejected in the House of Commons, a later legislative attempt to punish acts of cruelty to animals was successfully passed by England's parliament in 1822.
Arthur Broome, William Wilberforce, Richard Martin and Thomas Fowell Buxton, and the organisation they created became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in England.
Pember's argument about a biblical approach to animal rights as seen from the standpoint of end times prophecy was by no means unique, as some of his Christian contemporaries such as Lutheran authors George N. H. Peters (The Theocratic Kingdom) and Joseph A. Seiss also argued similar points.