What is the test for making a threat to strike the chairman of a meeting?

[31] In Stephens v. Myers (1830), 172 E.R. 735, it was held that it “is not every threat, where there is no actual personal violence, that constitutes an assault; there must, in all cases, be the means of carrying the threat into effect. The question I shall leave to you will be, whether the defendant was advancing at the time, in a threatening attitude, to strike the chairman...then, though he was not near enough at the time to have struck him, yet if he was advancing with that intent, I think it amounts to an assault in law."