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stration of its fulfilment. And it seems to me, that, in like manner, the assemblies of the church, in these times, should be filled with prophetic knowledge, in order to deliberate with wisdom and effect. I require not that they should take these measures, on purpose to fulfil the prophecy, or that they should determine upon the manner of its fulfilment, nor in any way make it a law to their proceedings, because, as hath been said, it is revealed not to the faculties of the mind which are occupied with the present, but to those which are occupied with the future; and should be the law unto our hopes, the guide to our prayers, and the presiding spirit of our schemes and purposes, if we would be fellow-workers with God, if we would not be found fighting against God.

As the soul of Moses, and the few faithful ones, was borne up in the wilderness by the prophecy of entering into the land of Canaan, and without such faith could not have endured, but must have fallen in the day of provocation, with the multitude which could not enter in by reason of unbelief, so ought the soul of these societies, which are at present the councils of the church, and receive its temporal and spiritual contributions, to be in like manner inspired by the prophecies which assure the church of her entrance into the possession of the kingdom of the whole earth; and, without such a full assurance of faith, they never shall be able to cope with and overcome the various enemies which will be raised up to oppose their progress, and try their faith. For let the church rest assured, that if she could have warred her warfare without such helps to her faith, these helps would not have been accorded to her of the Lord; and that being furnished to her, she doth herself most grievous wrong, and showeth to her Lord much ingratitude and dishonour in not using them as a great treasure of faith, and storehouse of strength, in her difficult passage to the land of promise.

Wherefore, to me, convinced of all the things which have been spoken above it is manifest, that no better service can be rendered to the church, and to that society of Christians which hath made choice of me to discourse before them, than to consider the prophecies of scripture, which are fulfilled in the present condition of the church and the world, with those which are about to be fulfilled in the

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years that are now beginning to run their course. For it will appear in the sequel, as indeed it hath been made to appear by more than one interpreter of prophecy, that we have just accomplished a prophetic period of great prominence in the book of God, and entered upon another of still greater prominence in the divine threatenings, full of still more terrible issues to the world, and still more joyful issues to the church. To which I am the rather moved, because the field of this society's undertaking is exactly in those parts of the world which have been made the subject of the most exact and minute prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation. For though this society be called the CONTINENTAL Society, and hath in its eye all the nations of Europe, it hath hitherto (by a divine Providence I doubt not) been confined in its operations to those kingdoms and nations which were included in the ancient Roman empire, to which these prophets chiefly, almost wholly, address the burden of their revelations. And therefore, that I may be able to instruct it with wholesome instruction, and that it may be instructed in the way in which it should fulfil its undertaking, I propose to examine, with diligence and with humility, what is said in the book of God's testimony, concerning that quarter of the earth where it hath been directed to labour, and the eventful time at which God hath called it into being.

PART I.

The twofold division of Prophecy into DISCURSIVE and HisTORICAL, with the general explication and opening of THE PROPHECY OF THE FOUR BEASTS, contained in the text.

THE prophecies of scripture are of two kinds; the one PROPHECY, properly so called, or the SHOWING FORTH of the purposes of God respecting the world and the church; the other, prophetic history, or the same purposes digested into a narrative of coming events, drawn up with reference to time and place. Of the DISCURSIVE kind are all the books of prophecy in the Old Testament, save the book of Daniel, which is HISTORICAL, with all the prophetic

passages of the New Testament, save the Revelation of John, which is also HISTORICAL. The oracles of God, delivered by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the minor prophets, do not observe the order of time, or contain any succession of dates, but are bound together by a more sublime principle of association, which, so far as it has been revealed to our mind, is, the analogy and similitude of the divine procedure in the administration of human affairs. Whatever point of space or time the prophet starts from, and whatever event stirs up the Spirit within him, be it a deliverance or a judgment, coming to Israel, to Tyre, to Babylon, to Egypt, or any other of the nations, he stayeth not when he hath spoken the comfortable or the doleful tidings, but delivereth himself into a large world of kindred vision, over which his eye ranging, in more than poetic liberty, doth note the most striking and remarkable dispensations of God's providence onward to the very end of time. Judgments of the world, and deliverances of the church, glow before the prophet's rapt and ravished mind, and take forms of terror or of glory from his inspired pen. And the Divine Person who accomplisheth the restoration and redemption of the church, comes into his vision,-now as a child that is born to everlasting government, now as the prince of peace and blessedness, whose coming is proclaimed by a voice filling the wilderness and the solitary waste, now as a man of sorrows led like a sheep to the slaughter, now as a conqueror coming from Bozrah, when he had trodden the wine press of his fury, travelling in righteousness, mighty to save; until, at length, the travail of his soul being accomplished, and his kingdom established, the whole earth rejoiceth, and the woods break forth into singing, and the desert and the solitary place is glad for him, and the wilderness rejoiceth and blossometh like the rose. It is a sublime method of discourse which these prophets use. The particular judgment or doom seems but as a text or theme to the all-compassing discourse, which straightway hastens to deliver itself from the conditions of time and place, in order that it may enter into communion with the divine mind, which is not by time and place methodised, and embracing the whole counsels of the eternal, fling them forth as they lie associated in the everlasting decrees, ere yet they take the mould and form of the human mind, or are digested by.

time and place, or arranged according to the conditions of cause and effect.

Therefore are they ofttimes called visions and dreams; because, as in our dreams, there is as it were, one great round of space, and presence of time, where all things past, present, and to come, read or heard of, seen or experienced, come forth, as it seems, in disorder and disarray, yet together constituting a unity of vision, and working a unity of effect by virtue of some one mood of the mind, which throws them all into mysterious association,-so in these prophecies the prophet's soul seems to be cast out of itself into a divine mood of the Spirit, which gathereth, and, as it were, attacheth to itself all forms of future events, which illustrate and appertain to it; and combineth them into one present image or scene, with the clear and vivid recollection of which the prophet findeth himself impressed, as a man who hath awaked from a vivid dream. And having described or written it, there it remains a work and testimony of the divine Spirit, not to the order, place, or time of certain future events, but to their connexion and association with the laws of the divine mind. The particular event which occasions the vision, seems but, as it were, a sample of the class of events which that mood of the prophetic spirit draws together from the ends of the earth, and from the bounds of time. And his mystical discourse containeth not merely the fates of a kingdom, or city, or nation, but is a type or form of the counsels of the eternal, with the eventful demonstration of the same upon the theatre of the world and of time.

To take the example of one prophet, which will answer for any other, Daniel and John excepted, such a discourse flung off, as it were, in one mood of the inspiring spirit, and assimilating to itself all kindred events till the end of the prophetic dispensation, is contained in the first five chapters of Isaiah; and another such carries us to the 13th chapter; where another such begins, with several particular burdens for its text, and carries us forward to the 36th chapter, if it be not broke in twain at the 28th; and thenceforth to the end, the prophet seems altogether out of the conditions of time, and delivered from the ordinary conditions even of prophetic discourse, sailing freely in the ocean of his revelations, as if a portion had been given to him of

God's own comprehension, which comprehendeth things with no respect of time, but with respect to his own eternal holiness, and combineth them not by any sequence of cause and effect, but delighteth in them as the offspring of his all-comprehending and all-creating WORD.

The prophetic harp, in the hands of those most lofty of the prophets, is continually employed, as it were, in playing the variations of the same divine piece, whereof the various notes are the acts of God's providence, and the harmony, the heavenly harmony, is the concert of those acts with the attributes of the divine Spirit, whether in his own personality, or present in the souls of his people. This harp is awakened by some great event about to happen to the earth, and being awakened, it plays through the compass of all the strings, a melody to the glory of God, and the salvation of the church out of the hands of all her enemies.

Which figures and similitudes my discourse affecteth not, but they present themselves as giving the only intelligible idea of that method of discourse which God employs, in the mouth of these discursive prophets. Hence all events seem confused and blended together, one eclipseth another with its greater glory, and is straightway swallowed up in the greater glory of a third. The first coming and the second coming of Christ; the first destruction of Jerusalem, and the second; the first redemption by Cyrus, and the second by Christ, and to those who receive him, a third greater redemption and deliverance, which hath not yet arrived; a first pouring out of the spirit, and one infinitely surpassing it; a first blessedness and consolation to the earth in the coming of Christ, and a second, whereto the first is but as the shaking of an olive tree, and the dropping of grapes before the vintage is come: all these great events of God's providence to the earth pass before us in the prophetic discourse, with a sublime glory, which is almost inconceivable by the powers of the natural mind, though I believe it to be natural to the spiritual mind, were it redeemed and set free from the conditions of time and place, and the sequency of cause and effect, into the view and comprehension of the mysteries of God.

Such is the best idea which I can give of the more sublime and mysterious of the prophecies, which we stay not

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