A Treatise on the Millennium

demonstratively the symbolical import of the Dra. gon, for upon this the whole doctrine of the Millennium mainly hinges. In connexion with this, the writer has endeavoured, at some length, to show the recondite meaning couched under the emblem of the Abyss into which the Dragon was cast, and to fix with as much certainty as the subject will admit the precise political powers shadowed forth by the mystic denomination of Gog and Magog.

The plan of the work unavoidably forced upon the author the necessity of somewhat of an imposing array of learned citations; for this he bespeaks the indulgence of his reader. If the inquiry could have been conducted without them, his pages would not have been encumbered with a mass of matter of so repellent a character. As the quotations, however, are all translated, he hopes the mere English reader will not be deterred, by the formidable aspect of his pages, from prosecuting a perusal to which the title-leaf and the table of contents may perhaps invite him.

Finally, the writer solicits a charitable view of the causes which have led him to the adoption of a theory of the Millennium so diverse from that generally entertained. In his own mind he is conscious of having embraced it from no motive of broaching a novel hypothesis, for in truth it is not novel, or from the prurient promptings of a general disposition to thrust upon the public a set of crude interpretations of the sacred writings. He has been forced purely by stress of evidence to adopt the conclusion announced, and, in some sort, supported, in the ensuing work; and as his object has been to

exhibit in a connected view the chain of proofs which have determined his own convictions, he feels free to demand, as matter of common justice, that the reader should sit in judgment, not, in the first instance, upon the conclusion itself, which must necessarily encounter a host of prejudice, but upon the sufficiency or insufficiency of the reasons alleged in its support. Let the premises be refuted before the conclusion is denied. This conclusion, whether sound or not, involves, indeed, the startling position that the Millennium, strictly so called, is PAST; but that the writer has not been led to embrace or utter this opinion merely from a perverse love of paradox, and that he has no disposition ruthlessly to pluck from the bosom of the Christian or the philanthropist so fond and sacred a hope as that of a coming age of light and glory to the church, without offering any thing to compensate the spoliation, will be evident to every one who shall be sufficiently interested to follow his speculations to their close. Instead of robbing the treasury of Christian hope of a gem so precious, and of abstracting from benevolent effort so mighty a motive, it will be seen that his view of the futurities of Zion, admitting the Millennium to be past, opens to the eye of faith a still more cheering prospect, a lengthened vista of richer and brighter beatitudes.

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