FULFILLED PROPHECY, IN PROOF OF THE TRUTH OF SCRIPTURE. BY THE REV. BOURCHIER WREY SAVILE, M.A., 66 RECTOR OF SHILLINGFORD; AUTHOR OF THE TRUTH OF THE BIBLE; "THE PRIMITIVE AND CATHOLIC FAITH;" ETC., ETC. "We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 1. MEETNESS FOR HEAVEN. 2. THE FIRST AND SECOND ADVENT. 3. LYRA SACRA: A COLLECTION OF HYMNS ANCIENT AND MODERN. 4. REVELATION AND SCIENCE. 5. EGYPT'S TESTIMONY TO SCRIPTURE. 6. THE TRUTH OF THE BIBLE. 7. THE PRIMITIVE AND CATHOLIC FAITH. 8. ST. PAUL IN BRITAIN. 9. THE APOSTASY: AN EXPLICATION OF 2 THES SALONIANS II. 10. THE BRIDE OF CHRIST. 11. TURKEY, OR THE JUDGMENT OF GOD UPON CHRISTENDOM. 12. HOW INDIA WAS WON BY ENGLAND. PREFACE. COMPARATIVELY few persons are aware how clear and decisive is the evidence in support of the Truth of Revelation, as against the Rationalistic tendencies of the age. It is as Lord Chief Justice Coleridge recently remarked at the trial of a noted criminal, when he spoke of "the immense and enormous preponderance of evidence" against the prisoner; just so is the strength of the testimony against the unbelieving school in the present day. Prominent among the many proofs which are fast accumulating in confirmation of the truth of Scripture, especially those which belong to archæology, as seen in the recently deciphered monuments of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon, the subject of "FULFILLED PROPHECY" is perhaps the most conspicuous and satisfactory of them all. Passing by the involuntary testimony which celebrated writers, such as Gibbon in his Decline and Fall, or Volney in his Ruins of Empires, have borne to Scripture Prophecy, I would adduce the testimony of one more recent traveller as to the present condition of Biblical lands in confirmation of the same. "It is for the learned," says a distinguished officer of the United States' navy, "to comment upon the facts we have laboriously collected. Upon ourselves the result is a decided one. We entered upon this (the Dead) sea with conflicting opinions. One of the party was sceptical, and another, I think, a professed unbeliever in the Mosaic account. After twenty-two days' close investigation, if I am not mistaken, we were unanimous in the conviction of the truth of the Scriptural account of the destruction of the cities of the plain." 1 The subject of " FULFILLED PROPHECY," as considered in the present work, may be divided into that tripartite division mentioned by St. Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, as pertaining to "the Jews, the Gentiles, and the Church of God." None but those whose consciences are what the apostle terms "seared," can deny the well-known and patent facts, which come under the head of predictive prophecy, that the Jewish people are in the condition which Moses foretold they would be, if disobedient, upwards of 3500 years ago. Their history since the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, and their present condition, is one of the most instructive proofs of FULFILLED PROPHECY. In the Messianic prophecies, especially in the one relating to the death of the Messiah, which we find was accomplished at the very time to a day, as Daniel had predicted upwards of five centuries before, we have a very striking lesson of FULFILLED PROPHECY in the history of the four great Gentile Monarchies, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman, during the last 2500 years, as detailed by Daniel and St. John, since Jerusalem has been trodden down by the Gentiles; and which, as the present "Signs of the 1 Commander Lynch's Narrative of the United States' Expedition to the River Jordan, chap. xvii., p. 253. Times" seem to indicate, appears now to be drawing to a close. Amongst these SIGNS which bear upon the question of FULFILLED PROPHECY, the most prominent may be mentioned as follows: 1. The long-continued supremacy of Japheth amongst the nations of the earth, according to Jacob's prophecy when dying, compared with the supremacy in ancient times, as it rested first with the descendants of Ham, and subsequently with the race of Shem. 2. The altered condition of the Jews compared with what it was in the Middle Ages, and their present gathering to the land which God gave to Abraham and his seed for "an everlasting possession." 3. The overthrow of the temporal power of the Papacy in 1870, and the refusal of the kings of the earth to support it any longer, when the Vatican Council thought to perpetuate its power for ever. But God had willed it otherwise. And as one of the most distinguished interpreters of prophecy which the Church of England has produced justly remarks, on the subject of the Vatican Council of 1870 "Thus it had been declared in the Divine prophecy, Apoc. xvii. 17, 'God hath put it into the hearts of the ten kings to fulfil His will, and to agree and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled' ...... The omission to invite the kings of the earth to the Vatican Council according to all former precedents, was too remarkable to escape notice. It was remarked on by M. Veuillot, editor of the well-known Popish journal at Paris, L'Univers, in the passage following:- The Bull does not invite sovereigns to sit in the council. The omission is remarkable. It implies that there are no longer (Roman) Catholic crowns-that is to say, that the order in which society has lived for the last thousand years no longer exists. What has been called the middle age has come to an end. The date of the Bull is the date of its death, its last |