there is prophecy or promise in Scripture, we shall find God in history, watching over its perfect performance. The minutest characteristics of the Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek, and Roman empires were pictorially set forth in Daniel, long prior to their corporate existence; and the evidence of God in history is the fact that Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Alexander, Pompey, Cæsar, and Constantine, all start up in brilliant succession at the moment indicated some thousand years before; and having done the work predetermined of God, they successively sank into the darkness, out of which like meteors they originally emerged. God's sure word of prophecy is the grand fluxion, of which the history of nations is the fluent. God is as truly in the history of modern and ancient Europe, as in the forty years' journeying in the wilderness. Read the prediction respecting Ham, that his descendants, the children of Africa, will be bondsmen of bondsmen. England nobly sacrificed twenty millions, in order to wash her hands of the heinous crime and horrible abominations of slavery, and sent her cruisers to sweep the seas of every craft that ventured to encourage the inhuman traffic. But while God is not the author of this sin, nor man irresponsible for his crimes, slavery has grown under the attempts to extinguish it, and shot up in spite of the power of Britain and the piercing protest of outraged humanity, the hour of its extinction not having yet come; thereby showing that heaven and earth may pass away, but that one jot or tittle of God's Word cannot pass away till all be fulfilled.

Of the descendants of Ishmael, the Arabs, it was written some six thousand years ago, that each should "be a wild man ; his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him," and that he should "dwell in the presence of his brethren."

Gibbon, the foe of Christianity, unconsciously bears witness to God in history, when he states, "the arms of Sesostris and Cyrus, and Pompey and Trajan, could never achieve the conquest of Arabia ;" and when he says, "the Arabs are armed against

mankind :" "and at this day," says Sir Robert Porter in his travels, "the Arabs are still a wild people, dwelling in the presence of all their brethren, unsubdued and unchangeable; one of those mysterious facts that establish the truth of prophecy ;" and, we may add, another evidence that the God who spake in prophecy is the God who acts in history.

Of Egypt it was written, upwards of two thousand years ago, "Egypt shall be the basest of kingdoms; I will make the land waste by the hands of strangers: there shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt; it shall be the basest of kingdoms."

Gibbon, ignorant of the prophecy, and declaiming against the very existence of God, thus writes: "Its constitution condemns the natives to perpetual servitude, under the arbitrary dominion of strangers and slaves."

Volney writes: "Deprived, twenty-three centuries ago, of her natural proprietors, she has seen her fertile fields successively a prey to the Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Tartars." "In Egypt there is no middle class; a universal air of misery is manifest in all the traveller meets."

God's truth was in prophecy, and atheists attest God's presence in the fulfilment and thus God in history is the echo of God in prophecy.

Of Nineveh it was prophesied by Nahum : "Nineveh shall be like a pool of water," "to be devoured as stubble fully dry ;" "the Lord will make an utter end of it." Diodorus relates, "it was destroyed partly by fire and partly by water." According to Gibbon, "the city, and even the ruins of the city, have wholly disappeared."

Tyre was once the London of the ancient world. "It was," says Volney, "the theatre of an immense commerce, the nursery of arts."

Upwards of two thousand years ago, God thus spake of it in prophecy "I am against thee, O Tyrus, and will cause

many nations to come up against thee, as the sea causeth his waves to come up. And they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers. I will also scrape her dust from

her, and make her like the top of a rock.

It shall be a place

In the words

for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea." The Chaldeans, and finally the Greeks under Alexander, came up against it. Alexander formed a mound from the mainland, out of the materials of old Tyre, and literally, in the words of the prophet, scraped off her dust, and buried it in the sea. There is left scarce a ruin of Tyre. A rock is all that remains, on which modern fishermen now dry their nets. of Volney, "It contains fifty or sixty families, who live obscurely on the produce of their little ground, and a trifling fishery." Thus there is seen in history the shadow of Him who inspired the prophecy; and while his voice is heard sounding in the one, his hand is seen acting in the other. Your time would not allow me to show similar proofs from the state of Idumea, Babylon, Judea.

But one race I cannot pass by, whose existence is eloquent evidence of God in history: I mean the Jews.

Of them, God thus spake hundreds of years before the destruction of Jerusalem: "I will scatter you among the heathen;" "Thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations, whither the Lord shall lead thee." "Among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest.”

These, and many other predictions, intimate the state of that mysterious race till Christ come. All nations have homes in Jerusalem. The Jew has none. They have been sifted through all nations, and have taken root in none. They are the subjects of every dynasty, the victims of every tyranny; the scoff of the infidel, the scorn of the great. From the Thames to the Tiber, and from the Tiber to the Ganges, and from the Ganges to the Missouri-" from Greenland's icy mountains to India's

coral strand"--they are found insulated from the sympathies of all men, indicating affinities with something above and before, but with nothing around. That once great nation has been poured down upon the earth like quicksilver; it has split into innumerable scattered and disintegrated globules, which the hand of the Great Proprietor will yet collect, and form into a mighty mass that shall glow with imperishable splendour and reflect his glory. Many thousand years ago, God in prophecy pronounced the future dispersion and doom of the Jews, and God in history has kept them like the bush on Horeb-burning and not consumed—till that day come when the glory shall return from between the cherubim, and the dry bones rush together from a thousand lands, and the groans of creation, and the oppression of the Jews, and the travail of the Christian cease together. Do you hear every morning that deep-toned voice in your streets? It is the echo of the voice of God in prophecy; evidence to a sceptic world that God's word is truth. No man can read the history of the Jews, and the prophecy of which that history is the shadow projected into many years and lands, and not conclude that the prescience of God pronounced the prediction, and that the presence of God in history superintends its fulfilment.

Let any man read the descriptions of Romanism, as they are delineated in the New Testament Scriptures, and compare with them the development in history of the features and facts of that terrible apostasy, some of whose characteristics were so eloquently rendered in this place last Tuesday ;----the system with which we shall soon have to grapple; a system which refuses to examine a dogma lest it lose faith in it; which regards prayer as a punishment, and simony as a virtue; which puts the queen of heaven in the place of the Saviour of sinners, and mechanical ceremonies in the stead of spiritual worship ;a system which speaks in all tongues and lives in all lands; which enters alike royal cabinet and republican congress; whose

hundred hands grasp the sceptre and arrange the ballot-box; whose wiles seduce priests and statesmen to endow Popery in Ireland, and open diplomatic intercourse with the Pope in Italy; whose fine music and dramatic ceremonies draw over our young men by thousands to the Romish cathedral in the Borough ;;and see if Popery, in its creeds and canons and history, be not a counterpart of prophecy in the pages of the Word of God. It was laid down as a qualification of Aaron, "I know he can speak well." May it not be laid down as a qualification for a Romish priest, "I know he can chant, genuflect, or pirouette, and dress well ?"

Romanism, in the nineteenth century, is the echo of its description in the first.

Yet, strange but true! and evidence that God in history is not Divine responsibility for human sins, every new corruption that Rome took to her bosom shot forth into a curse that tormented her, as if to show that while God predicted her he did not make her. The sword with which she evangelized smote herself; the decretals and chartularies which she forged became the witnesses of her crimes; the cathedrals she built from the plunder of widows and orphans echoed with her own groans, and, in 1793, flowed with her own blood; her doctrine of priestly celibacy has been poison in her veins; and her confessional, erected to be the seat of power, has been felt by her as a burning throne. At every stage of her development, God in but not of her history has cried aloud, "Do it not ;" as often she has done it and suffered.

You have read and heard of the controversies and discussions of the ancient fathers, councils, and ecclesiastical writers. These were frequently fierce, often turning on some word or syllable of the sacred text.

Let the value of some of their discussions be placed at as low a rate as you like their writings, preserved by that Church which was less willing to preserve the Bible, contain almost all