in Shylock hoarding the ducats of Venice, in Rothschilds feeding with gold the tyrants of a continent, the Jews have obtained a footing in the world, a power and influence among the potentates of Europe, by which they will ere long be able, in these days of "nationalities," to demand and obtain their native land. They have amassed vast wealth, and have multiplied into a scattered nation of at least five millions,―probably seven millions of population; while, so far from anything having happened to prevent the possibility of their re-settlement, the enemy that holds their inheritance in trust is at the last gasp of his long pining existence. The Sultan, by a Hatti-scheriff, A.D. 1856, granted permission for Jews to purchase land in Palestine; and political events in Syria and the east are pointing more and more directly to the settlement of Israel, with the co-operation perhaps of the western governments, as a solution of growing difficulties and dangers. And again, about two millions of the Jews are now in the dominions of Russia, whose ulterior designs upon their country might very well lead it to the politic excuse of attempting the acquisition of Palestine under colour of promoting the re-establishment of a Hebrew kingdom.

The restoration of Jerusalem will surely come, because the inspired word of God declares it; though it may be common to disbelieve, and though the first attempts at a re-settlement of the chosen people may possibly meet with a similar mockery to that encountered at the re-erection of the city wall by Nehemiah, when "the people had a mind to build," and when the

(w) But it came to pass, that when Sanballat heard that we builded the wall, he was wroth, and took great indignation, and mocked the Jews. And he spake before his brethren and the army of Samaria, and said, What do these feeble Jews? will they fortify themselves? will they sacrifice? will they make an end in a day? will they revive the stones out of the heaps of the rubbish which

restoration from the Babylonian captivity was nevertheless accomplished. (w)

At the close of Section VII. we have shown what ground there is for expecting the great attack of Gog, and the day of supernatural deliverance, about A.d. 1896. As this is to be some time after the first colony of Jews has been re-settled; and as the Turkish power, now preventing their return, is to die away before the opening of the seventh vial, which we look for A.D. 1867 (as the most likely date), the restoration of a portion of the Israelite wanderers may be expected very shortly. But we have amply explained, in the proper place, that these dates are liable to many readings and constructions.

Whether or not the existing Jewish people are an amalgamation of the several tribes, or whether the ten tribes have yet to be discovered, may be a controversy. Certainly, the royal family of David, and his son Nathan, the main sacerdotal line of Levi, and the priestly line of his grandson Shimei, are distinctly mentioned by Zechariah as mourning on the occasion of the great deliverance; and if these, with "all the families that remain," are not put representatively for the entire nation, they will be found and identified when the time shall arrive. Recent discoveries have brought to light the miraculous preservation and existence as a distinct people of the posterity of Jonadab, the son of Rechab, to whom God promised that he should "not want a man to stand before me for ever. (") These are the Beni Rechab, numbering some sixty thousand, in the neighbourhood of Mecca, all knowing Hebrew, and professing pure Judaism.

Miracles met with incredulity from men who did not personally behold them; fulfilled prophecies have been perversely pronounced "written after the event," in flat contradiction of the dates assigned by the authors themselves to their visions; but the accomplishment of the predicted occurrences connected with Israel's recovery will leave no room for scepticism, or the disputation of unbelieving critics. For, multiplied in myriad copies of the printed Bible, and a familiar topic of polemical controversy, the pre-existence of these prophecies can no more be denied than the reality of the facts themselves, when they shall transpire and be instantaneously blazed abroad by press and telegraph throughout the civilized world. Not that the startling fulfilment of God's ancient word, no matter how stupendous may be the supernatural accompaniments of the era, will necessarily lead to the conversion of every individual who may hear the strange tidings.() But no doubt or infidel argument being any longer possible against such obvious and confounding evidence of the authority of God's written revelation, and of the reality of His providence over the affairs of earth, wilful carelessness or open defiance of God can alone characterize those whose hearts will still reject the offers of mercy. That the events, however, will cause a rapidity of conversions in all the world, unparalleled in the history of the church, has been foretold by the prophets. Undeniable

(b) If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.Luke xvi. 31.

John ix. 13-31.

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proofs of the Divine presence and power will produce the same effect as miracles did in ancient days, only that immensely greater multitudes will be constrained to believe. When Nehemiah had rebuilt Jerusalem, “it came to pass that when all our enemies heard thereof, and all the heathen that were about us saw these things, they were much cast down in their own eyes; for they perceived that this work was wrought of our God."(c) When Judah under King Jehoshaphat "believed in the Lord their God and in His prophets," and were miraculously delivered from the invading armies of Ammon, Moab, and Seir, "the fear of God was on all the kingdoms of those countries, when they had heard that the Lord fought against the enemies of Israel."(4) So will it be in the great day of Gog's discomfiture. The Jews themselves will mourn and repent, and acknowledge Jesus as their Messiah the marvellous interposition of Heaven overcoming their long blindness of unbelief, as in the days of Elijah, the only remaining prophet of the Lord, when, at the descent of the miraculous fire, "the people fell on their faces, and said, The Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God."() And, natives of every land, inured to every climate, conversing in every tongue, the children of Israel will constitute a ready missionary agency, testifying in all regions of our mighty globe "how great things the Lord hath done for them."

(c) Nehemiah vi. 16. (d) 2 Chronicles xx. 29. (e) 1 Kings xviii. 39.

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We now recur to the interpretation of the 20th chapter of the Revelation, the coming of Christ, the millennium, the resurrection, and the judgment. It was generally believed by the primitive church that the end of the world and the kingdom of heaven were at hand: the early Christians expected the second coming of the Son of Man in the clouds, before that generation was totally extinct which had beheld His humble condition upon earth, and which might still be witness of the calamities of the Jews under Vespasian and Hadrian. Paul's Second Epistle to the Thessalonians was written to expose this erroneous idea, and to declare that "the end is not by-and-by." And the ancient and popular doctrine of the millennium (taught by Justin Martyr in the 2nd century, by Tertullian in the 3rd century, &c.) was intimately connected with the second coming of Christ. The works of creation had been finished in six days; after six days' labour came the appointed hallowed sabbath; there had been the sabbatical Jewish year, also the seventh sabbatical year, or Jubilee; and did not all this have reference to a still greater divi

Ac

sion of time? Did it not point to so many millennaries of the world's history? cordingly, the duration in the present state was fixed to six thousands of years, and, by the same analogy, was to follow a joyful sabbath of a thousand years. This has been an almost universally prevalent belief among Jews and Gentiles, Rabbinists, Talmudists, and Fathers; it is found in the Sibylline oracles, in the poems of Hesiod, in Plato, and prevailed long before the birth of Christ. The expectation of a momentous change after 6000 years, is expressed by the Chaldeans, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. The mere universality and unanimity of a presentiment may not be a sufficient evidence that it will ever be verified; but other considerations tend to forbid our passing over such an opinion as entirely futile and fanciful. It may be that more than half the human beings born upon our globe die in infancy, partakers of the redemption of Christ; and that, therefore, Christ will, in the end, have won more of the souls born into the world than Satan, Still, if there be no true age of gold to come-no time of holiness and peace, in

which human nature shall be exhibited restored by the power of Christ's salvation, in

life upon

which the highest ideal of human the earth shall be really attained, pain and misery shortened, men's lives lengthened like those in antediluvian days, the problems of good government, good social organization, &c., solved, and, in fact, the world's last days displayed as its best days, if such a triumph of the Redeemer never gladden the earth, how shall He " 'see of the travail of His soul, and be satisfied?" (Isaiah liii. 11.) For Satan will then have succeeded in marring this fair creation of God beyond recovery; he will have defied the power of the omnipotent Spirit, and have had the best of the great struggle between the powers of darkness and light, of which our world is now the arena. Accordingly, in addition to the abundance of passages in the Bible pointing to a universal and long-continued reign of the gospel, the Apocalypse directly predicts such a period. Immediately after the slaying of the wicked nations and the destruction of antichrist in the war of Christ and His saints, or rather as part of the same scene, Satan is bound for a thousand years.

"And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled and after that he must be loosed a little season.' Revelation xx. 1-3.

Of course, this binding of an emblematic figure in the vision, representing the archspirit of evil, cannot predict any actual confinement with a real chain in some locality of this or some other world of what state of things, then, is it symbolic?

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Something more is prefigured than a restraining of sin in the world. There is a plain statement of the restraint imposed upon a personality, "that he shall deceive the nations no more; "and doubtless this is intended to explain, as far as mortals may comprehend the conflicts and wonders of the world of spirits, how the age of repose and godliness in the world will be secured,-mankind will be delivered from the temptations of the arch-fiend and his ministering demons.

"The nations," be it observed, are still to continue in existence during the millennium, after the comprehensive slaughter of the Armageddon conflict; but though remaining under the curse of original sin, they will be no longer ruled by Satan, or be tempted to establish another great antichristian apostasy, till "the thousand years" are finished.

It may be that the thousand years are to be understood, like previous statements of time in the prophecy, as 360,000 years, one year for each day. But, considering that the world's history is not to be consummated until Satan has been released to corrupt the inhabitants again for a short season after the age of righteousness, it seems more reasonable and proportionate to take the thousand years as a literal statement; and the reason for employing an enigmatic form in stating a cycle may cease after the mystery of God's present providence is ended. Or, as a

round number is nowhere else used as an exact measure of time, perhaps a lengthened period, not meaning a precise 1000 years, may be designated in a proverbial expression. Still, it is doubtful if the analogy of the sabbath will hold good. It is very well known that great discrepancies exist in the early Biblical chronology; and that to avoid difficulties of reconciliation of statements, Archbishop Usher endeavoured to correct the chrono

logy by assuming that Abraham was born when Terah was 130 years old; reckoning upon which assumption he arrives at the year 4004 B.C., as that when man was created. Fynes Clinton, in his "Fasti Hellenici," traces the dates down to the year 4138 B.C., as that of the advent of Adam upon the earth. From this date, 6000 years will end in A.D. 1862,-when the world's great working-day week of six thousands of years is supposed to be followed by the seventh or sabbath thousand,-what Paul calls the "sabbatismos"-"the rest that remaineth for the people of God." But besides recent discoveries in the antiquity of primeval nations, there are grounds for believing that the six thousand years have long since passed away without bringing this sabbatic era. Both the Hebrew, Septuagint, and Samaritan texts, agree that Terah was 70 not 130 years old at Abraham's birth, so that Usher's computation is not to be unhesitatingly relied on. And the Septuagint,-which was universally quoted by Christ and His apostles in preference to the Hebrew text, and in its postdiluvian dates is corroborated by the Samaritan, by Josephus, and ancient chronographers,—gives the year of the creation as 5411 B.C.; while the Samaritan version gives it as 4700 B.C. That the Hebrew chronology was purposely falsified after the Christian era, is probable. About the time of the advent of the Saviour, an opinion had gained currency in many parts of the world, and particularly in Judea (where it originated from the prophecies), that a great king was about to appear on the earth, who was to exercise universal dominion, and to restore man to the paradisaical state or golden age in all its pristine glory. Five ages, each of 1000 years, of the world's history, were already past, the golden, the silver, the brazen, the heroic, and the iron ages, and both the Jews and the sibyls predicted that the

Great King should appear in the middle of the sixth, or last, age of the world; that is, the year 5500 from the creation. When, however, instead of a glorious, temporal monarch and an earthly Messiah, which they expected, they beheld the crucified Nazarene, contemptuously called by the Roman governor, "the king of the Jews," and forty years afterward, saw the destruction of their city and temple, and the dispersion of their nation, then, it is believed, they falsified their own scriptures, and declared that the time of the Messiah was not yet come. They likewise got up the famous traditional prophecy of Elias, and inserted in their Talmud,—that “the world shall last 6000 years,―of which 2000 shall pass without the law, 2000 under the law, and 2000 under the Messiah." And the Rabbis, it is supposed, reduced the period in their chronology, from the creation to the birth of Christ, to 3760 years; expecting that, by this falsification, the Jews would be kept in expectation of the Messiah at least for 240 years after that date. Accordingly, during the first two centuries after Christ, many vain attempts were made to set up false Messiahs for the restoration of the Jews.

The only trustworthy cycles are those of the prophetic Scriptures, which we have endeavoured to elucidate and apply; from which it appears, that the series of grand events connected with the closing of the present and the opening of the millennial age of the world are already hastening, and that the blessed era may be delayed no longer, perhaps, than the opening of the next century.

It is not necessary for us to explain satisfactorily the following verses relating to the millennial era,-confessedly one of the most obscure and difficult passages in prophecy.

"And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: