CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION. ARRIVED at the concluding Chapter of my Work, it will be well to stop, and consider attentively our present eventful position in prophetic chronology, and the evidence which fixes it-then to direct our regards to the coming future; and consider it in the light, and connectedly with the lessons, suggested by the previous parts of the Apocalyptic prophecy. Each of these subjects will furnish ample matter for a separate Section. § 1. OUR PRESENT POSITION IN THE PROPHETIC CALENDAR. With regard to our present position, we have been led, as the result of our investigations, to fix it at but a short time from the end of the now existing dispensation, and the expected second advent of Christ. This thought, when we seriously attempt to realize it, must be felt to be a very startling as well as solemn one. And for my own part I confess to risings of doubt, and almost of scepticism, as I do so. Can it be that we are come so near to the day may enter in through the gates into the city. 15. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. 16. I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. 17. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.-18. I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: 19. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life, and from the holy city, which are written of † in this book. 20. He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen! Come, Lord Jesus." both in itself, and as a connecting link between the there anticipatively foreshown state of heavenly bliss; and that which is here symbolized, as actually realized and present. ξυλου, instead of βιβλου. So the critical editions. The ka of the textus receptus, after τng woλews Tηs άyias, is wanting in the critical editions. of the Son of Man, that the generation now alive shall very possibly not have passed away before its fulfilment yea that perhaps even our own eyes may witness, without the intervention of death, that astonishing event of the consummation? The idea falls on my mind as almost incredible. The circumstance of anticipations having been so often formed quite erroneously heretofore of the proximity of the consummation,-for example, in the apostolic age, before the destruction of Jerusalem,'-then during the persecutions of Pagan Rome, then upon the breaking up of the old Roman Empire,3-then at the close of the tenth century,*—then at and after the Reformation,—and, still later, even by writers of our own day,—I say the circumstance of all these numerous anticipations having been formed, and zealously promulgated, of the imminence of the second advent, which, notwithstanding, have by the event itself been shown to be unfounded, strongly tends to confirm us in our doubts and incredulity. Yet to rest in scepticism simply and altogether upon such grounds would be evidently bad philosophy. For these are causes that would operate always: and that would make us be saying, up to the very eve and moment of the advent, "Where is the promise of his coming? Besides that, if we throw ourselves back into the times immediately preceding Christ's first advent, it will be easy to see that there would then have been fully as much ground for scepticism with regard to the imminence of that equally momentous event, just before its occurrence. Our true wisdom is to test each link of the chain of evidence by which we have been led to our conclusion, and see whether it will bear the testing;-to examine into the causes of previous demonstrated errors on the subject, and see whether we avoid them ;-finally, to consider whether the signs of the times now present be in all the sundry points that prophecy points out so peculiar, as altogether to warrant a measure of confidence in our inference such as was never warranted before. And certainly, on doing this, it does seem to me that 1 See my Vol. i. p. 54. 3 See Vol. i. pp. 387-398. 2 So Vol. i. pp. 224, 228-231. See ib. 470-472. 5 See Vol. ii. pp. 135-145. See an elaborate Paper by me on this subject of comparison in the Appendix. VOL. IV. 15 the grounds of our conclusion are stable. For let us look backward over the path we have travelled; and, in rapid retrospective review, call to mind the evidence, step by step, on which our argument has proceeded. A review which now, on revising this Work for its 5th Edition, we can make with all the advantage of those who have had the evidence investigated again and again by antagonistic expositors; its links tested; and every possible flaw sought out. Can we then well have erred in our explanation of the primary part of the Apocalyptic Prophecy, i. e. its six first Seals? Let it be remembered, to begin, how, as we first took the Book in hand, the evidence of its apostolic, and so divine authorship, alike internal and external, imprest itself on our minds as clear and irrefragable: and consequently the inference that it ought to be judged of and explained as a divine Book, and after the analogy of other similarly divine and similarly constructed prophecies. Which being the case, and the analogy of Daniel's symbolic and orderly constructed prophecies (by far the nearest parallels in Scripture) enforcing an explanation with reference to the future fortunes of the great worldly empires connected with God's Church, commencing from the date of St. John's receiving the prophetic revelation,-i. e. we saw clearly, from near the end of Domitian's reign, A.D. 95 or 96,-could we well be wrong in supposing presumptively that the fortunes and grand mutations of the Roman empire, then standing in its glory, (the 4th of Daniel's four great prophetic empires,) were likely to be the subjects of the primary Apocalyptic figurations? I say the mutations thenceforward commencing, accordantly with the Danielic precedent: especially as the revealing angel's own words, "I will now show thee what is to happen after these things," (the things then present,) taken in their most natural sense, seemed expressly to indicate such a speedily following commencement.-And, if such were the reasonable presumption à priori, was the evidence slight, or insufficient, on which we concluded that the figurations of the first six Apocalyptic Seals did answer very exactly to the Roman empire's chief æras of change and progress from Domitian to Constantine? Let me stop here and particularize a little; as these Seals were the introduction and key to the whole Commentary. : In regard then of the four first Seals it will not be forgotten how the horse (the prominent emblem in each) appeared to be a most fit symbol of the martial Roman empire, just analogically with the ram in Dan. viii. for Persia, and he-goat for Macedon; especially as, besides being the war-horse, it was an animal sacred to the Romans' reputed father Mars and how its successive colours of white, red, black, and livid pale, considered conjunctively with the associated riders of the respective horses, and with the explanatory remarks in each case accompanying, seemed to be just the fittest hues also to depict the chief subsequent successive phases of the empire, such as they might well strike a philosophic eye, marking cause as well as effect, as new principles appeared developed in it, for good or for evil. Thus, 1st, came the white prosperous æra under the bow-bearing Cretic dynasty of Nerva, Trajan, and the Antonines; with triumphs the most signal marking its commencement, and triumphs hard-bought but as signal marking its close: (alike the "went forth conquering," and the added "to conquer:") an æra begun on Domitian's death, within a year from the time of St. John's seeing the visions in Patmos; and continued for some eighty years and more, till a little after the succession of the second Antonine's son Commodus :-then, 2ndly, an æra red with the blood of civil strife, under a sword-bearing succession of military usurpers; begun with the murder of Commodus, or a little before it, and continued far onward, with other superadded principles of evil soon commingling, the subjects of the two next Seals:-3rdly, the black phase of impoverishment by fiscal oppression, under the balance-bearing administrators of the civil government, the necessary result of prolonged military usurpation and civil wars; begun from the marked epoch of Caracalla's Edict; and continued onwards, with ever-increased internal wasting, together with the evil that preceded and caused it :---4thly, the æra of mortality under Gallienus, when all the four agencies of destruction particularized in the Apocalypse, war, famine, pestilence, and wild beasts, in meet sequel to the evils of the two preceding Seals, appeared let loose upon the empire, not to be withdrawn till the completed restoration by Diocletian: an æra compared by Niebuhr with that of the black death in the European middle age; and when, as Gibbon says, "the ruined empire seemed to approach the last and fatal moment of its dissolution." -It will be remembered, as suggested by this citation and reference, that the æras were marked out, and their picturings ready drawn to our hands, in such singular agreement with the successive Apocalyptic figurations, by the best and most philosophic historians of the Roman empire, Gibbon, Montesquieu, Sismondi, Niebuhr. Nor will my readers forget how many curious antiquarian as well as historical points came into question, in the Roman explanation of the symbols of these four Seals ;-the horse, crown, diadem, bow, sword, balance, notices of corn, wine, and oil from the throne, and various colours of the horse, all in a fixed chronological succession and order. Altogether above twenty points for testing and not one, on testing it, has failed. Could this be mere chance? : And this strikes me much in my present review of the evidence, after all its siftings, that I only did not do justice to my subject originally; and that the evidence for the four Seals, as here expounded, was stronger and more complete than I had primarily represented it. In the 1st Seal the measure of the second Antonine's success was at first not adequately stated: resulting as his wars did in the restoration of the empire to the full measure of its eastward limits as extended by Trajan; but which Hadrian, from motives of policy, had voluntarily for a while contracted. In the 2nd Seal the sword-bearing rider had been explained too exclusively of the Prætorian Prefects: whereas as much the prophetic symbol, as the facts of history, required a reference to the military body and its commanders generally, as the cause of the evils figured under that Seal. In the 3rd it was fairly argued by an opponent that the larger choenix first taken by me was not the common choenix, and therefore objectionable. But, on further inquiry, it appeared that the idea which drove me to the larger chonix of the Apocalyptic price of wheat not suiting the æra |