that when, thereupon, the Lord again builds Zion, "He will appear in His glory."—A prophecy this remembered probably, as well as confirmed, by St. Peter in his first sermon to the Jews after the day of Pentecost; saying, "Repent and be converted, that your sins may be bletted out; and that the times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and he may send Jesus Christ, whom the heavens must receive until the times of the restitution of all things, spoken of by all the prophets."2 And what shall I say of the Euphrates drying up?-the drying up not of political power alone, but of the very heart, spirit, and life-blood of Mohammedanism itself in the great Turkish Empire; especially as accelerated, just of late, by means and in a manner so unexpected and wonderful ?—The object in God's providence of this its drying up, is stated to be "that the way of the kings from the East (not of the East, as many wrongly state it) may be prepared: "3 whether meant of the light-bearing beams of Christ's coming with His saints, or perhaps of the converted Jews' re-establishment in their own country. For there is a way, I think, though as yet unnoticed by expositors, in which the expression, kings from the East, may be applicable to them; albeit that their gathering at the latter day is to be not from the East alone, but alike from the East, and from the West, and from the North, and from the South. I mean by reference to their Eastern first original in Abraham; "the righteous man raised up and called from the East," as Isaiah emphatically designates him.5

Nor if it be thought, as many think, that our Lord's prophecy on the Mount of Olives refers at its close to the ending of the present dispensation, does that statement, "This generation (avrn yevɛa) shall not pass away till all these things be fulfilled,” (Luke xxi. 32,) present any necessary obstacle to its application to the present age. For airnyerea may mean that generation which witnesses the signs in the sun and moon, &c.; those convulsions which may have had their accomplishment in the French Revolution, agreeably with the use of similar imagery in the Apocalypse and other Scripture. Then the force of the saying will be, that ere a century or so elapse from

1 Psalm cii. 16.

2 Acts iii. 19, 20. See on this most important passage the critical remarks in my Hora Apocalyptica, Vol. iv. pp. 175–180.

3 ἵνα ετοιμασθῇ ἡ ὁδος των βασιλέων των απο ανατολων ήλιο. Apoc. xvi. 12. Compare the figure in Apoc. vii. 2: also Luke i. 78 and 2 Thess. ii. 1, 8; Apoc. xx. 4. 5 Isaiah xli. 2. Compare Gen. xvii. 6, 16; Josh. xxiv. 2, 3.

that event, all having perished that were alive at the time of its first outbreak, the end and his second advent shall have taken place.1

Nor can I altogether omit the fact that, according to the elaborate tables of one of the most judicious and learned of our modern chronologists, the late Mr. Fynes Clinton, the world's 6000 years would seem to be very near their ending; and this, most remarkably, just about the self-same time as the ending of the 1260 years of the Papal Antichrist, so calculated, as I have stated before.2 Nor if we take Usher's somewhat more protracted Scripture chronology, and moreover consider that Daniel's 75 years of the time of the end have to be added on to the completed 1260 years ere the consummation, will the further postponement of the ending of the 6th millennary be very long. And with the world's 6000 years ending, the world's sabbatism may be drawing on?

In fine, and on summing up, the more I consider it the more strong and convincing does the prophetic evidence appear to me, in indication that Messiah's promised second coming,-that coming at which Antichrist is to be destroyed,-is near at hand. In order at all to realize its strength, it will be well to consider separately and distinctly alike that evidence which results from the demonstrated long and continuous agreement of historic fact and prophetic figura tion, respecting the four great successive empires of the world, from certain known epochs of commencement, viz. that of the reign of the Babylonian monarch Nebuchadnezzar, and time of St. John's seeing the visions in Patmos; a parallelism whereby we are brought down in John's prophecy quite near to its close in the consummation;—that

1 My impression is, that the saying may have had a double reference, 1st, to the fulfilment of the judgments on Jerusalem, ere the generation then alive should have past away; 2nd, to the final judgment of the consummation, ere the generation should have wholly past away that had witnessed the signs in the sun and moon, &c. (verse 25, &c.), which signs I suppose to have begun at the French Revolution. See my Vol. iii. p. 361, Note 1; also my Paper in the Investigator, Vol. iv. p. 341.

It is to be observed that the word aurn, this, in the clause ǹ yɛvɛa avτη, needs not necessarily to be aspirated: as there were no aspirates in the uncial characters of the older Greek MSS. And if without the aspirate, then aurn would mean that ;-" that generation shall not have passed away, &c. ;" with reference distinctly to the generation that was alive at the time of the signs in the sun and moon, &c., appearing. But the view I advocate does not depend on the absence of the aspirate. Because our Lord might mean by "this generation," the generation of the time he was then speaking of just as in Luke xvii. 34, where, speaking of the time of his second coming, he says, тauтη тη VUKTI, “On this night shall two be in one bed; one shall be taken, &c. :" meaning thereby the night of his coming; and so rendered in our English version, "In that night."

2 See my abstract of Mr. Clinton's chronological argument and tables in the Chapter immediately preceding the present; and also my pp. 238, 239 suprà.

which results from the near ending of long prophetic chronological periods, dated from a commencing epoch which, within certain narrow limits, may be fixed almost certainly;-and then again, that which arises from what I have designated as the signs of the times; signs very various, very marked, very peculiar to the present æra, and each independent of the rest. Then let the cumulative force of the whole taken together be considered; all tending, as it does, to one and the same result;-that namely, as I have before said, of the nearness of Messiah's second coming. It seems impossible to deny that it is evidence immensely stronger than that which, in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, warranted the Jews of those days in their conviction of the time for Messiah's first coming having then arrived.1

II. But now, as to objections and objectors.

And, no doubt, there are learned Rabbis now, even as then, who with various views, and on various grounds, deny, and seek to invalidate, more or less of the prophetic evidence on which our inference has been grounded. By some it is said that the whole of the

*

I must quote a remarkable passage to the same effect, from the late lamented Dr. Arnold's Lectures on Modern History, which is the more interesting from its consideration of the subject quite in a new point of view.

"Modern history appears to be not only a step in advance of ancient history, but the last step it appears to bear marks of the fulness of time, as if there would be no future history beyond it. For the last eighteen hundred years Greece has fed the human intellect: Rome, taught by Greece and improving upon her teacher, has been the source of law and government and social civilization: and, what neither Greece nor Rome could furnish, the perfection of moral and spiritual truth has been given by Christianity. The changes which have been wrought have arisen out of the reception of these elements by new races;-races endowed with such force of character, that what was old in itself, when exhibited in them, seemed to become something new. But races so gifted are, and have been from the beginning of the world, few in number: the mass of mankind have no such power.... Now, looking anxiously round the world for any new races, which may receive the seed (so to speak) of our present history into a kindly yet vigorous soil, and may reproduce it, the same and yet new, for a future period, we know not where such are to be found. Some appear exhausted, others incapable; and yet the whole surface of the globe is known to us.... Everywhere the search has been made, and the report has been received. We have the full amount of earth's resources before us; and they seem inadequate to supply life for a third period of human history. I am well aware that to state this as a matter of positive belief, would be the extreme of presumption. There may be nations reserved hereafter for great purposes of God's providence, whose fitness for their appointed work will not betray itself till the work and the time for doing it be come.... But, without any presumptuous confidence, if there be any signs, however uncertain, that we are living in the latest periods of the world's history, that no other races remain behind to perform what we have neglected, or to restore what we have ruined, then indeed the interest of modern history becomes intense."

2

Apocalypse, and all too of Daniel's prophecies which I have expounded as reaching in its range down to the present time, and yet beyond it, was fulfilled centuries ago. By others, on the contrary, it is contended that all the Apocalypse, and whatever in Daniel's two prophecies concerns the ten-toed division of the iron legs of the image, or ten-horned division, and synchronic rise and dominancy of the little horn of the fourth Beast, still waits its fulfilment in the future; the 1260 days of the little horn's duration in power meaning simply, say both, 1260 literal days.3 And thus, though the present signs of the times may be admitted by some of them as evidence tending to the conclusion I have stated, yet that most convincing portion of the prophetic evidence,-the same substantially in kind with some that greatly tended, doubtless, to excite expectation among the Jews of Messiah's first coming as imminent in the days of Augustus, I mean that of a long-continued parallelism of prophecy and history, reaching from a known commencing epoch, down nearly to the event expected,-is set aside.

It is my settled conviction, after much and careful thought, that each and either of these prophetic counter-theories, the præteristic and that of the futurists, in any of the multitudinous and mutually contradictory forms of either, may be shown to be self-refuting. Thus as regards the latter, and its fundamental dogma of the Man of Sin being an individual yet future, who is to sit as God, and have his image placed for worship, in some new-built Jewish temple at Jerusalem, which they would have to be called God's temple in St. Paul's prophecy, though built in direct opposition to himself and

So first the Jesuit Alcasar, then with their various modifications the Germans Eichhorn, Ewald, &c. ; also Bossuet, and the American Moses Stuart. The latest Apocalyptic expositor of this class that I have seen is Mr. Desprez of Wolverhampton. I have noticed his work in a critique in the Appendix to my Warburton Lectures, p. 518. The others are reviewed in the Appendix to this fourth volume of my Horæ Apocalyptica.

e. g. Drs. S. R. Maitland and Todd, Mr. Molyneux, &c. &c. book is critically noticed in my Warburton Lectures, p. 512: the pendix to the present fourth volume of the Hora Apocalypticæ. was, I believe, the first author, after the breaking up of the old this system of prophetic exposition.

Mr. Molyneux's others in the ApThe Jesuit Ribera Roman Empire, of 32 Thess. ii. 4.

I have vainly asked from advocates of these sentiments for any Scripture warrant for such a designation of such a temple.

The distinction is ever to be remembered between a temple originally founded in opposition to God's will, and one originally founded in accordance with it, but which may have become afterwards apostate. Even under Manasseh the old Jewish temple might be called God's temple, though corrupted to heathen worship, (2 Kings xxi.

the Son of His love,'-I say as regards this theory of the futurists, construct but the time-table of their Antichrist's 1260 days, and you will have there what will of itself suffice to refute it. It is during the whole of these 1260 days, or 3 years, that he is, according to their interpretation of Daniel, to have his abomination standing in the Jewish temple,2 (these being the 3 years, observe, which end in his destruction by Christ's appearing,) and during the whole of them that the Gentiles, in subjection to Him, are to occupy the Holy City. Yet meanwhile he is, during part at least of the selfsame 3 years, to be occupied in besieging Jerusalem from without, according to these self-same theorists; and, moreover, during part to be busied sundry ways, in connexion with, and on the site of, the Roman seven-hilled city, or Apocalyptic Babylon. For vainly do they seek Scripture warrant for assigning more than 3 years, or 1260 days, (whether construed literally, or on the year-day principle,) to his duration in power.-Again, admitting the iron legs of Daniel's image to signify the old Roman Empire, as most of them do, they must, in order to the ten-toed feet being yet future in their significancy, suppose the iron legs to have appeared broken off at the ankle, and a vacuum, indicating some twelve or fourteen unrepresent

4, 5; 2 Chron. xxxiii. 4, 5, 7,) because originally instituted by him. And similarly the symbolic temple of the Christian visible and professing Church (compare 1 Tim. iii. 15) might still be so called under the Popes, though then apostatized, because originally founded in his name, and according to his will. This distinction is perpetually overlooked by futurist expositors.

1 Some futurist expositors, while disclaiming the year-day principle with reference to the 1260 days' prophetic period, seem to admit and adopt it with reference to the smaller Apocalyptic period of the 3 days of the two witnesses lying dead. Apoc. xi. 9, 11. So "Eight Lectures on Prophecy," p. 154 (Dublin, 1853, 3rd Edition): "May not these 3 days be the very period of the time, times, and half a time?" i. e. 31 years, or 1260 days. So, also, many of the patristic expositors.

2 Dan. xi. 31, xii. 11, compared with 2 Thess. ii. 4. This has been asserted not. long since, as a certain fact, by two Christian ministers to large congregations in London churches.

Apoc. xi. 2. "During Antichrist's reign Jerusalem will be occupied by his followers; for they will tread under-foot the holy city forty-two months. There he will slay the two witnesses; and set up the abomination in the holy place. All prophecy agrees in pointing out Jerusalem as the seat of Antichrist's kingdom." C. Maitland at p. 14 of his so-called Apostolic School of Prophetic Interpretation; though with Apoc. xvii. before him.

Zech. xiv. 2. This is an essential part of the futurist theory. 5 Apoc. xvii. 3, 4, 5, 18.

So the Rev.

This duration is fixed alike by Dan. vii. 25, and Apoc. xiii. 5; and it is at the end of the three and a half years of his sitting in the temple to receive worship and oppressing the saints, that, according to Dan. vii., Apoc. xiii., and 2 Thess. ii., he is to be destroyed by the brightness of Christ's coming.