the exploded fancies of unenlightened criticism. It is no popular theory of the many; there are comparatively few throughout the Churches who receive it, few who will even concede it a place among the things which deserve serious study, or are accessible to proof. Yet all are concerned in it; and it comes abroad proclaiming itself alike to the Church of God and to the heedless multitude, as the consummation towards which all the lines of prophecy are rapidly converging, as the glorious issue of all the confusion, the sin, the change, the death, that have made earth so long a wilderness, as the only cure for those deep and manifold evils under which men are groaning, and which they are so earnestly, yet so vainly, striving to remedy.* Kelso, January, 1847, *Having occasionally been called to take up some prophetical points in one of our periodicals, I have not scrupled, in the present volume, to avail myself freely of what I have written. CHAPTER I. THE CALL TO PROPHETIC STUDY. MAN's thoughts about the future and the unseen are of little worth. They are at best but dreams; no more than the blind guesses of fancy. They approach no nearer to the truth than do a child's conjectures regarding the history of some distant star, or as to the peopling of space beyond the outskirts of the visible creation. But the thoughts of God respecting the future are precious above measure. They are truth and certainty, whether they touch upon the far off or the near, the likely or the unlikely. They are disfigured with no miscalculations, for they are the thoughts of the great Designer regarding his own handiwork. Of however little moment it may be for us to know what man thinks about the future, it is of vast moment for us to know what God thinks of it. However few these revealed thoughts of God may be, yet they ought to be estimated by B us as above all price. They are the thoughts of an infinite mind; and they are the thoughts of that mind upon a subject utterly inaccessible to us, yet entirely familiar to Him who sees the end from the beginning, and whose wisdom has pre-arranged the whole. These thoughts of God about the future are what we call prophecy; and, in studying prophecy, we are studying the thoughts of God, the purposes of his heart. Of these, his secrets, He is not unwilling that we should be partakers; for He has spread them out before us. He has recorded them for our use; and deep must be the guilt, as well as incalculable the loss, of those who turn aside from such a study; who will listen with some interest, perhaps, to man's ideas of what is coming to pass upon the earth, but never think of inquiring what is the mind of God in reference to these. With what breathless interest will a company sometimes gather round a sagacious observer of the times, who has seen much, and noted much of what is passing in the various circles, outer and inner, of this ever-moving world! How eagerly will they catch up and repeat his opinions as to coming events, though all is conjecture and uncertainty. But, let a hint be cast in of what God has spoken, how coldly is it received; as if human uncertainties were better than divine certainties,-the guesses and dreams of man more worthy of being listened to than the sure revelations of God. When the prophet is man, all men listen; when the prophet is God, they turn heedlessly away. Yet that future, with all its vastness of interest and of moment, is man's future, we may say, more than God's. It is a future in which all human destinies are wrapt up, and to discover what that future is to be, is worth the most profound and painful inquiry. If that future is my future,-not a future of shadows but of realities,-how deeply does it concern me to know whether these are to be the realities of an endless night, or the realities of everlasting day. It is not enough that my own individual lot for eternity be made sure; so that, in believing the record which God has given of his Son, I know that I shall never die; I cannot help looking around me upon this miserable world, and asking what is its future history, its final destiny? Is it light, or is it darkness? Is it but a prolongation of its present wretchedness and sin, or is it a restoration to blessedness and glory? Should it not, then, be with deepest and most thankful joy that we learn that God has drawn aside a slight fold of the curtain, and given us a glance into the long vista on which we and our world are so soon to enter ? Should not every thing that God has revealed concerning our future be welcomed, both for its interest and its certainty? Should it not be studied and searched, that we may stand and survey that future, somewhat at least, in the position, and from the point in which God surveys it, and may in some measure be enabled to enter into his mind respecting it? For we are not one, but many; or, rather, I should say, we are not many, but one. We are members of one household, and our household interests should not be absorbed in our individual ones. We belong to one world; we are the tenants of one star, and our inquiry should be not merely, How shall I escape from the calamities of which all its inhabitants are the heirs, and wing my way to some brighter orb on which darkness and the curse have never alighted? but, What is to be the destiny of this my native planet, and of that race which has peopled it for six thousand years? All creation lies in ruins. The garden of the Lord has become a wilderness; and that which rose up into beauty under the blessing of Jehovah, is now withering away beneath his curse. Its falling leaves, its dying flowers, its clouded skies, its stormy deep, its swollen rivers, its crumbling rocks, all tell us this. These are its weeds of mourning; these are the groans of its travail and bondage. But what is to be the issue of all this blight, and change, and death? God alone can |