DISSERTATION I.

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. DAN. ii. 44.

THE GENERAL SUBJECT.

1.-THE Christian is a man who is born for the welfare of others, and as an immortal man destined to live in eternity, his thoughts should be filled at times. with solemn and practical reflections upon the state of his world, and the condition of his own age. His country demands and has a right to his best services. It is his home, in the largest sense of the word, and contains his most valuable possessions; his children, whose hands are in his heart; his wealth, which, little or much, is his independence; his associations, which bind him to the past, as a brother of those who have bled or studied for his peace; and in the history of his country's triumphant progress from a rude forest, that sheltered the noble independence of a free, yet barbarous people, he now contemplates the British empire as the great fortress of scriptural faith

THE SPIRIT AND DESIGN OF PROPHECY.

4.-Every revelation from God to man in his present condition, must be sustained by miraculous evidence, and every such distinct communication has possessed this guardianship and confirmation of miracles. Amongst these, PROPHECY in our day stands preeminent. It is precisely that kind of evidence which is adapted by its own nature to the peculiarities of the last ages of the world, and the wants and restless scrutiny of an intellectual age. In its first communications and assertions, it could possess no distinct claim to be received as evidence, for proof of its truth in the fulfilment of the events it delineated was then necessarily wanting. But as time unrolled his records, each century inscribed its own deeds in the volumes of history, and then the prediction as announced, could be compared with the event which it fulfilled; and thus the truth of that book in which the prophecy was found, received the additional attestation of the historic witness, whose veracity and impartiality none could deny or traduce.

5. Of all the parts of Revelation, Prophecy is the least within man's influence or control. He is here treated as a being, whose freedom of action is scanned by an omniscience that knows what the result of his determinations will be, before he himself is born to begin them. But in the predicted circumstances, he is not controlled by the prediction. Every minute external event, and every small pulsation of inward

emotion, with the most complicated combination of general occurrences, are all marked, defined, and ascertained; whilst to assure man of God's watchful Providence, his controlling vigilance, and his truth in his words, the great end of these circumstances is distinctly stated ;-so that after the history of the event, no doubt may exist in a candid inquirer, as to the clearness of the prediction. The picture has been displayed as an illustration of God's truth, in a portrait of some striking change in the future history of cities or nations. Babylon, in all her grandeur, is presented with the picture of Babylon without a wall, desolated by inundations, a vast green mound of ruins, where venomous creatures hiss, and make their habitations within the dark holes of her former palaces, and whose savage desolation is so great, as to scare far from its ruined site, even the Arabian dwellers of the wilderness. The proud Babylonian noble may have smiled in haughty disdain at the apparent presumptuous folly of such a scene, estimating it as a piece of nonsense dictated by the hatred of the Jewish captives to their conquerors. But when the prophetic landscape is compared with the present state of that mysterious city, we recognise instantly the truth and strangeness of the literal prediction,1 and acknowledge the miraculous energies of omniscience, in thus granting to us so striking a confirmation of the truth of that volume, whose revelations embrace the circumstances of both worlds, and direct us how to obtain possession of salvation.

The same remarks will apply with equal or more force to the Grecian and Roman empires-the past state or present condition of Egypt-the wild solitudes

1 Is. xlvii.

of Moab, Edom, and Ammon—the bare rocks of Tyre, covered with fishermen's nets, where formerly the proudest city in the East had established her commercial power-the desolations of Jerusalem--the captivity of the Jews in Babylon-their restoration at the chosen period of seventy years-the coming of Messiah -the Romish pollutions in the Church of Christ—the present condition of the Jews-the distribution of the three great races of mankind in the world, and all those minor, and yet no less strikingly small circumstances in the lives of His apostles or servants, so clearly developing the miracle of that power which defines the prediction, produces the event, and confirms thereby the truth of Holy Writ.

6. We can also perceive that Prophecy is a growing evidence, which is strengthened every year, as the world becomes older, and the events of each century have their birth. Man cannot impede the events, and unconsciously even when he opposes, fulfils them. Nothing can interfere with the predictions. They are the miracles of the last days. Their distinct accomplishment forms, each in its place, a link in a chain of glorious testimony, which binds the last fulfilment to the first uttered prophecy, and stretches in a golden series of irresistible demonstrations from the expulsion in Paradise to our own times. Every thing has been foreseen, and God is never taken by surprise. Our determination to act may come from our own will, but as we act, the events have been foreknown, and arrangements are in progress around us, by the controlling will of God, which unseen and unfelt till the end of prophecy, are as irresistibly disposing, and as freely