CONTENTS. PAGE AN INTRODUCTION, ETC., ETC. "Nobis summoperè studendum est, ut maneat vera et certa Scripturæ intelligentia.” CALVINUS IN HOSEAM. "I leave it to themselves to consider, whether they have in this first point, or not, overshot themselves."-HOOKER, Ecc. Pol., last paragraph of Book ii. THE author of the following treatise having been good enough to wish that I should introduce it to the world, I imply a readiness to carry out his wishes, rather than a concurrence in his estimate of what was expedient, by offering some preliminary remarks. 1. Those amongst us whose recollection goes back to their earliest impressions of the Sacred Volume, can hardly fail to remember that Daniel struck them from the beginning as unlike the rest of the Prophets. We may in some instances, or at some times, have preferred stories of marvel to sublime denunciations: yet the stir awakened in us at the words, Hear, O Heaven, and give ear, O Earth, for the Lord hath spoken," had but faint counterpart in the languid feeling with which we listened to an enumeration of "the princes, the governors, and captains, the judges, the treasurers, the counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces gathered together unto the dedication of the image that Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up." The one had the trumpet-sound of song; the other drawled, like official prose. If we grew up within the circle of ecclesiastical sayings, other differences could hardly fail to be impressed upon us. Other Prophets had foretold the sufferings and glory of Christ; Daniel had marked the time of his coming. The Jews might, with some violence, explain the other Prophets away: despairing of Daniel, they had removed him out of the roll of the Prophets into a secondary place. Even Butler, whose sagacity needed only a larger literary furniture to anticipate many difficulties of our time, and who ought to be quoted on the side of conscience instead of on that of tradition, formally excepted Daniel from the large concessions which he contemplated as possible under the head of Prophetic Interpretation. A question which involved the honour of Christianity could hardly remain a question. If digressions from Babylon to the Ottoman empire and the Church of Rome were unlike the general style of the Prophets, they were the more interesting, as long as they did not perplex us. Sir John Marsham, whose "Canon Chronicus" seems to have been more valued in foreign countries than in his own, might explain the seven weeks as the period from the commencement of the captivity (and if he had made this commence at the destruction of the city, B.C. 588, he would have found the period just forty-nine years down to Cyrus, whom the Isaiah of the Return calls the Anointed of God, B.c. 538); similarly, he found sixty-two weeks, four hundred and thirtyfour years (which, with sabbatical allowances, might be made more exact), down to Antiochus. Collins might go farther in questioning the authorship of the book. Gibbon might write in a feigned name a letter on the subject, not destined to be fully answered by Bishop Hurd. "Such objections were as old as Porphyry." It did not always occur to us that Porphyry's judgment as a critic in literature was infinitely superior to that of almost any Christian Father, or that his opportunities of information exceeded our own. Bentley, one of the few scholars of the very highest eminence whom the English Universities have produced, seems to have been unable to prevent himself from taking Porphyry's side, and might have left us fuller disclosures if it had not been for a person who |