we appeal to their candour, whether they are not at variance with what the Vicars Apostolic would make us believe to be the Faith of their unchangeable Church. If after all we are to be told, that we are "contending against our own misconstructions of the language of the (Roman) Catholic Church;" it will appear to the world, that the Romish hierarchy has succeeded to that of ancient Egypt, in the use of hieroglyphics.

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We must now close the subject. To state the actual doc trines of the Roman Catholic Church is to expose them. We shall of course never have an intelligible statement from the Vicars Apostolic; we may, indeed, have a succession of those obsolete, evasive, and prevaricating pamphlets, obviously, (as now for the elections,) prepared for political purposes, and to be looked on in no higher light than as the common-place instruments of common-place party. But even those are distasteful weapons to Rome. The pen is fatal to her; she never triumphs but by the torch and the sword!

Babylon and Infidelity foredoomed of God. A Discourse on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse, which relate to these latter times, and until the Second Advent. By the Rev. EDWARD IRVING, Minister of the Caledonian Church. 2 vols. 10s. 6d. London. Whittaker. 1826.

Ir is not surprising that so large a succession of commentators have attempted the interpretation of the Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse. The natural desire of looking into the future, the high and solemn beauty of the prophetic visions, the palpable evidences of reality that start up from the midst of the clouds and baffling depths of those mighty mysteries, all urge the spirit of mere human curiosity to try how much farther it can penetrate into what seem the very counsels of Providence. With the divine the impulse is of a still higher and more impressive rank. Scripture is put into his hands for explanation; and to discover its sublime purposes and deliver them to the people is among the most sacred offices of his duty.

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We have from the earliest ages of Christianity instances of the pious zeal and anxious enquiry which were directed to the Apocalypse. But the nearness of the commentator to the apostolical age, when it might be presumed that all the know

ledge was accessible which could be derived from those who had associated with the disciples of St. John, or when the feelings and traditions of the primitive church must have been fresh in the memory, gave no obvious assistance to the interpretation. Irenæus, who declares that John had lived" almost in his own time," attempts scarcely more than a few guesses, (which he acknowledges to be such) at some remarkable points. Those who have followed him appear to have done little beyond drawing exhortations of faith and hope from the promises of the Apocalypse. Their works were almost totally suffered to perish, and this is, of itself, an indication that they had made no important progress in explaining the prophecy.

It is remarkable, and not unsuited to the general action of Providence, that the first satisfactory effort at elucidating even a part of the Apocalypse should have been made at a time when it was most important as an auxiliary to the true Church,

pre

The sudden circulation of the Scriptures in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had begun the Reformation. The attention of the converts was drawn to the book which, declaring that the true church should be perpetually a comparatively obscure, depressed, and persecuted body, until its final and eminent triumph, pointed out the source of that oppressive state in an extraordinary form of HUMAN DOMINATION, rising out of the ruins of the empire of the Cæsars, sitting in their capital, and, without the ordinary means of empire, without extensive territory, military strength, or early independent power, rapidly rising to a supremacy over the Christian world. They found other characteristics still more striking; that the possessor of this great Despotism should be a priest; that he should assume a still more formidable tyranny over the consciences of men; that, calling himself a Christian, he should bow down to idols and worship the spirits of the dead; that, declaring himself the protector of the faith, he should prohibit the Scriptures which Christ had commanded to be read by all; and should slaughter more mercilessly than all the heathen persecutors, those who read, them; and finally, that setting himself in the place of God, he should declare that he had the power of punishing and forgiving beyond the grave, and was lord of the keys of heaven and hell!

Those momentous facts are, beyond all question, revealed in the Apocalypse; and the discovery, which was by the will of God reserved for the time, when it was needed by the terrified heart and feeble fortunes of the infant Reformation, was, loudly and authoritatively brought forward by the Christians of Piemont and the South of France. The champions of popery.

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altogether failed of throwing doubt upon this great and cheering evidence of the True Cause; and the Reformation, through all its varieties, (its predicted varieties,) of fortune, its defeats, banishments, confiscations, the unnumbered and bitter inflic tions of furious bigotry and barbarian and bloodthirsty power, struggled its desperate but glorious way over all Europe: the later Israel of God, led by the inextinguishable light of the wisdom from above, and sustained triumphant through the desert by the visible power of the Almighty, until it found a place of rest and security in our own land!

The

Since the twelfth century no actual advance in the interpretation of the Apocalypse has been made. A host of learned and intelligent men throughout the Continent have in vain applied themselves with singular vigour to the task. English commentators have been honourably distinguished by their learning and perseverance; yet, since the day of Joseph Mede, and he was scarcely more than a compiler of the opinions of the original reformers, nothing has been done of sufficient clearness and evidence to satisfy a rational enquirer. Bishop Newton's work is a compilation, the works of Faber, Kett, Cunningham and others, notwithstanding the display of much acuteness and that strong conviction of the truth and importance of their subject, which is essential to success, have failed, and passed away; and we are still without any interpretation, which by its clearness, its absence of all straining of the text, and its proof of some general connexion and system in the prophecy, may convince, not merely the commentator himself, but the general Christian community, that the Apocalypse is an actual developement of the will of Providence, and, as the result, is capable of supplying the most direct and irresistible of all evidences of the truth of Christianity!

Without detaining our readers here by our further reasons for thinking that all this may, and will, yet be done; and that truths which have hitherto come before the public eye in the shape of vague guess, and rambling and conflicting hypothesis, will yet take the nobler form of consecutive, and consistent, and convincing elucidation; we unhesitatingly repeat at once our opinion, that the chief work of the commentators hitherto has been to add cloud to cloud; and our solemn conviction that the Apocalypse is a true prophecy; and of all prophecies the most circumstantial, complete, and abounding in evidence of the wonder working providence of God; in a word, that it is worthy of the final outpouring of that Spirit of knowledge which descended for the comfort and illustration of the Christian world.

The book of Daniel and the Apocalypse have a remarkable similitude, in their peculiar reference to remote things. The other prophecies were evidently directed to the generation in which they were delivered; and, as their object was, either the encouragement of the Jewish people under their oppressors and conquerors; or the warning of those calamities which so frequently crushed them during the long and troubled succession of their kings; those great documents contain, mingled with prediction, a vast variety of matters suitable to existing things. We have continual references to the wars and crimes of the people; Assyria and Egypt with their triumphs and policy are constantly before the eye; and through all those references to immediate fact, are also interspersed religious doctrines, expressed in the obscurity of that dispensation in which the VEIL was on the national heart; though not seldom declared with a boldness and fulness of knowledge characteristic of that glorious and consummate revelation of which the whole World was yet to be the heir.

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In these prophecies there is, (with a few exceptions, and those relating to the Jewish captivities and restorations,) a general absence of dates, almost the only marks by which a prophecy of remote events can be authenticated. The imagery is splendid and strongly projecting, but it is local, and conformable to the instant events of Jewish war and polity; it is the thunder proclaiming the tempest that was at that hour gathering over the turrets of the kingdom of David, and requiring no other interpreter than the instant descent of the divine wrath; it is the vision of Belshazzar, a broad and fiery developement of the divine will before the eyes of the very criminals who were to be stricken before another morn; a prophecy, to find its illustration in the assault of the Mede and Persian, and in the instant ruin of a guilty and foredoomed dominion.

In Daniel, the characters of the Jewish and the Christian prophet are combined. He predicts the immediate fate of the captive people; but the greater part of his predictions look to the remotest ages of Christianity. As the vision penetrates more deeply into time, it becomes even more circumstantial, and the distinguishing periods are set forth by dates, which, if hitherto no interpreter has been equal to explain, are yet, probably, to be the landmarks of magnificent discovery. But St. John is still more exclusively the prophet of a remote age. His mention of the times in which he lived, is scarcely to be called a prophecy; it is an exhortation to renewed purity and faith in the promises of the Gospel. In the whole Christian congregation,

then extending over the Roman empire, and probably to limits where the Roman never trod, he directs himself to merely the Churches which he personally superintended; and after a reproof and a promise expressed to each in nearly the same words, he leaves the living world behind him, and is led by the Spirit through that long succession of terrors and wonders which was to be consummated in the eternal triumph of the true Religion.

We have now to ascertain what Mr. Irving has done as a commentator. It is obvious that unless he shall have conducted his work with some reference to system, and satisfied the reader of the soundness of his comment by some clearing up of the difficulties on that point, which have hitherto made all commentary uncertain, he has done nothing. It is not enough that his guesses may be probable, he must shew that they are true; that they accurately coincide with the historic facts; and that they, so far from violating any other portions of the prophecy, coincide with and are corroborated by them. This last object is essential; for there are the most evident signs, (from the repetition of the visions, and from the remarkable recurrence of the dates throughout the Apocalypse,) that it has a system, that it is one, and of course, that no interpretation which is incompatible with any portion of it, can stand as an interpretation of any other.

Dates make another highly important check upon misinterpretation, as they make a most powerful evidence of the truth. But if they are good for any thing, it is for their accuracy. What we are to think of the value of Mr. Irving's labour may be easily ascertained from the facts;-that no attempt to consider the Apocalypse as a consistent whole, is discoverable; and that, when dates are in the way, he disdains all history: what are we to think of the interpreter who pronounces that the French Republic commenced in the year 1792! A year in which every body else knows that neither the Revolution nor the Republic began. But Mr. Irving's calculation had found 1792 convenient, and he proceeded accordingly.

It must, however, be allowed that, Mr. Irving abandons all claim to original discovery, or at least asserts it only at intervals, and with a kind of reluctant and half-abashed self-denial. He has been a disciple at the feet of Mr. Hatley Frere, we believe, an author on the subject in the early part of the French Revolution. His dedication to that Gentleman is couched in the strange and mystic phraseology of those times of our forefathers, when every man had "visitings and visions" of his

own.