be viwed in their integrity;-they speak of the sufferings of Christ as well as of the glories that shall follow ;-you do wrong to overlook the cross, while you gaze so intently on the crown. O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken; learn first to accept as your Messiah the despised and rejected Jesus ;-soon will he come again as Israel's triumphant King. Then shall it be found that your national privileges are not abrogated, that still you are the people of God's peculiar choice,-for Israel's pre-eminence shall then be revived in transcending majesty. Your lost brethren of the ten tribes shall be brought back,—Judah and Ephraim shall become one stick,-planted in the land of your fathers,—its boundary extended, its fertility multiplied an hundred fold, the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vine-dressers,- but ye shall be named Priests of the Lord, the Ministers of our God,-year by year shall all nations come up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles,-all the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee: they shall come up with acceptance on Jehovah's altar, and he will glorify the house of his glory.' Yes, A more glorious temple shall be there, and a more glorious shekinah than before. A King shall yet reign in righteousness, and the isles shall yet wait for that law which is to come forth from Jerusalem, the metropolis of the world.'"-(Pp. 86-88.)

Our reply is very simple. Such arguments were, in point of fact, addressed by Peter to the unconverted Jews. In his discourse on the occasion of the healing of the lame man, the apostle points out to them that the sufferings of Christ had been predicted. He then calls upon them to repent and be converted, that their sins might be blotted out, that the times of refreshing might, at last, come from the presence of the Lord, when he should send Jesus Christ, before preached unto them. He tells them that Jesus must remain in the heavens until the times of the restitution of all things, which God had announced by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. Thus all the glories of Israel's future restoration, and every particular which Mr Waldegrave refers to, are by the apostle connected with the coming of Christ, and are made an argument for the repentance of Israel.

The fourth lecture, on the ingathering and glorification of the Church, asserts the principle that the coming of Christ cannot take place until the whole Church is gathered in. We do not find that our author alludes to the distinction premillennialists make between the Church of the First-bornthe 144,000 who are called the first-fruits-the Bride; and the great multitude who afterwards swell the company of the redeemed. And we observe that he repeats the argument, which even Dr Brown withdrew from the second edition of his work, that the intercession of Christ depends on his continued presence in heaven. We should like to ask, whether he believes that there was any intercession before Christ ascended; how he accounts for the intercessory prayer,

contained in the 17th of John; and whether he believes that Christ's intercession shall be perpetual?

We must endeavour to make room for a few remarks, in order to shew how unfounded is the assertion made by our author in his fifth lecture, that the "tenet of premillennialists deprives of all its most stringent elements of fear, the awful doctrine of judgment to come" (p. 188). He has arranged in order these several elements of terror; the first of which is, that "before the sudden approach of the Lord, universal nature would recoil and shrink away and perish." Of course, the denial of such a total annihilation, on the part of premillennialists, can only be complained of, if the doctrine itself shall be proved to be unscriptural. We shall have many postmillennialists on our side in maintaining the contrary opinion, a course of argument, however, which we have no intention of entering upon, as we are persuaded that most reasonable men will agree with us, that any difference, as an element of terror, between a conflagration that annihilates, and a conflagration that renovates, is hardly worth insisting on. Men's minds will be occupied, at that moment, with far other considerations. But turning the tables on Mr Waldegrave, we would ask whether postmillennialists do not remove one scriptural element of terror when they interpose a millennium between the world and the coming of the Judge? The second element of terror which the views of premillennialists are said to remove is the immediate appearance of all mankind at the bar of judgment. Now, in the case of the nations of the earth judged at Christ's coming, it is not easy to see how the terrors of that judgment could have been enhanced to the wicked among them by the fact that all the wicked dead received sentence along with them. Nor, in the case of the resurrection of the wicked, can we perceive that the terrors of their judgment are diminished by the fact that others, a comparatively small number, have been judged and condemned before them. Let it not be forgotten that, while the eye of an omniscient Judge may, at one moment, take in the whole assembled multitudes of all the generations of earth's inhabitants, no finite being can possibly contemplate more than a small portion of the scene, and it will immediately appear that, whether all appear at once, or all who are alive at one time, and all the dead at another, cannot materially affect the terrors of the day of judgment. All must appear before the judg ment-seat of Christ; all must give an account of the deeds done in the body. As long as these two things are insisted on, the scriptural elements of terror in the day of the Lord are maintained. And, in regard to the latter of these two

propositions, notwithstanding Mr Waldegrave's assertions at page 227, where he would make it appear that this his third element of terror is eliminated by us from the judgment-day, we affirm that, on the premillennial hypothesis, every man, righteous or wicked, dead or alive, at the coming of Christ shall, in his own order, give an account of the deeds done in the body.

Although we are much tempted to enter on a consideration. of the sixth lecture, on "The Recompense of Reward to be conferred upon the Saints at the Second Coming of their Lord," we feel that, to do any justice to the topics contained, it would occupy more space than we can afford, the more especially as we wish to introduce our readers to the peculiar and distinguishing features of Mr Waldegrave's theory, as expounded in the seventh lecture.

When Dr Brown published his work on the second advent, three things were predicted by premillennialists regarding the aspect which the controversy had assumed. First, it was

asserted that Dr Brown had conceded too much to be able to maintain his position; that his friends would discover this, and would especially remonstrate against what they would call the materialism of his theory regarding the future habitation of the blessed. Secondly, it was asserted that Dr Brown, in his exposition of the passage regarding the Man of Sin, had made admissions which would be found totally irreconcilable with the denial of a personal advent of Christ, by which Antichrist should be destroyed. And, thirdly, it was contended that the necessary result of the principles which Dr Brown advocated would be, either that there was no millennium at all, or that it was already past. It is not a little remarkable that, on each of these three points, Mr Waldegrave's work confirms the anticipations which Dr Brown's had awakened.

With regard to the future habitation of the blessed, he distinctly repudiates the doctrine of Dr Brown, who maintains that it shall be the renovated earth. "The scene," he says, "of these unsullied, these eternal glories, shall be heaven itself" (p. 70.) And again he tells us that one characteristic of the saints' inheritance is, that its locality shall be heaven itself. "If inquiry be made," he says, "what is heaven? and where is it? Scripture would seem to reply, that heaven is an abode distinct from the earth that now is,-an abode in which the incarnate Word is at this moment dwelling in the immediate presence of God the Father. It is to this heaven,

* See Wood's " Last Things," pp. 20, 180, 278, 279.

the very heaven in which he himself now dwelleth in glory in the presence of God, that the Lord purposes to take his people, when he comes again the second time."-(Pp. 259, 260.) Again, in expounding the prophecy of the Man of Sin, Mr Waldegrave admits with Dr Brown that the coming of Christ, mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, is plainly a personal coming. He then notices the argument of premillennialists founded on this concession, namely, that the coming by which Antichrist is to be destroyed, mentioned a few verses afterwards, must be also the personal coming of Christ. To this argument, he says, "it might well be replied" that the usage of Scripture does not require that the same word should always bear the same sense, even when repeated in the same context. And he adduces, as a case in point, the coming (Taρovola) of the Man of Sin, spoken of in this very passage, which he holds to signify the potential coming of Antichrist. But in this he is plainly mistaken, along with Dr Brown, who adduces the same example, for Antichrist (the Papal Antichrist, according to our author) is surely actually present upon the earth before he is destroyed; and all we ask is, that the same actuality of presence, admitted in the case of Antichrist, be also allowed in the case of the Lord, who destroys him. We might, however, have permitted Mr Waldegrave to answer his own argument; for although "it might well be replied" to premillennialists after this fashion, he himself does not choose so to reply. The ground, he feels, is scarcely tenable. "I will not detain you longer upon this passage," he says, "for I must confess that . . . it does appear to me to render it probable that Popery, among other delusions, shall survive to the coming of the Lord" (pp. 374-376.) Was it not truly said, then, that the admission of a personal coming in the first verse, requires a similar admission in the eighth verse? Was not Dr Brown correct in allowing that this is the natural sense of the passage?

66

But we are now naturally brought to the third point; for Mr Waldegrave having admitted that Antichrist shall rule till the actual coming of Christ, proceeds to develop his own theory of the millennium, adopted in order to reconcile this admission. with a postmillennial advent. "The thousand years," he says, may be even now in progress, if not entirely past" (p. 377). Of course, this renders nugatory a large portion of his previous arguments; and it must surely be with some feelings of chagrin that those of his readers who may have been perusing with interest and conviction the reasoning used against premillennialists, discover in the seventh lecture that our author is pre

pared to evacuate the position which he has all along been defending, and that the battle is really to be fought on altogether different ground, of which they have had only an obscure intimation in the foregoing part of his work.

Before considering the interpretation of the Apocalypse by which this tenet of a past millennium is attempted to be defended, we must take a glance at the other mode of exposition which our author offers for the benefit of those who choose to adhere to the more common doctrine of a future millennium. That he should provide two interpretations of these prophecies, based on principles so contradictory, does not increase our confidence in him as an expositor. We cannot rid ourselves of the impression that in his hands the prophetical parts of Scripture will be found capable of any exposition which may suit a preconceived theory; in short, that he does not possess any valid principle of interpretation whatever. But without further preface, let us turn to the prophecy itself.

Passing by all other considerations, we wish to fix the attention of our readers on the following statement, made with reference to the resurrection predicted in the 20th chapter of Revelation. "It may well be asked," says Mr Waldegrave, "whether a symbolic resurrection necessarily implies the resurrection of the persons; whether it does not rather designate the revival of the principles of which those persons were once the representatives?" (p. 359.) Now, suppose we concede the point that the latter interpretation is admissible,-nay, even that it is the most natural meaning of a symbolic resurrection, the question still remains, Is there any symbolic resurrection to be found in the chapter which we are considering? We affirm that there is not. There are symbols, no doubt,-symbols of which an explanation is given in the very text; there are symbols which signify a resurrection, but there is no symbolic resurrection, that is to say, the resurrection is not used as a symbol. A certain scene is presented to the eye of the prophet, and then the explanation of the symbolic vision is given in the words, "This is the first resurrection." Such notes of explanation are common in the Apocalypse; thus, "The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven candlesticks are the seven churches." But who would argue that there are here symbolic angels, and symbolic churches? In the same manner, we contend that the Spirit's interpretation of the vision in the 20th chapter ought to be taken as the true one; it is a symbol of the first resurrection. It is not the symbol of a symbol, but of the resurrection, called "the first," because, as the Spirit states, "the rest of the dead lived not again till