marrying Roxana, the daughter and only child of his uncle Cyaxares, called in the Scripture Ahaseurus, succeeded to both crowns, and thus united Media and Persia." Respecting this ram with his two horns, Daniel says, chap. 8, verse 4, I saw the ram pushing westward, and northward, and southward, so that no " beast might stand before him, neither was there any that could deliver out of his hand; he did according to his will, and became great. "The principal theatre of their wars was against the Scythians, northward; against the Greeks, westward; and against the Egyptians, southward." There was no nation at that time

that could stay the progress of the Persian arms.

The prophet Daniel says, verses 5 and 6, And as 1 was considering, behold a he-goat came from the west on the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground; and the he-gout had a notable horn between his eyes. And he came to the ram that had two horns, which I had seen standing before the river, and ran unto him in the fury of his power." This he- -goat was the emperor Alexander the Great, who invaded Asia B. C. 334 years. It may be pleasing to the reader to learn why in the Scriptures he is called a he-goat. Bishop Newton states that two hundred years before the time of Daniel, they were called the Egeadae, the goat's people; the origin of which name is said to be as follows: Caranus, their first king, going with a multitude of Greeks to seek a new habitation in Macedonia, was advised by an oracle to take the goats for his guides; and afterwards, seeing a herd of goats flying from a violent storm, he followed them to Edes

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sa, and there fixed the seat of his empire, and made the goats his ensign or standard, and called the place Ege, the goat's town, and the people Ægeadae, the goat's people. The city Æge, or Egea, was the usual burying place of the Macedonian kings; and in reference to this origin, Alexander called his son by Rox'ana, Alexander Ægus, (or, as it is in English, Alexander the Goat.) All of which goes to establish the propriety of Alexander's being in Scripture called, in reference to this origin, a he-goat. This he-goat came with his forces from the west of Asia. Europe lies west of that quarter of the globe, and by the time Alexander was thirty years of age, he had conquered all Asia; and because of the rapidity of his conquests; he is represented as a leopard with four wings, in the preceding vision. This he-goat, it is said by Daniel, came to the ram that had two horns, which I had seen standing before the river, and ran unto him in the fury of his power. Chap. 8, 6. The conflicts between the Greeks and the Persians were excessively severe. Alexander first vanquished the generals of Darius at the river Granicus, in Phrygia; he next attacked and totally routed Darius at the straits of Issus, in Silicia; and afterwards at the plains of Arbela, in Assyria. "One can hardly read these words," says Bishop Newton, "the ram which I had seen standing by the riverran unto him in the fury of his power, without having the image of Darius's army standing and guarding the river Granicus; and of Alexander on the other side, with his forces plunging in, swimming across the stream, and rushing on the enemy, with all the fire and

fury that can be conceived." He broke the two horns of the ram when he had subdued Persia and Media, and had burnt the royal city of Persepolis, the capital of the Persian empire; and, even in its ruins, one of the wonders of the world to the present day. Alexander's victories over the Persians were as easy as they were rapid and decisive. He cast down (the ram) to the ground, and stamped on him, totally destroyed the family, and overturned the whole monarchy. But this hegoat, when he had conquered nearly the then known world, died B. C. 323, in the height of his conquests, at the age of about thirty-three years. After his death, his natural brother, Philip Aridaeus, and his two sons, Alexander Agus, and Hercules, kept up the show and name of the Macedonian kingdom for a time, but they were all murdered within fifteen years after the death of Alexander ; and thus the great horn, the Macedonian kingdom, was broken, the whole family being now cut off. But as soon as this was accomplished, the regions subdued by Alexander were divided among four of his generals, as before stated in this division. These four generals, who had become governors of provinces, during the fifteen years in which Alexander's brothers and two sons held the rule, were the four notable horns which came up after Alexander, the great Macedonian horn was broken. But "out of one of them came a little horn which waxed exceeding great toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land, And it waxed great even to the host of heaven, and it cast down some of the host, and of the stars, to the ground, and stamped upon them, which was the

Jewish priesthood. And by him the daily sacrifice" was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. And a host was given him against the daily sacrifice, by reason of transgressions, and it cast down the truth to the ground, and it practiced and prospered." See Dan. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Now when Daniel saw in the vision the havoc and desolation this little horn would make at Jerusalem, by destroying the Jews and profaning the temple, by putting the abominations of the heathen in the most holy place, then I heard, said Daniel, one saint speaking to another saint, (or, as Dr. Clark says, one angel speaking to another angel) how long shall be the vision con cerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot? To which an answer was immediately given, saying, Unto two thousand three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.

Now arises the question to be answered: Who is this little horn, and when are we to commence the numbering of those 2300 days or years, as they are by all allowed to mean; so that we may know when the sanctuary, i. e. the church of God, to which Daniel must have referred, as well as to the sacred altar at Jerusalem, evidently connecting them in his view of desolations, shall be cleansed. For he very well knew, as a prophet, that the sanctuary at Jerusalem was to give place to the greater one to be set up by the Messiah; therefore, in his propecying respecting when the sanctuary is to be cleansed, he has adverted from the former to the latter, and foretold when, or, in other

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words, when the Millennium is to commence. have strenuously contended, that this little horn signifies the Romans as a nation; but this cannot be, because Daniel saw this horn arise at a period future to the time when he saw the vision, which was while he was at Babylon, a captive, B. C. 550 years. But the Romans had their commencement long before Daniel was born, as early as the year B. C. 753; consequently, it is morally impossible to allow this horn to be the Roman government. The vision put the whole tragedy in the ages to come from the time of the vision. Those who have supposed that this little horn signifies the Roinan government, have accordingly supposed that Daniel's view of what was done to the sanctuary and temple by way of polluting it, by setting up the abomination which maketh desolate, was accomplished by the Romans under Titus, when it was totally destroyed by that emperor, A. D. 70. But it should be recollected, that nothing is more unlikely than that God would put it into the heart of Daniel to mourn for the desolation of the temple, after it was of no further use to his cause and church in the earth, when Christ had once suffered, and the temple thereby rendere useless as a place to exhibit types of a coming Messiah, which was the only design had in view in building it at first.

But Daniel certainly foretold the destruction of Jerusalem in the ninth and eleventh chapters of his book, and speaks of the Romans as being the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place. See Matth. 24, 15; but by no means conveying the idea, that the