city, a temple, a home: she traverses the plains of earth, or dwells in its cities-yet still an outcast for whom no man careth, and with whom no man will share his honour and influence, and to whom in death no man will build a monument. Her land is a desolation; her vineyards are trodden down her cities are a ruinous heap. Is it always thus to be? Is there to be no restoration, no rebuilding for her? Has not God recorded thoughts of peace for her in the appointed time? Let us search and see. Prophecy alone can tell us.'

'Antichrist gathers strength. Like a spectre from the abyss he rises, overshadowing the earth, and going forth to write his name upon the forehead and the hand of his myriad worshippers. Even now are there many Antichrists, each of them like a demon from the pit, all of them banded together against the saints of the Most High. What is to be the career and the end of these hosts of darkness, especially of their great head and captain? God has revealed the things concerning him, lest the heart of his saints should fail. The same word of prophecy makes known his doom-swift and speedy as his exaltation. It is our wisdom to inquire what has been written concerning him. How shall the church know her great adversary and prepare for his onset, if she do not set herself to study the prophetic picture, in which God is holding him up to her gaze.'

But objections are raised to this study so interesting and inviting, and Mr. Bonar proceeds to meet these. First, the extravagances into which prophetical students have fallen, are alleged to bring discredit upon the study itself.

Let us admit,' he says, 'the fact on which the mockery is founded, and there let it rest. It will humble us; it will inspire caution; it will teach us

It will not deter us

wisdom; but it will do no more. from such studies, nor will it lead us to impeach the word of God for consequences in which man alone is the delinquent.... Nothing more profane has ever been uttered against Scripture, than that the study of any part of it is fit to unhinge the mind, or raise its temperature beyond the point of calm and solemn enquiry. No Romanist ever promulgated an idea so indefensible, as that any region of Scripture is unfruitful or forbidden ground, to be employed merely as a field out of which a casual text may be culled as taste or fancy may incline; that whole chapters and books of Scripture are wrapt in such studied mystery, that the very endeavour to understand them betokens rashness and folly.'

'Secret things belong to God,' says an objector. 'Most certainly; and whosoever insists on prying into God's secrets will only proclaim his own pride, and plunge himself into profounder ignorance. But prophecy is no secret thing; it is a thing revealed. It is not truth over which God has drawn the veil. It is just the opposite. It is truth from which God has withdrawn the veil, on purpose that we may know it, and profit by it. The very name of the chief prophetic book is a declaration of this, and a call on us to "Come and see." What does the Apocalypse or Revelation mean, but the book which reveals,—the book which takes the veil or covering from the future, and presents that future to our gaze. Into what is not written we may not search, but into all that is written we may and must.'

'We hear much of the difference between things essential and things non-essential, but who will undertake to draw the dividing line? Or who will venture to affirm that the prophetic portions of the Word are its non-essentials? Strange, truly strange, that man JUNE, 1847.

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should make such a division of the word of God! Stranger still, that he should make it for the purpose of excusing himself for the neglect of so large and precious a portion of revelation. Is not the fact of its being revealed, enough to show us that God thought it essential; or if not essential absolutely, and with reference to salvation, at least essential relatively, and as pertaining to holiness? If a man will persist in calling it non-essential, surely he will not irreverently pronounce it unimportant? and if it be admitted to be important, then surely all farther argument is at an end. It must be studied; we dare not overlook or postpone the duty.'

In the second chapter, after showing that much of the present indifference to prophetic study has arisen from the want of unity among Christians, Mr. Bonar proceeds to urge another motive for a diligent inquiry into this part of Divine truth :—

'Prophecy is not designed for the mere gratification of curious men; it is the nourishment of part of our very nature. We should be but half-fed without it. We are by nature as instinctively prospective as retrospective creatures. Our eye was formed to glance forward with as intense and eager interest into the uncertainties of the future, as to hold intercourse with past and present realities. We cannot help this. It is our nature. We cannot help our anticipative propensities, any more than we can extinguish memory. We are formed to look into the future, and we feel that nothing can be more natural; for the sunshine or the shadows of that future are hastening on to us apace, and we shall soon be compassed about with them on every side.

Our picture of that future, then, must be filled up either with shadows-phantoms of our own creation

or with the revelations of inspired prophecy. We cannot help speculating and conjecturing, either to "cast the fashion of uncertain evil," or to spread before us the vision of "scenes surpassing fable." The past is all fixed and gone; the present may be restless; still it is within our grasp; but futurity is too full of our destinies to allow us to smile at its uncertainties. Every moment comes loaded with fresh arrivals from the unknown shore, compelling us to vigilant forethought; so that fear and hope must be utterly torn from our breast, and the future forbidden to cast forward its shadow, and hang out its portents, ere we can lie down at ease absorbed in present realities, and torpidly indifferent to all that the future may, in a moment, let down upon us from its mysterious and inaccessible eminences.

'Besides, the soul of man is not so narrow and simple a thing, that the belief of one truth will mould it into the form desired. Every part, every principle, every faculty and feeling, must have truths presented to them precisely adapted to their nature and exercise, else they must remain undeveloped, or, if developed, remain unsanctified. Our reasoning faculty must be addressed, or it must wither up by remaining uncultivated; and accordingly there is ample scope in Scripture for its energies to work upon. Our propensity for imitation, observation, and acquisition of experience, must be addressed, and it is met by the graphic narratives of Old and New Testament history. Our finer and higher feelings must be touched, and we have the poetic richness of seer and psalmist to attract and improve them. Our prospective propensities must be guided and moulded, or else they will grow rank over fields of their own, luxuriant but unhallowed; creation and the prophetic word must be spread before us, that

these feelings may be sanctified. Most mercifully, most marvellously, has God framed His revelation, that by its largeness and variety it may compass our whole nature, and adapt itself to every part of our being. We have not to cut down and contract the manifold instincts of our soul, in order to bring it into the likeness of Christ. We have not to strike off one affection, or leave one desire to waste unnourished, so as to fix ourselves in a state of unnatural constraint, and concentrate into a single point the various out-goings of our nature; but, on the contrary, every principle within is provided with a corresponding truth without, by which it may be controlled and purified. If then we are to be wholly sanctified only by a belief of the whole truth; and if every truth neglected be so much injury to our souls, how can we palliate the guilt, or slight the danger of those who wilfully neglect one truth of God—one chapter of his revelation? To slight any section of the word of God, is just to say either that we do not desire to be wholly sanctified, wholly cast into the Divine mould, or that that section of the Word is unnecessary for our holiness and transformation. To complain of obscurity in the prophecies, is an attempt to palliate our own guilt by fastening blame upon the Word. To plead this fancied obscurity as an excuse for omitting their study, is strange obliquity of logic, as well as of conscience. It makes the very circumstance which, in everything else, is deemed the strongest argument for doubling the intensity of thought and appliance, a reason for indifference and pretermission. To say that these obscure parts cannot be so profitable as the rest, is to maintain that God has written difficulties in His word, which will not repay the labour of investigation, even when successful, Surely, there is no part of re