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meanour I shall deceive the hearts of the simple into a belief of the correctness of my exposition," just as the fasting starving Jesuits deceive men ignorant of Christianity into a belief of their doctrines.

Now, to speak the truth without the least possible tincture of asperity, what Mr. Jones says of Mr. Faber's scheme, though he may be right in the catastrophe, may be said of his own plot, 'Tis all wrong together. Of the prophetic drama the end is ecclesiastical, but the means to bring about that end is both political and ecclesiastical. It must necessarily treat of the state, if it treat of the church, because the church has never kept clear of the state. And thus our Lord describes himself in the outset not only as walking in the midst of the candlesticks, but as the Prince of the kings of the earth, as having power over the nations to rule them with a rod of iron, and to break them in shivers as a potter's vessel, i. e. not only as ordering all things in the church, but also as overruling all things in the state to his purposes. So that if Mr. Jones had well purged himself of the "unclean spirit" of sectarian bias, whose name seems to be Legion in him,—so mighty is he to cast down the strong holds of " the cities of the nations," i. e. cities of the nations as they stand in their relation to God, viz. as national churches, so strong is he in his Quixotic phrensy to take every windmill for a national churchsay if he had well purged himself, he would have seen in the Apocalypse that the political events of the world were made use of in the hands of the Lord Jesus as instruments for the furtherance of his ecclesiastical purposes, and he consequently would have seen that every series of the former were terminated by some grand catastrophe in the affairs of the latter. After the sixth seal away go the gods and goddesses by the establishment of Christianity; after the sixth trumpet away goes the Pope of Rome by the Reformation; and after the sixth vial away go "the cities of the nations," to the indescribable satisfaction of Mr. Jones and the discomfiture of Mr. Irving, who, like the person that ran about Jerusalem before its destruction by the Roman armies, crying woe, woe, to everybody, will at last be obliged to cry out woe to himself, and make his prophetical exit. It is ludicrous to see how these two men start. One runs red-hot to the Millennium at once, while the other blows his first blast against the cities of the nations, Rev. xvi. 19, to trumpet them down. One wishes to call in the

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personal assistance of Christ to overthrow the Pope and the schismatics; and the other is afraid if he waits for the personal generalship of the Captain of the Lord's host, he may wait long enough, and the cities of the nations will never be taken. One sees nothing will do without calling down fire from heaven, to convince men of his dogmas; while the other, resting his cause upon the truth of it, can do without Christ's personal appearance. And this has just been the nature of the dispute between the Church and Nonconformists from first to last, as Zechariah xiv. long ago foretold. When the Lord Jesus descended upon that mount of Olives, the church, with a mighty crash by the Reformation, one part of it went due North and the other due South, and so it has continued to the present day. The light has been neither clear nor dark, but at evening it shall be light, when each party will be humble enough to come down from its supercilious elevation and meet in the valley of the mountains, the fathers to be reconciled to the children, and the children to the fathers, that they may flee from the curse, and the Lord my God may come and all his saints with thee to dwell among them. Neither Mr. Jones nor Mr. Irving has "that peculiar wisdom" as Dr. Pye Smith calls it, fit to lecture upon prophecy. It is neither clear nor dark with either of them, because they will not flee to the valley. They both are right, and both are wrong. The truth is, our Lord's coming before the millennium is both figurative and literal, both energetical and personal, according to the plain statements of 2 Thess. ii. 8, and ii. 2, 3; i. 7–10 compared: figurative and energetical by the issue of the Word of God or Spirit of his mouth, literal and personal, to follow up the blow, by his binding down Satan, i. e. by his appearing a second time without sin unto salvation; so that there will be plenty of room for the exercise of Mr. Jones's trumpeting around the "fore doomed" city to the ridicule of Mr. Irving and his lay champion within it, and plenty of room for faith on the other hand, to those who may believe that the Lord Jesus will answer the blast by a miraculous intervention. Mr. Jones cannot see the sudden shift of scene and change of terms in the Sixth Vision, from figurative to literal, from the armies in heaven to the armies on earth, from the figurative heaven to the literal heaven (xx. 1), from the Word of God in heaven on a white horse, with followers on white horses in fine linen, white and clean, to

Christ reigning among revived souls on earth, from followers already in full life to companions just risen from the dead. He cannot see the disused prophetic time for the literal year. He cannot distinguish between the war in the figurative heaven and the battle on the literal earth. He consequently cannot see the distinction between the remnant slain by him that sat on the horse, and the rest of the dead who rise at the end of the thousand years. Õh, no, he sees nothing but the cities of the nations. This is his "stop-watch." He has got a glimpse of a part of the scheme, but he does not see the whole of it. He has got hold of the under-plot instead of the main one. Now I must give him skill and understanding, that he may understand the vision. There are two plots, one going on in heaven, which is the main one, and the other going on on earth, which is the under one. It is a Divine Comedy, because it ends with a marriage, viz. that of the Hero of the piece, and attended, as a comedy generally is, with the marriage of the menials of the hero and heroine; in other words, it is the accomplishing of the number of the elect in heaven met by the purification of the church below on earth. Mr. Irving's lofty mind is taken up with the dignity of the former, while Mr. Jones is tickled throughout the piece by the fun that is going on below stairs, the fall of the cities of the nations, in the latter. While the souls or individuals are continually dying off into heaven out of an iron world, to make up the number of the bride, the bodies of the two nonconformist candlesticks perpetually live, as it were, like corporate societies, to bring down the cities of the nations by the moral weapon of truth, the fire of the mouth, backed by the physical force of God's political judgments; and it so happens that just as the latter is effected at the war of the Word of God, the former is accomplished at the first resurrection. And this accounts for the difference of scene and difference of terms used in the separate termination and subsequent coalition of the two plots, when the Lord Jesus unites his revived church and changed quick church, caught up to escape the conflagration, into one family, and then descends from God out of heaven to reign with them on the renovated earth. The figurative heaven or dominion of the two cotemporaneous and perpetual ecclesiastical corporations had been shut for a long time, so that the rain of divine grace had not descended upon men, xi. 6.

That heaven is suddenly opened or extended, and the true principles of Christianity go forth to cover the earth, just risen again, after their three and a half years' defeat, to that heaven or dominion they had lost, and to more than it, p. xiv. On the other hand, those two successive and perishing series of souls or individuals (see p. 107, I. 29), the first-fruits and the victors over Antichrist, who had been for a long time gathering into the literal heaven, till their corps was completed by the slaughter of the last remnant, are ready, just as they are avenged of Babylon and the cities of the nations, her daughters, at the termination of the war of the Word of God, by their spiritual posterity below. Had not the victory of the Word of God and the reign of the souls been the terminations of two distinct plots, the results of two different resurrections, a corporate resurrection (xi. 11, 12), and a personal resurrection (xx. 4), there would have been evidently a redundancy of metaphor and a jumble in the piece. There would have been a redundancy of metaphor, because, if the resurrection of souls meant merely the universal establishment of pure christianity, that might have been expressed by the armies in heaven taking the kingdom and possessing the kingdom for ever and ever, without the unnecessary sudden change to a resurrection of souls on earth which has not the least possible harmony, with the victory of the armies in heaven, who had been already alive, or with the ascension of the bodies of those two candlesticks to that heaven, to which those armies belonged, who had been never (save for three years and a half) dead, when the souls had been always dying. There would have been a jumble in the piece; for, if the resurrection of souls meant merely the diffusion of pure christianity on earth in its mere terrestrial and mortal state, a term, souls, which had hitherto been kept throughout to apply exclusively to the separate state of those who died in the Lord, and bad entered into a state of eternal rest (vi. 9, 10, 11; vii. 9-17; xiv. 1-5; xv. 2-4; xix. 1-9), would have been suddenly and capriciously wrested from its place, to the discomfiture of all means of arriving at a just interpretation, to apply to the fluctuating mortal state of the church on earth, when, from the plenitude of the materials of symbolisation already lavished upon the prophecy, there was not the least necessity for such a penurious economy of them. The harmony of the symbolisation, which had been so long beautifully preserved, could have been kept up to

the last, without any such beggarly shift as dressing up terrestrial in the language of heavenly affairs, as the resurrection of the candlesticks and the repentance of the rest of the men, and the casting off the sackcloth of the candlesticks, since a symbolisation, when begun, is kept up throughout, could have typified all what some superficial tasters would have to be meant by the first resurrection. Let it therefore be laid down as a certainty that, as when the White Horse first started from the goal, it was both a personal and spiritual visitation of our Lord: so when the White Horse is seen at last in his career, that it will be again a personal as well as spiritual visitation, though in an inverted order. Also let it be taken as a certainty, that as the figurative Heaven was opened and the spiritual leader appeared, so the literal heaven will be opened (xi. 19), and the personal leader, the Ark, appear (see p. xii. ARK; p. 444 note, lines 12, 33.) Those who make the rest of the dead (xx. 5) to be the same with the remnant slain by the sword (xix. 21), to be consistent, ought to make the first resurrectionists the same with the armies in heaven, which would refute itself, as the resurrectionists are represented as post-existent to the armies in heaven. But the remnant slain by the sword are the same as the remnant who were affrighted (xi. 13), the same as the rest of the men who did not repent (ix. 20, 21; xvi. 9, 11). So after all, though interpreters are not consistent, the Prophecy is, the figurative heaven of the church on earth or BODIES of the witnesses, and the literal heaven of the church in heaven, or SOULS of the martyrs or wit· nesses, being kept distinct, and figurative and literal, respectively, throughout, till they both meet, and the literal conquers the figurative by a real resurrection. Mr. Morison in his argument upon Matth. xxv. 31-46, for a simultaneous resurrection and immediate judgment of both classes, in his discourse on the Doctrine of the Millennium, seems either addressing himself to the ignorance of his auditory, or he is else palpably deficient in the just rules of a critical interpretation of Scripture. Instead of drawing his conclusions from a careful and calm comparison of the conflicting statements of that most paradoxical of all Books, the Bible, instead of attempting to reconcile its discrepancies, he arrays one set of passages against another, and having made a choice of which he likes best, which are those in accordance with the spirit of his party, he knocks the other set on the head with it, the cause of all heresies

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