free intercourse which he had with the Almighty, the importance of the commission which he bore, and the signs which he did. And, therefore, that succession not only kept alive the expectation, but was itself a pledge of the great prophet that should come. The writings of the succession of prophets are full of predictions concerning a new dispensation more glorious, more general, more spiritual than the Jewish economy, when "the sons of the stranger should join themselves to the Lord;" when "his house should be an house of prayer for all people;" when "the gods of the earth should be famished," no more offerings being presented to them, and "every one from his place," not at Jerusalem, but in his ordinary residence, "should worship Jehovah." "Behold the days come, saith the Lord," by Jeremiah, who lived in the time of the captivity, " that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."* It is further to be remarked, that the prophecy of this new spiritual dispensation is connected throughout the Old Testament with the mention of a person by whom the dispensation was to be introduced. If it is called a covenant, we read of the Messenger of the Covenant. If it is called a kingdom, set up by the God of heaven, which should never be destroyed, we read of a chief ruler to come out of Judah, of the Prince of Peace who was to sit on the throne of his father David, to establish it with justice and judgment for ever; of one like the Son of man coming with the clouds of heaven, to whom is given an universal and everlasting dominion. If the new dispensation is represented as a more perfect mode of instruction, we read of a prophet upon whom should rest the spirit of wisdom and understanding. If it is styled the deliverance of captives, there is also a redeemer; or victory, there is also a leader; or a sacrifice, there is also an everlasting priest. The intimations of this extraordinary personage, so closely connected with the new dispensation, became more clear and pointed as the time of his coming approached: and there are predictions in Malachi and the later prophets, which in their direct primary sense can belong to no other but the Messiah. "Behold," says God, by Malachi, "I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me; and the Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his temple; even the messenger of the covenant whom ye delight in." And again," Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet, before the great and dreadful day of the Lord." Even Grotius, whose principle it was, in his exposition of the Old Testament, to seek for the primary sense of the prophecies in the Jewish affairs which were immediately under the eye of the prophet, and to consider their application to Jesus as a secondary sense, and who has often been misled by this principle into very forced interpretations, has not been able to assign any other Malachi iii. 1, 4, 5.

Jer. xxxi. 31-33.

meaning to these prophecies, with which the old Testament concludes, and with a repetition of which Mark begins his Gospel, than that Malachi, with whom the prophetical spirit ceased, gave notice that it should be resumed in John the forerunner of the Messiah, who in the spirit and the power of Elias, should prepare the way before the messenger of the covenant.

The first answer then to Mr. Collins is, that there are in the Old Testament direct prophecies of the dispensation of the Gospel, and of the Messiah.

The second answer is, that prophecies applicable to Jesus only in a typical and secondary sense are not fanatical or unscholastic.

We are taught by the Apostle Paul to consider all the ceremonies of the law as types of the more perfect and spiritual dispensation of the Gospel. The meats, the drinks, the washings, the institution of the Levitical priesthood, the paschal lamb, and the other sacrifices, were figures for the time then present, shadows of good things to come, a rough draught, as the word type properly imports, of the blessings of that better covenant which the law announced. Many actions and incidents in the lives of eminent persons under the law are held forth as types of the Christ; and by the application which is made in the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, of various passages in the Old Testament, we are led to consider many prophecies, which originally had, both in the intention of the speaker and in the sense of the hearers, a reference only to Jewish affairs, and were then interpreted by that reference, as receiving their full accomplishment in the events of the Gospel. This is what we mean by the double sense of prophecy. The seventy-second psalm is an example. It is the paternal blessing given by David in his dying moments to Solomon, when with the complacency of an affectionate father and a good prince, he looks forward to that happiness which his people were to enjoy under the peaceful reign of his son. But while he contemplates this great and pleasing object, he is led by the spirit to look beyond it, to that illustrious descendant whose birth he had been taught to expect, -that branch which in the latter days was to spring out of the root of Jesse. The two objects blend themselves together in his imagination; at least the words in which he pours forth his conceptions, although suggested by the promise concerning Solomon, are much too exalted when applied to the occurrences even of his distinguished reign, and were fulfilled only in the nature and the extent of the blessings conveyed by the Gospel. Had we no warrant from authority upon other accounts respectable, to bring this secondary sense out of some prophecies; or had we no prophecies of the Messiah in the Old Testament of another kind, it would be unfair and unscholastical reasoning to infer that Jesus is the Messiah, because some passages may be thus transferred to him. We rest the argument from prophecy upon those predictions which expressly point to the Messiah, and upon that authority which the miracles of Jesus and his apostles gave to them as interpreters of prophecy; and we say that when their interpretation of those prophecies which were originally applicable to other events, gives to every expression in them a natural and complete sense, and at the same time coincides with the spirit of those predictions concerning the Gospel which are direct, we have the best reason

for receiving this further meaning, not to the exclusion of the other, but as the full exposition of the words of the prophet.

There is nothing in the nature of prophecy, or the general use of language, inconsistent with this account of the matter. If you allow that prophecy is a thing possible, you must admit that "it came not by the will of man, but that holy men spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." Prophecy by its nature is distinguished from other kinds of discourse. At other times, men utter sentiments which they feel; they relate facts which they know; they reason according to the measure of their faculties. But when they prophesy, that is, when they declare, by the inspiration of God, events which are out of the reach of human foresight, they speak not of themselves; they are but the vehicles for conveying the mind of another Being; they pronounce the words which he puts into their mouth; and whether these words be intelligible or not, or what their full meaning may be, depends not upon them, but upon Him from whom the words proceed. It is thus clearly deducible from the nature of prophecy, that there might be in the predictions of the Old Testament, a further meaning than that which was distinctly presented to the minds of those who spake.And we may conceive, that as the high priest Caiaphas was directed. to the Jewish council to employ words which, although in his eyes they contained only a political advice, were really a prophecy of the benefits resulting from the death of Christ, so the spirit of God might introduce into predictions, which to those who uttered them seemed to respect only the present fortune of their country, or the fate of some illustrious personage, expressions, in a certain sense indeed, applicable to them, but pointing to a more important event, and a more glorious personage, in whom it was to appear at a future period that they were literally fulfilled.

As there is nothing in the nature of prophecy inconsistent with that account of types and secondary senses which constitutes our second answer to the objection of Mr. Collins, so this account is supported by the general use of language. And any person versant in that use, will not be disposed to call the application of types and secondary prophecies unscholastic. The typical nature of the Jewish ritual accords with that most ancient method of conversing by actions, that kind of symbolical language, which is adopted in early times from the scantiness of words, which is retained in advanced periods of society, in order to give energy and beauty to speech, which abounds in the writings of the Jewish prophets, and appears to have been in familiar and universal use through all the regions adjoining to Judea. In like manner, prophecies which admit of two senses, one immediate and obvious, the other remote and hidden, are agreeable to that allegory which is only the symbolical language appearing in an extended discourse. Both sacred and profane poets afford beautiful examples of allegory. In the 14th Ode of the first book of Horace, the poet, under a concern for the safety of his friends at sea in a shattered bark, contrives at the same time to convey his apprehensions concerning the issue of the new civil war. There is a finished allegory, in the 80th Psalm. And Dr. Warburton has pointed out a prophecy in the two

* John. xi, 49.

first chapters of Joel, where the prophet, he says, in his prediction of an approaching ravage by locusts, foretells likewise, in the same words, a succeeding desolation by the Assyrian army. For, as some of the expressions mark death by insects, and others desolation by war, both senses must be admitted. Allegory abounds in all the moral writings of antiquity, and is employed at some times as an agreeable method of communicating knowledge, and at other times as a cover for that which was too refined for vulgar eyes. There is not any particular reason for saying that it was unworthy of God to accommodate the style of many of his prophecies to this universal use of allegory; because whenever the Almighty condescends to speak to us, whether he uses plain or figurative language, he must speak after the manner of men; and we are able to assign a most important purpose which was attained by those prophecies of a double sense, the interpretation of which, although very far from deserving the name of unscholastic, may be called allegorical. It pleased God, in the intermediate space between the first predictions of the Messiah and the fulfilment of them, to establish the Jewish economy, an institution singular in its nature, and limited in its extent. This intermediate institution being for many ages a theocracy, there arose a succession of prophets by whom the intercourse between the Almighty Sovereign and his people was maintained; and the whole administration of the affairs of the Jews was long conducted by the prophets. It was natural for this succession of prophecy to give some notice of the better covenant which was to be made; and accordingly, we can trace predictions of the Messiah from the books of Moses, till the cessation of the prophetical spirit in Malachi. The Holy Ghost, by whom the prophet spoke, could have rendered these notices of the spiritual and universal nature of the future dispensation clear and intelligible to every one who heard them. But, in this case, the intermediate preparatory dispensation would have been despised. The Jews comparing their burdensome ritual with the simplicity of Gospel worship,-their imperfect sacrifices with the efficacy of the great atonement,-their temporal rewards with the crown of glory laid up in heaven, would have thrown off the yoke which they were called to bear; and those rudiments by which the law was given to train their minds for the perfect instruction of the Gospel, would have been cast away as "beggarly elements." If the law served any purpose, it was necessary that it should be respected and observed so long as it was to subsist; and therefore it would have been inconsistent with the wisdom of Him from whom it proceeded, that it should impart such a degree of light as might have destroyed itself. Enough was to be declared to raise and cherish an expectation of that which was to come, but not enough to disparage the things that then were. This end is most perfectly attained by the types, and the prophecies of a double sense which are contained in the Old Testament. Both were so agreeable to the manners of the times, and both received such a degree of explication from the direct prophecies concerning the Messiah, that there was an universal apprehension of their further meaning. Yet their immediate importance preserved the respect which was due to the law; and when, in the end of the age of prophecy, predictions of the Messiah were given by different prophets which could not apply to any other person,

-these direct predictions were clothed in a figurative language, all the figures of which were borrowed from the law. The law, in this way, was still magnified; and as the child is kept under tutors and governors till the time appointed of the father, so says the apostle to the Galatians, the Jews were kept under the law, the guardians of the oracles of God,-the depositaries of the hopes of mankind, until the time came that the faith should be revealed.* When it was revealed, then the allegory received its interpretation; the significancy of the types, the reddition of the parables, the hidden meaning of the ancient prophecies, and the propriety of the figures in which the latter were clothed, all now stand forth to the admiration and conviction of the Christian world. What was a hyperbole in its application to Jewish affairs, becomes, says Dr. Warburton, plain speech, or an obvious metaphor, when transferred to the Gospel; and the Old Testament appears to have been, what St. Austin calls it, a continued prophecy of the New.

SECTION IV.

BEFORE I proceed to state the amount of the argument from prophecy, there is one other objection to that argument which requires to be mentioned. The objection arises from a kind of verbal criticism, but does not deserve upon that account to be dismissed as unimportant.

It was long ago observed, that many of the passages quoted from the Old Testament in the New, do not exactly agree with the text of our copies of the Old Testament. The apology commonly made for this difference was, that our Lord and his apostles did not quote from the Hebrew, but from the Septuagint translation, which was known and respected in Judea. But, upon accurate investigation, it was found that the quotations do not always correspond with the Septuagint; and that there are many which agree neither with the Septuagint nor with the Hebrew. It was insinuated, therefore, by the adversaries of Christianity, that our Lord and his apostles had not been scrupulous in their method of quoting the Old Testament; but wishing to ground Christianity upon Judaism, and finding it difficult to lay this foundation with the materials that existed, had accommodated the words of the Old Testament to their argument, and made the prophets say what it was necessary for the conclusiveness of that argument, they should seem to say. It appears at first sight very unlikely that our Lord and his apostles, who began the preaching of the gospel from Judea, would, in the hearing of the Jews, use such liberty with the scriptures which were publicly read in those very synagogues where they were thus misquoted. The detection of the fraud was easy, or rather unavoidable, and must have been ruinous to the cause of Christianity. But however improbable it may seem that our Lord and his apostles should be guilty of such a fraud, the fact is undeniable, that the quotations in the New Testament do not

• Gal. iv.