for their good. In danger, and in the first feelings of thankfulness at escape from danger, we are happy in thinking, with Hezekiah, that we shall go softly all our years; but the pride and evil of our hearts soon surges up, and unless we are restrained as soon by correction, we are at once hurried away. It is a most beneficial exercise to think over our mercies through life, and ask which of them have we adequately sought by waiting upon God; and let the result show us what our gratitude ought to be. And it may humble us, if, when we glance at blessings withheld, we ask ourselves whether we really gave evidence, by our prayers, that we sought or desired them. Whilst dependence on a fellow creature has the tendency, which we continually witness, to depress the dependent; and the very words, "a state of dependence," indicate a sad tale of sorrow; and whilst the dependence of a child even on a parent, if prolonged too far into life, is trying to the character of both, there are few things in reality more ennobling than a well sustained dependence on our Heavenly Father. As far as it is carried out, it saves us from undue dependence on our fellow creatures; and from what is even more hurtful, dependence on ourselves. It leads to communion and union with God. It requires, and it promotes, an advance in every strengthening virtue, love, joy, and peace. How wonderfully different is God from man! We are in difficulties, and apply to a fellow creature for help he is sympathizing and kind, and he gives us assistance willingly, especially if he can do it at once; but he avoids a burden upon himself: and if our applications are repeated to him, they soon become troublesome, and we are unwelcome. This is at least the case too frequently for the afflicted. And yet we ought not to complain, or disparage human sympathy; nor feel otherwise than largely thankful for all the readiness to help, which cases of real urgency seldom fail to meet with. But we cannot but feel that keeping a want continually before a fellow creature is apt to make it a weariness. And here few will fail to remember how enduring women are in their feelings of kindness. If, as often happens, they are somewhat deficient in power, yet their help and effort to assist seem never to fail. No one can have passed through many years of life, without having occasion to witness and acknowledge this beauty of the female character, as exemplified towards himself or others. And we ought all to remember to their honour, how they ministered to our Saviour during His life, were present at Calvary, and the first at the tomb on the morning of the resurrection. And then the power of woman's kindness, and the grace and absence of thoughts of self which constantly attend it! But what a contrast to all human help, overflowing in benefits as it is, when it blesses both the receiver and the giver, is the sustaining God! He never wearies with our complaints, the thoughtless murmuring complaints of a creation; though He often delays an answer, as we see at last, for reasons wise and good; and we should see this much more frequently and clearly, if we knew our own faults. We find it difficult to get access to a fellow creature to introduce our wants; we hesitate; we try for a propitious moment; we approach with hesitation; we retire, if successful, with benefits beyond our hopes. How different is the Almighty! And how different is our conduct toward Him! He waiteth to be gracious. He is more ready to hear than we are to pray. Are we, then, ready to pray? Perhaps we think so. We enter His presence with little or no hesitation; but is it to pray? We are sometimes distressed at the apparent want of success of what appears to be fervent, believing, waiting prayer. But is the prayer of this description? We cannot practically come to any other conclusion than that somewhere it is deficient. Our best hope and course is to make the discovery of this something the subject of prayer, and to persevere. It is with prayer as with illness. In sickness, we may be a long way from health; but we know not how ncar it may be to the time of rapid amendment. In prayer, we may not have obtained an answer; but we know not how near we may be, or how great the blessing. It was after a night of prayer that Jacob's perseverance was rewarded with a blessing seldom surpassed. His mercy is everlasting, always lasting. In a future state we may hope to see this, and to trace it through the whole course of our lives: as we can now trace the lines of worsted in the royal cordage; cut it where you will, there is the worsted, the proof that it has been wrought under the sovereign, always prescnt. And in that future state, we may hope to appreciate something of the love which led our Blessed Saviour Himself to take our infirmities, and bear our sicknesses. And what shall wo then think of the forgiveness of sin, and the atonement by which the graciousness of our God is so manifested. Our best feelings now are those so beautifully expressed by Martha, who, not stopping to estimate difficulties, but apparently fully aware of the surpassing wonders of the truths set before her, and of her own utter inability to comprehend them, and yet with the hope of some day entering into them more fully, gave utterance to all these mingled feelings in her answer to the inquiry, "Believest thou these things?" "Yea, Lord, I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world." In this spirit we should always draw near; and it is not a vain thing, nor a poetic fiction, nor a mere abstraction, but a living saving truth, that His throne is a mercy seat. Vol. 26.-No. 312. 6 B R. P. REV. E. B. ELLIOTT ON DR. VAUGHAN'S "LECTURES ON THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN." To the Editor of the Christian Observer. DEAR SIR,-You proposed to me, some little time since, to review Dr. Vaughan's lately published "Lectures on the Revelation of St. John." Kindly allow me to present the review in the form of a Letter to you, and with my own name subscribed. For I have found myself forced, in the cause of Scriptural truth, to speak of the directly prophetic part of his Apocalyptic Exposition,-that which is, of course, the main and most important part of the book,-with some considerable severity of criticism. And as the author is one whom you, Sir, I feel sure, (and I too, let me most sincerely say,) would shrink from giving pain to, and delight to honour, on account both of his generally well known Christian character, and of the evangelic truth, and beautiful spirit of piety, which characterize the applicatory practical addresses in this very Exposition, I wish to take avowedly upon myself the whole responsibility of the review.-An analysis of Dr. Vaughan's exposition of the prophecy will be the fit and necessary preliminary to my observations. The grand subject of the Apocalyptic Prophecy is, as all know, expressly stated in the sacred record itself;-"Come up, and I will show thee what things must happen after these things" i. e. after the state of things then existing, as described in the previously indited Epistles to the seven Asiatic Churches, at the time of the revelation to St. John in Patmos, A.D. 96.* It was evidently all the chief mutations and events in the Church, and World as connected with the Church, that Jesus Christ hereby engaged to foreshow (by prefigurations, as it would seem)† to the beloved disciple. And what then, according to Dr. Vaughan, was His fulfilment of that promise? What the revelation made to St. John of the destinies of the "The later of the assigned dates of St. John's exile to Patmos [i.e., the Domitianic, not the Neronic, date] has here been adopted," says Dr. Vaughan, vol. i. p. 23, "though with a full sense of the difficulty of the question.' What his difficulty on the question, I am unable to imagine, if he has at all carefully examined the evidence. I have myself done so most fully and carefully; and found the evidence, alike internal and external, to be altogether decisive in favour of the Domitianic date; and the objections to it, one and all, really vain and worthless. See my preliminary Essay on the subject; and the additional Paper respecting it, in answer to Lücke and Moses Stuart, at p. 533 of It may be well to give Dr. Vaughan's own words on this point, for reasons that will afterwards appear. "The object of this revelation was a disclosure to His servants of the divine counsels, with reference to the future course and final destiny of the Church and of the World."-So vol. i. p. 6. Church and World in the great coming future, from after the date above-mentioned to the end of the present dispensation? Let me briefly abstract the view of this given by our author, under the five usual and clearly marked Apocalyptic divisions of the Seals, Trumpets, Vials, supplemental part respecting the Dragon and Beast, and visions, finally, of the Millennium and the New Jerusalem. 1. As regards the Seals, then, the first five visions are explained by him to have figured to St. John (all in accord with Christ's prophecy, Matt. xxiv., on Mount Olivet) "wars of conquest," civil wars, scarcities, mortality,-judgments these already impending, and ever to be recurring; together with similarly recurring martyrdoms of Christ's faithful saints, whose blood would cry from the earth for vengeance: also, sixthly, revolutions of states, and other such calamities, as the earthquake and other elemental convulsions of the sixth seal's vision might fitly portend; the full accomplishment of this last judgment being reserved for the era immediately preceding Christ's second advent. Finally, after an interlude showing the assured safety of the sealed 144,000 of Israel, or mystical sacred number of Christ's saints, amidst those last judgments, there followed, on the breaking of the seventh seal of the seven-sealed book, not [so as might surely have been expected] a figuring of Christ's advent; but a silence in heaven, as of awe and admiration, at the disclosure now at length made of God's counsels respecting our world, as written in that book of fate: a disclosure, however, to the inhabitants of heaven exclusively; not to St. John, or the Church on earth! 2. As to the Trumpets, the successive visions exhibited in connexion with their sounding blasts (after that a created angel had incensed the saints' prayers for deliverance and victory, to make them acceptable before the divine throne, and show that the time for answering them was now at length fully come*) figured the judgments of wars, wars, wars, against the enemies of God's Israel: still, in part, after the prototype of the prophecy in Matt. xxiv.; and like as the trumpet-soundings that portended, and prepared, the fall of the ancient Jericho. All which judgments, it is to be understood, would recur from time to time, in chronological parallelism with the ever recurrent judgments of the Seal visions, throughout what remained after St. John of the present dispensation: And this without any distinctiveness, apparently, one from another as to time or locality, whether locality of origin or of infliction :-save only that the "hair like women's" of the agents in the fifth trumpet-woe might seem to indicate uncivilized barbarians ;-that the origination of those of the sixth *Vol. i. p. 261. Dr. Vaughan translates ἵνα δώσῃ ταῖς προσευχαῖς, Apoc. viii. 3, "that he might give it to the prayers;" not, as our E. V., "with the prayers.” On this strange translation and exposition more hereafter. from Euphrates, (that seat of the Assyrian and Babylonian enemies of the ancient Israel,) on the cry of God's oppressed people from the horns of the golden incense-altar, indicated generally their coming "as God's hosts of war," not indeed against the Christian Israel, but "against an unbelieving and apostate world;"*-that the "one-third" of land sea rivers and sun, on which the judgments of the four first trumpets were to fall, being fractional, indicated their limitation and non-finality ;and that the assignment of five months as the duration of the fifth trumpet-woe, being also fractional, [I presume a fraction of a year!] indicated similarly that "it too was not yet final."+ Add to this that in one of two interludes, interposed between the sixth and seventh trumpets, [so says Dr. Vaughan, but incorrectly, as it occurs really between the first half and second half of the sixth trumpet,] somewhat like that between the sixth seal and the seventh, [another incorrectness, as this constitutes the latter half of the sixth seal's vision,] the vision of a rainbow-vested angel descending on this earth, and uttering solemn oath on the subject, (such was the main object of his figured descent,) gave assurance that the time of judgments from heaven on this world, and of the present mystery of mixed good and evil, should not be for ever, nor indeed prolonged beyond the seventh trumpet.-Further, in the second interlude, by St. John's commanded measurement of some visionary temple, like Israel's of old, and exclusion of its outer-court as given up to Gentiles,§ there was indicated, that throughout all the three-and-a-half (or half seven) years which designated mystically, by its fraction of the sacred number, the destined time of the reign of evil,|| there would be always both false professors in the visible Church, and also always some truehearted witnesses for Jesus Christ: which latter, after martyrdom by the godless worldly persecuting power, (so, in a general way, says Dr. Vaughan, it may here suffice to explain the Beast from the abyss,) would themselves severally and individually rise to heaven; while, on earth, their cause also would never fail to have its revival.¶ 3. Then, as to the parenthetic visions in Apoc. xii. xiii., * Ib. pp. 283, 284. † See ib. pp. 256, 258, 265, 281286, generally, on this head. Ib. pp. 293, 334. The little book, exhibited open to St. John by the angel, Dr. Vaughan explains to be one containing all that remained of the Apocalyptic prophecies. pp. 295, 299. This in con. trast with the seven-sealed larger book of the divine counsels, which was only opened to the inhabitants of heaven. § At p. 315 Dr. Vaughan speaks of the covered shrine of the Holy Place and Most Holy, as alone to be measured; forgetting that the altar-court is, with its altar of burnt-offering, expressly included in the commanded measurement. It is the outer court only, answering to the court of the Gentiles in the old temple, which was to be excluded. Vol. i. p. 316. Also ii. 10; where Dr. Vaughan strangely identifies the two witnesses' three-and-a-half days of apparent death with the three-and-ahalf years of their whole assigned time of prophesying in sackcloth. Vol. i. pp. 321, 324. |