APPENDIX. 9. .10. 11. 12. 1 [A.]* PROPHECY-Dan. vii. 8-26. (THE VISION.) 8 The he-goat waxed very great: and when he was strong, the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven. And out of one of them came forth 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. Yea, he magnified himself even to the Prince of the host, and by him was the daily sacrifice taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. And a host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression; and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it 13. practised and prospered. Then I heard one saint speaking, and another saint said unto that certain saint which spake, How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the 14. host to be trodden under foot? And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. 23. (THE INTERPRETATION.) 21. And the rough goat is the king (kingdom) of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king (kingdom). 22. Now that being broken, whereas four stood up for it, four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not in his power. And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance, and understanding (Heb. making to understand, teaching) dark sentences, shall stand up. And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power: and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people. And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he 24. 25. * For the materials of this chapter, and occasionally for some portion of the language, the compiler acknowledges himself indebted principally to Faber's Sacred Calendar of Prophecy, Foster's Mahometanism Unveiled, and Fry's Second Advent of Christ. He has moreover given a minute and critical attention to these prophecies in the original languages. 26. shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes; but he shall be broken without hand. And the vision of the evening and the morning which was told is true; wherefore shut thou up the vision; for it shall be for many days. Dan. vii. 8-26. THE prophecy of Daniel contains a prospective view of the providential history of the world, including the four great empires of antiquity, together with the powers which should succeed them to the end of time, and consummation of all things. It is reasonable therefore to expect, that a system of predictions thus large upon the history of the world, would not omit a revolution of such magnitude and prominence as that occasioned by Mohammed and Mohammedanism. No event, moreover, has had a more direct and powerful bearing upon the state of the Church than the establishment of this vast imposture; and as the preceding chapter contains a full and exact portraiture of the Papal tyranny which was to arise and prevail in the western portion of Christendom, so the present is very generally admitted to contain a prediction of that great apostacy which was destined to grow up and overwhelm the Church in the East. The reasons of this opinion we now proceed to state. The theatre of this prophecy is the Macedonian empire, founded by Alexander; from one of the four dismembered kingdoms of which the little horn of the vision was to spring up. In the vision, the prophet saw the first great horn of the he-goat, or the kingdom of Alexander," broken;" indicating that that kingdom was no longer to have a place as a kingdom in the eye of prophecy. The dominions of Alexander at his death were divided between four of his generals: Macedon and Greece in the west were assigned to Cassander; Thrace and Bithynia in the north to Lysimachus; Egypt in the south to Ptolemy; and Syria with the eastern provinces to Seleucus. Ver. 9. And out of one of them came forth a little horn.-A "horn," in the symbolical language of prophecy, represents a civil or ecclesiastical kingdom. The little horn here mentioned was to come forth out of one of the four notable horns or members of the subdivided kingdom of Alexander. The question has been much agitated whether Alexander seized and retained any portion of the Arabian peninsula: the fact of his having done so may be seen in any map of the Macedonian empire. "The empire of Alexander," observes M. Rollin, 66 was distributed into four kingdoms; of which Ptolemy had Egypt, Libya, Arabia, Coelosyria, and Palestine." The district occupied was indeed no more than an outskirt, but that outskirt comprised part of the province of Hejaz; that is to say, part of that very district which gave birth to Mohammed and his religion.-As the horn in the vision was a little one, so Mohammedanism in its first rise perfectly corresponded with the symbol. It originated with an obscure inhabitant of a desert corner of Asia, whose earliest converts were his wife, his servant, his pupil, and his friend; and whose party at the end of three years scarcely numbered a dozen persons. Which waxed exceeding great toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. -Mohammedanism accordingly, in its primitive course of conquest, did presently wax exceedingly great; and that in the very line marked out by the prophecy. Its conquests extended southward over the large peninsula of Arabia, over Egypt, and over a considerable portion of central Africa; eastward, over Persia, Bokhara, and Hindostan; and northward, over Palestine, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Tartary, the countries now forming the Turkish empire. The pleasant land," or, literally, "the beauty," "the ornament," is an appellation bestowed upon the land of Judah, from its being in a peculiar manner the residence of the divine glory, the seat of worship, containing the city of Jerusalem and the temple, which were "a crown of beauty and a diadem of glory" to the nation of Israel. The ori ginal word here employed is found in a parallel sense in Ezek. xx. 6. 15; "a land flowing with milk and Loney, which is the glory of all lands." Jerusalem was captured by the Saracens A. D. 637, after a siege of four months. But Ver. 10. And it waxed great even to the host of Keaven.-The "host of heaven" is but another name for the multitude of stars in the firmament. stars, in the idiom of prophecy, are a standing emclem of ecclesiastical officers. The word "host" accordingly is not only applied to the priests and Levites performing the service of the sanctuary (Num. iv. 3), but to the nation of Israel as a great organized ecclesiastical body, or kingdom of priests. Ex. xii. 41. And when Christ says (Rev. i. 20), "the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches," his meaning undoubtedly is, that these stars are symbols of the spiritual rulers of the churches. The grand scope, therefore, of the present prophecy is, to point out a spiritual desolation, achieved by a hostile power suddenly attaining great strength, and forcibly thrusting itself into the body of true worshippers, with a view to their discomfiture and dispersion. And it cast down some of the host, and (i.e. even) of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them.-As in the figurative language of prophecy the stars denote the spiritual pastors of God's church, so the violent dejection of such stars from heaven to earth signifies a compulsory apostatizing from their religion. Mohammedanism strikingly fulfilled this prophecy from the date of its first promulgation, when it stood up against the allegorical host, or the degenerate pastors of the Christian Church. Such of them as lay within the territories of the Greek empire were especially given into the hand of this persecuting superstition; but by its inroads into Africa, and Spain, |