others to deny, they would have aroused the indignation of the whole believing people of England against them, that they denied such truths and remained ministers of the Church of England.

Others, who wrote in defence of the faith, engaged in larger subjects; I took, for my province, one more confined but definite issue. I selected the book of Daniel, because unbelieving critics considered their attacks upon it to be one of their greatest triumphs. The exposure of the weakness of some ill-alleged point of evidence has often thrown suspicion on a whole faith. The exposure of the weakness of criticism, where it thought itself most triumphant, would, I hoped, shake the confidence of the young in their wouldbe misleaders. True! Disbelief of Daniel had become an axiom in the unbelieving critical school. Only, they mistook the result of unbelief for the victory of criticism. They overlooked the historical fact that the disbelief had been antecedent to the criticism. Disbelief had been the parent, not the offspring of their criticism; their starting-point, not the winningpost of their course.

In other books of Holy Scripture, disbelief could Jesus and His Gospel rests. He did not mention doctrine, except to say that the command to destroy the Canaanites and the eternity of future punishment are "questioned," (he does not say "denied,") by "natural conscience." Continued study of Professor Jowett's Essay makes one think sadly, "What does there remain of Christianity, which the writer can believe?"

b "Auberlen indeed defends [Daniel] but says, 'Die Unächtheit Daniel's ist in der modernen Theologie zum Axiom geworden.'" Dr. Williams in Essays, p. 76. "It is one of the highest triumphs and most saving facts of the more recent criticism, to have proved that the book of Daniel belongs to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes." A well known writer, now dead.

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and did sever what, if true, (as it is,) was necessarily Divine, from what admitted of being represented as human. Rejecting what, if they accepted, they must own to be from God, they assigned to man the humanised residuum. They laid down, to their own satisfaction, that the miracles, related in any historical book of Holy Scripture, were magnified representations of the real truth, or that insulated prophecies were inserted after the event; or that a long-lived e. g. Davidson, Introd. "The narratives of the Pentateuch are usually trustworthy, though partly mythical and legendary. The miracles recorded were the exaggerations of a later age." i. 131. "It is only neccessary to examine the history as it lies before us, to find in it a mythological, traditional, and exaggerated element, forbidding the literal acceptation of the whole.-The ten miraculous plagues, which spared the Israelites, while they fell upon the Egyptians the crowd of extraordinary interpositions of Jehovah in behalf of the people as they journeyed through the wilderness, shew the influence of later traditions on the narrative, in dressing it out with fabulous traits. The laws of nature are unchangeable. God does not directly and suddenly interfere with them on behalf of his creatures; neither does he so palpably or constantly intermeddle with men's little concerns.' " Ib. 103. "The Almighty does not violently interfere with the eternal laws of nature which he established at first." Ib. 221. "In regard to the miraculous element connected with these plagues, it appears that the national traditions account for all that appears as miraculous. We resolve what is miraculous in the plagues into a traditional element," &c. Ib. 225. "The narrative of the passage of the Red Sea must not be viewed as literal history. Later traditions exaggerated the event, surrounding it with wonder, &c." Ib. p. 430. "The traditional and mythical (in the passage of the Jordan) are perceptible. A miracle is made out of a natural event." add p. 470, 1. ii. 41, 2. 450. iii. 32. 279, 80. 347.

a "It [Jacob's prophecy] has the form of a prediction; but it is a vaticinium post eventum." (Dav. i. 198.) i. e. a falsehood, professing to be "a prophecy," but written "after the event." So i. 338, of Balaam's prophecy; i. 428, of the prophecy of the judg

prophet lived to recast his prophecies, and gave to his prophecies of nearer events a definiteness which, (they stated as confidently as if they had lived and had heard them,) they had not when he uttered them, or, if the events prophesied were too remote to be so accounted for, that the prediction must have been given close upon the events, when human sagacity could, (they held,) foresee them, and then, without prejudice to their unbelief, they could afford to admire what they claimed to be man's own. The old prophets, (they tacitly assumed,) were inferior to themselves; still, for their own times, they were, "samid frailty and national contractedness," above their age.

The book of Daniel admitted of no such compromises. Its historical portions are no history; for the people, as such, had, in the period of their Captivity, no history. The period was like one of those in the book of Judges, whether of oppression or of rest, in which their whole condition exemplified God's Providence and dealings with them, and no marked change occurred. Jeremiah had bidden them, in God's name, live as peaceable denizens in the land of their captivity. "Build ye houses, and dwell; and plant gardens and eat the fruit of them; take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons ment on the rebuilder of Jericho; ii. 452, of predictions in the Judges; ii. 450, of others in Samuel; iii. 32, of those of Isaiah as to Sennacherib and Hezekiah; iii. 99, 100, as to some of Jeremiah. e Davids. iii. 146, 7. and 150, of Ezekiel.

f Dav. i. 383, of the predictions in Deuteronomy; iii. 15, of Is. xxi; iii. 19, of Is. xxiii; iii. 98, of Jeremiah's prophecy of the 70 years' captivity of Judah.

8 Dav. ii. 456. Comp. Dr. Stanley, as quoted below, p. 257. Jer. xxix. 5-7.

and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof ye shall have peace." Their habits in their subsequent dispersions make it, in itself, probable, that they followed the advice. The Psalms of the captivity describe them as waiting for God. But a dissolved people, individuals scattered amid an overwhelming population, with no unity save that of their faith, has no history, unless it rebel. For history is of changes. These had no power to change. The history then in Daniel relates not to his people; nor was it Daniel's office to record the history of his own administration in the position to which, for the protection of his people, he had been raised. The book of Daniel then has nothing of the nature of secular history; it records only certain events whereby God acted upon the Heathen Monarchs in whose keeping His people, the depositories of His revelation to man, for the time were. And these events were mostly supernatural. The prophecies also are one connected whole; they admit of no dislocation; they speak definitely of a long period far beyond Daniel's time. To the nearer future there was nothing to add. The restoration from the captivity, the date of that restoration, the name of the conqueror who was to grant it, had been foretold already. In this respect, there was nothing left but to await the flowing-by of the seventy years. The temporal prophecies in Daniel join on with those of Isaiah and Jeremiah.

i Davidson

66 says, Deliverance from Babylon is not predicted.

The former prophets had predicted the destruction of Babylon by the Medes and Persians, and the restoration of Israel. The visions in Daniel shew the succession of world-empires, beginning with the description of the Babylonian world-empire and its displacement by the Medo-Persian. Thenceforward, there is no break. They are outlines, shaded here and there, and at times more strongly, which embrace the whole space from Nebuchadnezzar to (as every one admits) Antiochus Epiphanes. Many a cleft is purposely left out of the picture; as the years of Nebuchadnezzar's worthless successors; or the century and a half of the miserable kings of Persia from the gathering of the storm against Greece by Xerxes until it rolled back under Alexander; or lesser intervals in the yet later period. Whatever details are given, the prophecies are neither chronology nor history. But since there is prophecy from the time of the Babylonian empire, there is no date between that empire and the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, where men could place the writer. For, by placing him at any intervening point, That event, which might be considered of greatest importance in the eye of a Hebrew seer living in Babylon whither he had been carried captive, is unnoticed." (iii. 174.) The prophets, who foretold the judgment of the Captivity, were also themselves consoled by the prediction of the close of that judgment, (e. g. Ezek. xi. 13-20.) or God foretold by them that close, as He ever, in this life, mitigates judgment by hope. Davidson assumes the spuriousness of Jeremiah's prophecy of the restoration after the 70 years, the later date of prophecies of Isaiah which predict the destruction of Babylon and the restoration of Judah from it, and then, since, on those and the like assumptions, that deliverance would not have been prophesied before, and would have been predicted then, he argues that Daniel too, had he lived then, must also have prophesied those same events, had he prophesied at all.