convert their own countrymen in the head-quarters of Judaism, Jerusalem itself (Rev. xi. 8), and shall succeed so far as to arouse the persecuting enmity of some great power called the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit.' This is evidently not an ecclesiastical power, because it makes war with the whore or false church, as well as with the bride or true church (Rev. xvii.). It will be, probably, a powerful temporal government, either actually possessing, or greatly influencing, Jerusalem.

This government, it would seem, will be offended by the successful preaching of the witnesses, and will kill them, leaving their dead bodies unburied and exposed to public view, for the purpose, as will be thought, of convincing the Jews that their testimony was valueless. This plan will defeat itself. After three days and a half, they shall, in the presence of the city, relive, and ascend up into heaven. Then (following the literal meaning of this part of the Apocalypse) shall the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of the Lord; which event it does not seem possible to regard but as the end of the Tribulation, and the restoration of the Jews to be again the Theocratic nation.

Then shall commence the kingdom of Christ with His Saints, who are to rise at that time in order to partake of His throne. Peace and virtue shall prevail over the earth. But only the saints will be perfect during this preliminary season. They only will see Christ; they will be His vicegerents, and rule in His name. The metropolitan church of Jerusalem will be the organ through which the world will be governed, and gradually made happy, much in the same kind of way as good Roman Catholics believe it may become by submitting cordially to the one true church.

It is natural to expect that this reign will meet with much opposition. The dreadful punishments inflicted upon the beast, to be closed by the battle of Armageddon, indicate the gradual extinction of all enemies. But while the powers of the earth will thus in time become subjects of the King of Jerusalem, receiving their authority from Him or from the Saints, His nuncios,-one power remains, called the Whore, or Babylon. It is not conceivable how this can be other than a false church, because the very name of Whore and her connection with the beast are evidently contrasted with the Bride who is awaiting the Lamb. And the name of Babylon also seems easily applicable to the false church, because it was, in Biblical usage, the proper antithesis of Jerusalem, the true church; still more remarkably, she is represented as saying (xviii. 7), 'I sit a queen, and am no widow,

We may observe that this interchange of the names of places is of Rabbinical origin, and that the Talmudical writers do not speak of temporal Rome as Babylon, but as Edom.

and shall see no sorrow,'-a striking expression, which leads us to think of the church of Jerusalem as mourning during the absence of the bridegroom, and especially as being (according to Isaiah, chap. liv.) reproached for her widowhood. If the church of Rome be not this power-utterly opposed to the return of Christ to Jerusalem-and having long aped the privileges of the Bride-it will be some church yet to arise. This church must clearly be destroyed before its rival in Jerusalem, where Christ will be, can become omnipotent. There are very fearful announcements of her burning to be found in the book of Revelation, and men point with awful curiosity to the volcanic, sulphureous nature of the Italian territory, containing materials for the conflagration. We may readily imagine that this catastrophe, however much of sorrow and of surprise it would at first excite in the kings of the earth, and the shipmen and merchants of the Mediterranean, would not only prepare men's minds for the reception of the truth, but would, more particularly, make way for them to bow before the church of Jerusalem, when she who had lived deliciously with the kings of the earth, and had reigned over them, shall have ceased to exist.

Thus far Millennarians are in agreement. But there are some who believe in Christ's actual presence during this period, while others think that He will not come until the close of the millennium. Mr. Faber, who is one of the latter class, asks how it is possible for the great outburst of wickedness to take place at the end of this reign, if Christ in person is actually presiding upon the earth. He forgets that at that season the world will not be perfectly pure in heart, and therefore cannot see His glory. None but the saints will possess that ability. It seems also that this reign of one thousand years is a progressive growth of goodness and truth, and that the end of it, the final victory over Satan and Gog and Magog, denotes the putting down of all rule and authority and power. For this one thousand years, as we have said, is only preliminary; Christ's work is not completed until all the dead rise again to judgment.

This sitting in judgment Mr. Faber believes to be the real second coming; and so undoubtedly it is, if regarded as Christ's manifestation to all men. Then will occur the great burning mentioned by St. Peter, which may be considered as at first issuing from the earth to destroy the Lord's enemies, and so continuing, that it may either entirely change the globe and turn it into the abode fit for such æthereal beings as Mr. Faber supposes we shall be; or, as Mr. Heath thinks, only so far modify it as to make room for the resuscitated of all generations to inhabit, and be placed in good or bad positions according to the result of the judgment.

As we said before, we are not desirous of proffering an opinion of our own upon these subjects; we are only making the reader acquainted with them. But we would, nevertheless, propose a suggestion that may tend to reconcile these conflicting theories. Restorationists are agreed in the reign of happiness here on earth before the end of all things. May there not be an error in those who confine this reign to the thousand years? Would it not be more in accordance with Scripture to look upon that millennium as the commencement of Christ's kingdom, during which his principles have to grow and gather strength unimpeded by Satan's temptations, and fostered by His own communion with the Saints who shall rule mankind, and at last put down for ever all opponents, when the great confederacy of Gog and Magog shall be overthrown and the wicked destroyed?

At the close of this period, the time may have arrived for the full benefit of Christ's work to be applied; men may be entirely recovered from the effect of Adam's fall, and placed in the same circumstances as they would have occupied had our first father remained upright. They may, therefore, continue on this earth, as Mr. Heath imagines, and yet not have attained their final position. They may be subjects of the kingdom of heaven, and yet there may be another heaven reserved for them.

We may certainly concede that this next habitation, this world (xóouos) to come after the present, is not revealed; because the proper object of the Bible is to tell us merely how Adam's fall shall be rectified. But when this shall have been done, we have to consider what would have been the ultimate destiny of man had he retained his purity, and never become subject to death. Whatever it may be thought that destiny would have been, ought also to be deemed still the destiny, or else Christ will not have undone Adam's deed.

If it was intended for man to be removed from this earth to another stage of existence in a still better world, without the sting of death, as Enoch was (and Christ himself when he had overcome the grave), why may we not believe this progression in glory and order still to be ours, when we shall have completed, during the life after our resurrection, our apportioned tasks here?

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The stagnation in our acquired intelligence, such as Mr. Heath supposes, seems contrary to the analogy of the universe: rather loves to think of progress, of advancement up the neverending series of ranks between us and God; and so we may look upon eternity, not as a dreary monotony without care and without interest, but in the way that the gifted author of The Physical Theory of another Life' regards it, a state of growing and learning. And this state, which we may imagine, but may not put into our

creeds (because it does not form a part of the scriptural revelation), in no way interferes with the great doctrine of the Bible, that our actual condition of death now is only an entrance and vestibule to the real mansion Christ will prepare for us on this earth; and that when we shall be thus free from sorrow and sin, and shall be guided by Christ's own human self-in this then lovely worldlovely as well by its moral as its material constitution—we shall be the objects of God's free and unchecked solicitude, so that He will raise us still nearer to Himself than a terrestrial creature can be-even to the dignities of archangels or of cherubim.

W. H. J.

THE HARMONY OF THE GOSPELS.

The Elements of the Gospel Harmony. By B. F. WESTCOTT, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Cambridge. Macmillan and Co. 1851.

The Four Witnesses: being a Harmony of the Gospels on a new Principle. By ISAAC DA COSTA, of Amsterdam. Translated by D. D. SCOTT, Esq. London. Nisbet and Co. 1851.

IT has always been a question of much interest and some difficulty, how the complete inspiration of a writer may be reconciled with the exhibition of personal characteristics in the writing. Many of those who have given their attention to the subject have been too eager to separate the two, to distinguish between the divine message and the human messenger, and imply that the one is transmitted to us tinged as it were with the gratuitous additions of the other. Hence arises the theory of an inspiration varying in kind and degree. The ten commandments, it would be alleged, afford the highest example of a Divine word. They were written on stone by the finger of God himself. The human medium was not permitted to intervene. God authoritatively speaks, and the word is addressed at once to the ear of those who are called upon to obey. An inspiration second only to this would be observed in the prophets who spake by immediate revelation. Prophecies there are which are distinctly observable as not being of any private interpretation, or coming by the will of man. The will of Balaam, for example, ran in a current directly opposed to the words which he uttered; nor could he have given any private interpretation of his message of the star that should come out of Jacob,' or the sceptre that should rise out of Israel.' When the prophet prefaces his revelation with 'Thus saith the Lord,' he is recognized as speaking words of inspiration. The same may be remarked of

visions. The Apocalypse of John is felt to be an inspired production, equally with the chapters in which Ezekiel and Daniel describe the scenes that passed before them in sublime magnificence. But when we descend to the exhortations of prophets and the pastoral letters of evangelists and apostles, it is pretended that a mixed inspiration is discernible. Many of the statements are of the nature of a message from Heaven; others again are no more than comments on the Divine word, or directions for daily conduct, plain rules for church guidance, or perhaps allusions to personal feelings and experience. These writers, we shall be told, were infallibly versed in the matters with which they were commissioned to instruct the church of God; but they were perfectly at liberty to choose their own mode of statement, and could introduce, if they pleased, matters for which divine inspiration would have been superfluous. In the authoritative announcements of divine truth we discern the agency of the Holy Spirit; in the greater or less sublimity of style, in the modes of thought and reasoning, in the characteristics of schools of learning, whether of Athens or Alexandria-in the tenderness of one writer, the ardent zeal of another, the glowing devotion of a third, we recognise Moses or Isaiah, John, Peter, or Paul.

When these reasoners pass from prophecies or epistles to histories, and examine the records of facts and the reports of colloquies or discourses, it would seem to them again as if a yet lower degree of inspiration would suffice. St. Luke, for example, gives in the closing chapters of the Acts a glowing account of St. Paul's last voyage, his shipwreck, his reception at Melita, and his journey to Rome. Localities are described, and allusions to the manners and customs of the times introduced, which give us vivid conceptions of the scenes in which the holy apostle took a part; but it will be suggested that Herodotus has in like manner placed on record descriptions of scenes and localities-that Pliny and Strabo have done the same-and that as each of these writers has his own definite style, so also has St. Luke; that the human features of the writing are so strongly developed, that a high degree of inspiration is scarcely recognized-at least such a one as would absorb individual peculiarities. This perplexity is yet further increased when the Gospels are passed under review. Let it be assumed that inspiration implies divine dictation, in which case the mental state of the writer has no influence on the writing, and the report given, though transcribed by various persons, has only one origin, then our four Gospels will be four coincident records, or will differ from one another as separate paragraphs of the same history; where different facts are related there will be the same style; where the same facts are described there will be the same words. Now our Gospels do not coincide; they do not exhibit the same style; they