authority which is equally the case with every type that is established as a type in the New Testament. In connexion with this inquiry the writer makes the most just observations on regeneration, as attached to baptism; and by learning and sound argument vindicates the true doctrine of the Church; and neither his learning nor his arguments can be shaken by those to whom the comparatively novel and contrary opinion is a delight. No man has in a greater degree directed the current of biblical criticism, and no one has been more unjustly assailed by men in every way disqualified to compete with him, than the Bishop of Peterborough; and he has lived to an age when the prognostics about the effects of the Bible Society, in which he indulged at the commencement of these Lectures, have been fully and lamentably fulfilled.

The author rightly denominates the prophecies which relate to the Messiah, more important than all other prophecies put together: they affect the very truth of our religion, and include the consideration of almost every thing that relates to prophecy in general. They include the question of primary and secondary senses of prophecy, and that which passes under the name of accommodation. Before the composition of the New Testament our Saviour referred to the Old, in evidence of his rightful claims (John v. 30; Luke xviii. 31; xxiv. 25, 44); and the same appeals that he made were made by his Apostles (John i. 45; Acts iii. 18; x. 43; 1 Peter i. 10); but those made by St. Paul are the most numerous. From these and others it is manifest, that the predictions in the writings of the Hebrew prophets were esteemed as the principal argument for the divine mission of Christ. Our Saviour also appealed to his miracles: these evincing a power of suspending or counteracting the laws of nature,—which the Author of nature alone could have had, alone could have exerted,―formed a legitimate proof that He was armed with divine authority; and, considered in connexion with the antecedent testimony of prophecy, fully substantiated his inherent and inalienable divinity, and by the strongest of all demonstrations exhibited him as a teacher sent from God, as Immanuel or God manifest in the flesh.

Prophecy formed the link between the Mosaic and Christian covenants. The prophetic books are the Scriptures which fully testified of Christ; for the Levitical types only shadowed him, until the full light of the Gospel revealed the substance. But these mentioned him as God, as the Son of Man, disclosed his vicarious offices, and pre-announced characteristics of him, which nothing but wilful bigotry or utter infidelity could have denied at his advent. Verily, to use the words of the Evangelist, the Jews hid their light under a bushel.

For when we reflect, that if we be enjoined to search the old Scriptures respecting Christ, there must be something respecting.

Christ to be found in them, that the apostles have declared him to be the person of whom the prophets wrote, to whom they gave witness, we must be convinced, that in the exact proportion that Christ's divine claims are established, so must be established the authenticity and inspiration of prophecy. These strict, direct, and literal predictions of Christ, his divine nature, his human life, and vicarious act, are infinitely beyond that which schoolmen call accommodation; they are as descriptive as they are predictive, and bear in them the impress of having been derived from that Spirit which cometh from the Father of lights." Well, therefore, observes the Bishop (qui vir et quantus!), that it must have been something beyond the remote, secondary, or mystical sense of prophecy, by which the preaching of Christ was made manifest. If we involve prophecy in this mystical uncertainty, we deprive it of the character which St. Peter, who could judge better of it than ourselves, gave it, when he called it the sure word of prophecy. Here the secondary sense attributed to prophecy is qualified, not denied; as we shall shortly show.

The Bishop's critical rules for the interpretation of prophecy are very accurate. Though the words of a Hebrew prophet may be applicable to a certain event, yet if they were not originally written with reference to it, they cannot be esteemed prophetic of it. No accommodation of the Old Testament from accidental similitude can, therefore, be ranked among those passages which testified of Christ. Nor can we so apply the secondary senses of prophecy, unless those secondary senses have been stamped with a prophetic character by Christ or his apostles.

Bishop Marsh's illustration of the prophecies selected by Bishop Chandler is very satisfactory. Without entering into them, it is sufficient to state, that the full and literal accomplishment of ancient prophecy in our Saviour has been most perspicuously proved. From the hypothesis of those defenders of the secondary sense of prophecy, who contend that the remote meaning was unknown to the prophets themselves, the writer well argues, that if the prophet who wrote the words did not perceive the sense, the same divine authority which communicated the prophecy must interpose to explain it. For it is contrary to sound sense, that we should be expected to discover a meaning which the prophet himself was unable to find out. Those, who affect to make such a discovery, proceed unconsciously from a petitio principii. When indeed we advance beyond the primary to a secondary sense, we exceed the natural guidance of the words; and in seeking for a remote or mystical signification, which they do not convey, undertake that which we, of ourselves, have not the means of performing. It cannot be urged, that because every allegory has two senses, the literal and the allegorical, and because the knowledge of the first leads us to the knowledge of the second; so, if

a prophecy has a double sense, we may argue from the one to the other, as it is commonly pretended, because the notion is founded on a supposed analogy between the double sense of allegory and the double sense of prophecy; whereas the two things, instead of being analogous, are totally dissimilar. In prophecy of this description, the same words which according to one interpretation are applied to one event, are, according to another, applied to a different one; but in an allegory, our first care is the interpretation of words, and our next of things; and the moral is learned by an application of the things signified by those words, to others which resemble them, and which the former were intended to suggest. In the interpretation of prophecy we are concerned with historic, in that of allegory, with moral truth; but the narrative which conveys allegory is commonly fictitious, whereas in prophecy we are occupied with real events. In allegory there is, and must be, a clue which leads us from the one sense to the other; in prophecy, there is none between the primary and the secondary, the latter being neither suggested by the words nor by the things intended by the words; but being so hidden, so remote from the literal sense, as to have occasioned the belief that it was unknown to the prophet himself. But we have made sufficient remarks on this system, which derived its strength from the plausible, but untenable, propositions of the author of the Divine Legation of Moses; the deep biblical critic will therefore hesitate to admit the secondary sense of any prophecy, unless that secondary sense is established by divine authority. Independently of this practice, we have ample prophecies in their literal acceptation, to avouch the divine authority of Christ and his apostles.*

With respect to this department of sacred criticism, Dr. Hengstenberg has continually erred; throughout his Commentary he has been a needlessly sedulous seeker of secondary senses. He has often wandered from his point into all the arid tracts of dogmatism, and mixed up with the illustrations of passages controversial disputations on the opposite opinions of some of his countrymen. These, according to our ideas, should rather have formed appendices to the several books. There are also many instances, in which we cannot assent to his Hebrew criticisms; in others, like too many biblical scholars, he has laid too great a stress on the vowel-points-a stress which can only be sanctioned when it shall have been proved that they existed, or existed in their present state and with their present influence on the grammar, at the time when the books were written. But, as

* In evidence of the very fanciful manner in which the Fathers interpreted the Scriptures (to which we have before alluded), the readers are referred to the Bishop's Eleventh Lecture on the Interpretation of the Bible.

such a proof is impossible, their critical rank must be only of a secondary order.

We must not, however, close this article without noticing the Doctor's remarks on the constitution of prophecy, and the evidence of the application of certain prophetic passages to Christ. In the disputes with the Montanists, the ecclesiastical writers in general maintained, that the scriptural prophets had a perfect consciousness, whilst they were delivering their oracles; but that the false prophets of the Gentiles were always in an ecstasis. In fact, according to Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, Miltiades wrote a book, περὶ τοῦ μὴ δεῖν προφήτην ἐν ἐκστάσει λαλεῖν. Epiphanius likewise affirmed, that this state of consciousness was the surest criterion of a true prophet.* But the Doctor disputes the allegation; and infers from 1 Sam. x. 5, and 2 Kings iii. 15, exactly the contrary fact, and supports his inference by various passages, in which the Spirit of God is stated to have come powerfully upon the prophets. Among those he ranks Jer. xx. 7, as the most unanswerable. Nor does he fail to appeal to 2 Pet. i. 21, ὑπὸ Πνεύματος ἁγίου φερομένοι ἐλάλησαν ἅγιοι Θεοῦ ἄνθρωποι, which Knapp has compared to the classical expressions, kaTÉXEσ0αι EK Oεov-Deum pati, &c. To the extent that may be fairly deduced from the passages quoted, Hengstenberg is right; but he immediately begins to involve himself in mysticism, to affix a certain degree of credit to the reverie of Philo on the subject, to subscribe to Tertullian's distinction between ecstasis and furor, to quote Lucan and Lycophron's Cassandra, and become himself as mysterious as the topic which he discusses.

From the partial description of the Messiah in certain places, and the admixture of national circumstances with other pro

Jerome, in his preface to Isaiah, writes, "Neque vero, ut Montanus cum insanis fœminis somniat, prophetæ in ecstaci loquuti sunt, ut nescirent quid loquerentur, et cum alios erudirent, ipsi ignorarent quid dicerent." So in his preface to Nahum : "Non loquitur propheta èv EKOTáσε, ut Montanus et Priscilla Maximillaque delirant, sed quod prophetat liber, intelligentis est quod loquitur." Likewise in that to Habakkuk; “ Prophetæ visio est, et adversum Montani dogma perversum intelligit, quod videt, nec ut amens loquitur, nec in morem insanientium fœminarum, dat sine mente sonum."

But Chrysostom, in his Twenty-ninth Homily on the Epistle to the Corinthians, exhibits most clearly the distinction: Touro yàp μávtews ἴδιον, τὸ ἐξεστηκέναι, τὸ ἀνάγκην ὑπομένειν, τὸ ὠθεῖσθαι, τὸ ἕλκεσθαι, τὸ σύρεσθαι, ὥσπερ μαινόμενον. Ὁ δὲ προφήτης οὐχ οὕτως, ἀλλὰ μετὰ διανοίας νηφούσης καὶ σωφρονούσης καταστάσεως, καὶ εἰδὼς ἃ φθέγγεται, φησὶν ἅπαντα· ὥστε καὶ πρὸ τῆς ἐκβάσεως κἀντεῦθεν γνώριζε τὸν μάντιν καὶ τὸν προφήτην.

+ Cf. Gen. xv. 12. Numb. xxiv. 4. Ezek. i. 28. Dan. viii. 27; x. 8-10. Apoc. i. 17, &c. &c.

phecies respecting him, Hengstenberg seeks to explain k μέρους γὰρ γινώσκομεν, καὶ ἐκ μέρους προφητεύομεν, in 1 Cor. xiii. 9, than which no explanation can be more unduly applied. The manner in which he, notwithstanding, vindicates the prophetic oracles, is of a much higher grade than that in which he endeavours to show us how the prophets received the divine communications. He rightly illustrates their use of the aorist or the preterite, by the supposition that the revelations made to them were as clearly exhibited, as if they saw the occurrences; from whence, to use Iken's words, "Non potuerunt non præsenti aut preteriti tempore uti, cum naturalis dicendi ordo id flagitaret:"-and this observation is useful, as the mode in which these tenses are employed in the Hellenistic dialect has not been properly elucidated by the grammarians of the language of the New Testament. On a similar principle he vindicates the Prophets from the charges which have been brought against them on the score of chronology. After a long but valuable discussion, which we cannot here adduce, he proves, that although different materials often appear to be admixed in one and the same prophecy, there are generally criteria which enable us to separate the parts thus in Isa. viii. ix. the times before the Messiah and those belonging to the Messiah, are distinguished at the first verse of the ninth chapter; and in Daniel, the period that should elapse from the termination of the exile to the Messiah is clearly defined. This canon Dr. Hengstenberg likewise extends to the opposition between πάντα ταῦτα and τῆς ἡμέρας ἐκείνης, in Matt. xxiv. 34-36. Thus may we separate the liberation which Isaiah foretold, by means of Cyrus, from that which he foresaw, by means of Christ. But the prophets often fixed on some circumstance, from which they contemplated the future; such as the Babylonian captivity; and hence arose that admixture, which commentators have not always analyzed with a sufficient care. In the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the sufferings of Christ were the point from whence the prophet extended his contemplations: thus, as these were the causes of his glorification, to which Isaiah directed his vision, these sufferings, according to the rule which has been illustrated, are described in the preterite, but his glorification in the future. In this plan there were, doubtless, a design and an advantage; for the fulfilment of the one part would naturally be a voucher for the fulfilment of the other: so where the redemption by the Messiah was admixed with predictions of the deliverance from Babylon, the real accomplishment of the latter deliverance must have been to many of the returned Jews an appaßèv, or pledge, that the former would be equally verified; and we perceive, that in the few prophetic works which we have after the Captivity, there is a great distinctness on the subject. The same observation is valid respecting Christ's prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem- the fulfilment of