evidence far exceeding those which the chart of history presented to St. Paul. There is to us a voice from the silent solitudes where Babylon and Tyre once stood in pride and reigned in power; from the modern history of the prostrate Egypt; from the wonderful annals and present condition of the Jewish race; from the desolate state of the Holy Land and adjoining countries; from the rise and present aspect of the mystic Babylon-which the primitive Christians had not the privilege of hearing. The force of this argument is yet to grow more and more until the consummation of all things. A few years hence, in all probability, will exhibit it invested with a brightness and glory, compared with which all present evidence will seem but as morning twilight. At the end of the world will be its full maturity. Prophecy having begun with the history of sin, extends to the completion of its tragedy; and not till the blazing of the great conflagration when "the earth and all that is therein shall be burned up," will its every prediction be fulfilled, or the fulness of glory with which it was designed to show the truth of God in the gospel of his Son, be made to appear.

Now, it is this continual growing of prophetic evidence that makes it so peculiarly valuable. The argument derived from miracles, though it could never have been more conclusive than it is to us, was certainly more impressive to those who saw the miracles, or who lived in the age in which they were wrought. And it is very difficult for most persons to distinguish between the conclusiveness and the im

pressiveness of evidence. Because the lapse of centuries, by removing the Christian miracles far from us, has diminished the sensible effect they would otherwise have had upon our minds, it is very generally supposed that the same cause has enfeebled the evidence on which their genuineness is maintained. This idea, though entirely unfounded, is too natural, to those whose thoughts reach not beneath the surface of such subjects, to be easily removed. But with regard to the evidence arising from prophecy, it cannot exist. Predictions, now in progress of fulfilment, are miracles which centuries can only render more certain and impressive. If there was a peculiar privilege conferred on those who saw in the miracles of Christ, manifest to sense, the wonderful works of God's omnipotence, there is also a similar privilege conferred on us, who, in consequence of the ever-increasing fulfilment of prophecy, may see in the Scriptures, more brilliantly illuminated than ever, the handwriting of God's omniscience.

There is another peculiarity in much of the evidence from prophecy, which renders it peculiarly valuable. It is evidence before our eyes addressed to our senses. By this we do not mean that the evidence arising from the miracles of Christ and his apostles would be any more conclusive, however much it would be increased in its impression on our minds, did we behold the miracles instead of reading of them in well-attested history. We believe, on the contrary, that this description of evidence, as addressed to us, is perfect. But still there is, and per

haps ever will be, a class of persons who, like the disciple Thomas, will require to see before they will believe. Either their indifference or sluggishness prevents them from pursuing a line of argument that would carry them back amidst the testimonies of antiquity, or else their willing scepticism, by ingenious sophistry, would shield them from all the evidence derived from miraculous agency, by the assumption that no testimony can prove a miracle. The utter fallacy of this position, we trust, was satisfactorily shown in a preceding lecture. But here are evidences with which, were it true, it could have no connection. God, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, has provided for all classes of minds, and all descriptions of infidelity, that all unbelievers may be without excuse. The argument from prophecy may be rendered brief enough for the most sluggish, tangible enough for the most obstinate opposers of historical testimony. They have only to read in the Bible the predictions with regard to the once proud cities of Babylon and Tyre, or the once powerful empire of Egypt, and then to open their ears to the accounts which almost every wind conveys, or go and see for themselves the obscure remnants of the ruins of those cities and of that once mighty empire; they have only to read in the books of Moses what, thirty-three hundred years ago, was foretold of the history of the Jewish people, and then to lift up their eyes and behold the present condition and the notorious peculiarities of that wonderful race, to see that the prophecies of the Bible have been plainly and most par

ticularly fulfilled-fulfilled in a manner which no human sagacity could have foreseen, which no human power could have brought to pass, and consequently that the authors of these prophecies were inspired men, and the religion they taught was the word of God. In these and various other examples which might be adduced, of the present and visible fulfilment of prophecy, the miracles of the Jewish and Christian dispensations are in fact continued among us. "Men are sometimes disposed to think that if they could see a miracle wrought in their own sight, they would believe the gospel without delay, and obey it unreservedly. They know not their own hearts. 'If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.' But in the whole range of prophecy now fulfilling before their eyes, they have in fact a series of divine interpositions, not precisely of the nature of miracles, in the sense of brief and instant and visible suspensions of the laws of nature, but evidently so in the sense of supernatural interference in the rise and fall of cities and nations and empires; in the arrangement of times and circumstances; in that wonderful display of infinite foreknowledge and infinite power, apparent in the control of the wills of unnumbered free and accountable agents to a certain result." 99*

In our last lecture we stated that the religion of the Bible is the only one which, on its first introduction, appealed to miracles in evidence of the divine

* Wilson's Lectures.

authority of its teachers. We make a similar remark, with still more evident truth, in regard to prophecy. The sublimity of men professing to be the commissioned and inspired messengers of God, making their appeal to a series of future events for a thousand years as the sure attestation of the divine authority of their embassy; the moral grandeur of that appeal, which, after having deposited in the hands of nations a prediction of minute transactions which the innumerable contingencies of a long retinue of centuries are to bring out, stakes its whole causc upon a perfect fulfilment, thus resting itself singly upon the omniscience and omnipotence of God, and separating to an infinite distance all possibility of human support-this is a dignity to which nothing but the inspiration of the Scriptures can pretend, a noble daring on which nothing else was ever known to venture.

The corruptions of Christianity, as existing in the church of Rome, have attempted to prop up their feeble foundations on the credit of miracles, easily refuted indeed, but widely boasted of. But prophecy, even the effrontery of that "man of sin," "whose coming," saith St. Paul, "is with all deceivableness of unrighteousness," has never pretended to. Although Mohammed did not profess to support his pretensions by miracles, and the Koran expressly concedes that miraculous power was not given him, yet his followers, hundreds of years after his death, related many miracles as having been performed under his hand. But that Mohammed, though styled the prophet of God, ever declared a prophecy, on the ful