Prophecy,

BY

REV. ALEXANDER T. M'GILL, D.D.

PROFESSOR IN THE WESTERN THEOLOC CAL

SEMINARY, ALLEGHANY, PA.

I.

Ir will not be denied, that sacred prophecy was extant, with its text completely finished, four hundred years ago; when the Bible was first printed, with movable metallic types, by Guttemberg of Mentz. The last four hundred years, however, have been the most impenetrable of all eras, to the exercise of human foresight; teeming with more numerous, involved, and utter contingencies, than pervade the whole duration of ages before. The passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope; the discovery of a western hemisphere; the great reformation in Europe; the revolutions in England, America, and France; not to speak of magical changes, by means of science, invention, and art ;-all these have made the history of man a maze of transformation, compared with which the former times were vista, obstructed by this labyrinth alone.

Surely, it can be no human foresight, which could delineate, in the lapse of such a future, lands devoted to the exception of a curse; and say, that this and that particular country, or people, would be palsied by the side of universal progress—not affected materially, nor affected at all, by the extreme vicissitudes and overwhelming emergencies which have come on the whole world besides. Least of all would human sagacity have ventured to affirm, that Egypt, Palestine, and Syria would be as they now are; for until that very time, these countries had been a theatre of perpetual changes, and the most wonderful events that burden the pages of history. Simultaneous with that primitive impression of the Bible, was the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Ottoman Turk: and who, with less than superhuman prescience, could have told, that here the waves of eastern revolution would be stayed, that Turkish turbulence itself would not break the stillness of desolation henceforth, that the day of civil redemption for all civilized nations, the day of liberty and commerce, art and science, would not first dawn, nor dawn at all, on

the regions of rapid and extreme revolution, through all previous

time.

Defer then, if you please, the whole question of date, integrity, and preservation of these oracles; and the faithful corroboration, with which all history details the facts of their fulfilment, until you subject their minute vaticinations to the inquest of living observers, and the verdict of journalizing infidelity itself. We have not only the general condition of ruin, yet to be seen, just as the Scriptures foretold it, over lands which have as delicious a climate, and as fertile a bosom, by nature, as any others on the face of the earth-itself conclusive proof that these prophets "spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost ;" and the general exemption from change, during a period of unparalleled changes, every where else, in lands, which, down till the accession of Mohammed the 2d, had been a battle-field of every power and every principle that struggled for mastery in human affairs - which monotony of ruin is also, of itself, a miracle in forecast; but we have minute accomplishments of the ancient letter, within these last four hundred years-a touch of Providence, here and there, upon the general picture, which might convince a skepticism, low enough to doubt all evidence anterior to the age of printing.

"The highways lie waste, the wayfaring man ceaseth," said Isaiah, in foretelling the judgments of God upon his country: and what traveller does not verify, to its letter, the truth of this prediction, since the Turk established his empire over Palestine? "In the interior of the country," says Volney, "there are neither great roads, nor canals, nor even bridges, over the greatest part of the rivers and torrents, however necessary they may be, in winter. Nobody travels alone, for the insecurity of the roads. The roads among the mountains are extremely bad, and the inhabitants are so far from levelling them, that they endeavor to make them more rugged, in order, as they say, to cure the Turks of their desire to introduce their cavalry."

"Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion under foot," said the prophet Jeremiah, in bewailing the same future desolation. And Volney has detailed the accomplishment, with a minuteness of description which no other testimony has surpassed. After enumerating a long list of pastoral marauders, who infest the whole region of Syria, in which he includes Judea-Curds, and Turkomen, and Bedouin Arabs—he informs us, that the most sedentary inhabitants are compelled to

become wandering bandits, in self-defence, and that, "under a government like that of the Turks, it is safer to lead a wandering life, than to choose a settled habitation."

"I will give it into the hands of strangers, for a prey," said Ezekiel, "and to the wicked of the earth for a spoil. The robber shall enter into it and defile it." "When the Ottomans took Syria from the Mamelukes," says the infidel tourist, "they considered it as the spoil of a vanquished enemy. The government are far from disapproving of a system of robbery and plunder which it finds so profitable."

Even the prophecies of Moses, on the same subject, never had their accomplishment written out, with more striking exactness, than by the pen of this great academician. "The stranger," says Moses, "that cometh from a far land shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which the Lord hath laid on it-Wherefore hath the Lord done this unto this landwhat meaneth the heat of this great anger?" "Good God!" exclaims Volney, who did come from a far land, a stranger in every sense to the scene he surveyed-" whence proceed such melancholy revolutions-for what cause is the fortune of these countries so strikingly changed-why are so many cities destroyed-why is not that ancient population reproduced and perpetuated ?"

These are specimens, taken at random, from only four ancient prophets, relating to a single topic, restricted to the latest era of fulfilment, and confirmed by the unwilling testimony of a skeptical philosopher. Evidence, precisely similar, might be multiplied to any extent of modern travel-in regard to Samaria, Judea, Philistia, Tyre, Ammon, Edom, Egypt-every country whose doom is recorded in prophecies of Scripture. Everywhere, minute and incidental, but not less forcible demonstrations of their truth, have been enacted, since the day when chirography resigned to the press that toil of transcription, which infidelity is fain to cover with suspicion of unfaithfulness.

Now, if enlightened observers, like Volney, are so much astonished at the singular and constant desolation of those Eastern countries, with the whole operation of second causes fully before them, surely, no intelligence of man could have ventured four, (much less thirty) centuries ago, to draw such a picture: not even with the clear anticipation of despotic Islamism, firmly established, during this period: for, in the light of history, all those regions