grades and defiles the people universally, nothing it can attempt. can save it. All the policy of imperial Rome; all the manoeuvring and compromises of the priests, the scribes, and the Sadducees; all the coalitions into which the people of Jerusalem entered, were utterly unable to avert their ruin; they rather contributed to hasten its sure and certain doom, just because sin was there. So, to apply it to other nations; the arms and squadrons of Xerxes, the legions of Cæsar, the armies of Napoleon, did not save them; and the wooden walls of England will not guard us, or any other nation, from utter ruin, if we do not keep ourselves in the faith, the fear, and the hope of the gospel. When I speak of national religion, I do not mean some transcendental view of it: one way for us to have national religion for all practical purposes is for each man to be a Christian. It is not by struggling to carry some measure in the House of Commons, however valuable it may be, that we shall make our nation Christian; it is by each man being so. One brick laid upon the ground does more to complete a building than a thousand castles built in the air. One family becoming truly and decidedly Christian is a greater contribution to the Christianity of our land than the most brilliant act of Parliament: I do not undervalue the latter; yet the days for getting such acts are ceasing, whereas the days for being Christians are multiplying. Never were men more called upon than in the present day to "be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord."

We learn from all these predictions-to leave for a moment the immediate topic under review, and to revert to all we have been contemplating in the nine chapters of Daniel, over which I have so rapidly passed-what man is without true religion. The magi of Chaldea showed themselves to be but fools; Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Belshazzar, the royal despots of the earth-how poor are they, how lustreless, beside the quiet grandeur of the prophet Daniel, and the three Hebrew youths that counted not their lives dear for Christ's sake! The gospel elevates the humblest and ennobles the highest; to the grandeur of the man it adds all the glory of the saint, and makes individuals and nations beautiful in that real and only beauty which the king's

daughter alone has the beauty of holiness, and righteousness, and truth.

We learn, too, how God rules and acts in all the affairs of men. The great image was the shadow of what all history is: a nation's dignity was merely a higher or lower place assigned it in the great image-being clay, or iron, or silver, or gold, as God might appoint. The same God that ruled in Babylon is the God that rules now. "God is," not God was; or, rather, "Jehovah is his name; God, who was, and is, and is to come."

How important must the Saviour have been felt to be by Daniel; and how important was he known to be of God, seeing that all prophecy is literally the testimony of Jesus! Daniel cannot close a great cycle in his prophecy without closing it with the exhibition of the Prince the Messiah; Isaiah's harp never rises to its noblest strains except when he tunes it to the Name, and sweeps it in the prospect of, a coming Messiah; Malachi closes the Old Testament prophecy, as Daniel closes his predictions, by giving the glad hope that the Messiah, the Sun of righteousness, was about to rise with healing under his wings. Christ is the key-note of all the songs of David, the burden of all prophecy, the alpha and the omega of the whole Bible.

We gather another lesson also-that the same religion we have, Daniel had he was as much a Christian as Martin Luther, Cecil, Newton, Whitefield, or any other great and distinguished Christian or minister of Christ in modern times. There never was sanctioned by God but one true religion. There are many current religions; there is and has been but one that bears the superscription and the stamp of God. There is the religion of man, the religion of the priest; but there is but one that is true-that is, the religion of God. This Christianity is as truly, if not as clearly, in the Old Testament as in the New. Isaiah was as truly an evangelist as John; so much so, that he has been called the evangelical prophet, although that phrase is objectionable, for Jeremiah, Malachi, and Daniel were just as evangelical as Isaiah. They all proclaimed one Saviour; they all taught one sacrifice; they all built up our hopes of glory upon one great foundation, Christ Jesus. The overshadowing angels on the mercy-seat, like the Old and New Testaments, while the tips of their wings

touched each other, both looked down upon one propitiatory or mercy-seat Like the twin lips of an oracle, the old covenant and the new equally utter and announce Christ and him crucified as the great substance of the hopes of men.

And what dignity, let me add, in the next place, does this give to God's word; and what a lowly, though an important place does prophecy impart to man's history! There is something wonderfully striking in this-that the calendars of nations are the commentaries on the prophecies of God's word. Whenever the historian is wanted, Josephus steps forth from his country, and Gibbon emerges from the shadow of the Alps where he sojourned, Alison comes from the north, Hume leaves infidelity, and each sits down to write facts; Christians read the facts; and lo! they are the rebounds of prophecy, the echoes of God's ancient word; and, consciously or unconsciously, the skeptic Hume, and atheistic Gibbon, the accomplished and Christian Alison, the Jew Josephus, attest in their histories that God's word is true, and that "holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." So, in the same manner, every thing that is now discovered, every thing that daily occurs, serves more and more to show the truth of God's word. Daniel writes, two thousand years ago, that toward the end of our dispensation "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased;" and to prove Daniel's prediction, the railway appears, and with it the mysterious whispering wire, that knits together isles and continents, so that the mother in London will yet convey messages in a few minutes to her son at Calcutta, and receive a message in reply; all spring up when the moment comes, to testify how truly the ancient prophet spake, when he said, "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."

In the next place, how humbling to great men are the truths embodied in the word of God! Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon, all the great generals and mighty captains that have successively stepped upon the stage to win splendour for their names, and glory for the armies of their country, to vindicate injured rights, to deliver oppressed nations; came forward, as they meant, to do their own behests, and lo! they are found to have been doing God's word, filling up the great outline of God's predicted and

pre-written Providential government; and so Hannibal, Cæsar, Alexander, and Napoleon were but the pens that the ready writer used-but the chisels in the hand of the Great Statuary, as he carved out in history what he had so clearly predicted in ancient prophecy. When we take our stand on prophetic ground, what composure, what quiet does it give us to see this, and be satisfied (and I am as satisfied of it as I am of my own existence) that all things are going right, that every thing is evolving its appropriate issue, that all occurrences are stepping in to fulfil God's sure word, and to accomplish God's grand purposes! Do not be alarmed, my dear brother, when a leaf shakes with the wind, as if the church of Christ were about to perish. Do not suppose, when nations withdraw their endowments, and imperial crowns their shields, from the Christian church-when popery enters here, and infidelity spreads there, and divisions and exasperation abound elsewhere, that the church of Christ is about to fall. It remains it gathers strength from the wreck, and grandeur from surrounding ruin. The fracture of the earthen vessel is only the letting forth of the inner perfume; and the noise and quarrels and debates that we hear are not the overturning of the glorious fabric; they are only the settling of its sure and its everlasting foundation. Let us then acquaint ourselves with God, and with God especially as he is revealed in his word, and be at peace.

In conclusion, let me ask, have you my hearer, my reader, an interest in Messiah? Do you stand in him as the stand-point from which you can review all the movements of the nations of the earth? Is it well, first, with thine own soul? and if it be well there, by its being washed in that Saviour's blood, arrayed in his righteousness, trusting in his name; then be still, and know that he is God; rejoice in the hope of glory, for He in whom you trust has engraven you on the palms of his hands, and holds you in imperishable remembrance.

APPENDIX*

DANIEL.

"THE predictions of things to come relate to the state of the church in all ages; and among the old prophets, Daniel is most distinct in order of time, and easiest to be understood; and, therefore, in those things which relate to the last times, he must be made the key to the rest."-Sir Isaac Newton's Observations on Daniel.

"The Jews do not reckon him (Daniel) to be a prophet, and therefore place his prophecies only among the Hagiographa; and they serve the Psalms of David after the same rate. The reason which they give for it in respect of both is, that they lived not the prophetic manner of life, but the courtly; David, in his own palace, as king of Israel, and Daniel in the palace of the king of Babylon, as one of his chief counsellors and ministers in the government of that empire. And in respect of Daniel they further add, that, although he had divine revelations delivered unto him, yet it was not in the prophetic way, but by dreams and visions of the night, which they reckon to be the most imperfect manner of revelation, and below the prophetic."-Prideaux's Connection. Anno 534.

"Never were any prophecies delivered more clearly, or fulfilled more exactly, than all these prophecies of Daniel were. Porphyry, who was a great enemy of the Holy Scriptures, as well of the Old Testament as of the New, acknowledged this. And therefore he contends that they were historical narratives, written after the facts were done, and not prophetical predictions, foretelling them to come. This Porphyry was a learned heathen, born at Tyre, in the year of Christ 233, and there called Malchus; which name, on his going among the Greeks, he changed into that of Porphyry, that signifying

See at the end of Rev. Dr. Nolan's Warburton Lectures, and Rev. P. Miles' Lectures, to both of which I am indebted for long and useful notes.