demonstration of the power of the Lamb, and the first glorious act of his reappearing; in which case they must either be believing Jews, who have been previously converted unto the Lord, and brought up out of the house of bondage in the East, and embattled to sustain the fury of the all-conquering warfare of the West, and behold his final overthrow;-or they must be some Christian power which hath no part with the Apostasy, but standeth up against it; and hearing of its usurpations, bringeth up bravely and gallantly from the East an army of good and true men, to be employed by the Lord in his overthrow, and for their faithfulness to witness the mighty acts of the Lord and there is only one Christian power in all this world which could fulfil such a destiny, and the subjects of that power have indeed become as kings of the East. But however much my heart might desire to take this honour to my beloved country, I do rather incline to the former idea, that these kings of the East are the Jewish tribes and people, who are now, some scattered, and some lost, among the nations of the East, and whom God, ere that time, shall have gathered into one, and be bringing up a mighty army to serve him in the day of his great battle.

And this I do for several reasons: First, because I find it to be expressly written of that day of the Lord in which "all the nations are gathered against Jerusalem to battle:" not only that the Lord shall go forth and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle, but that "Judah also shall fight at Jerusalem," and possess the wealth of the heathen. (Zech. xiv. 2—14.)– And again, I find that in that same day of dire

destructiveness the Lord hath promised thus: "In that day will I make the governors of Judah like a hearth of fire among the wood, and like a torch of fire in a sheaf; and they shall devour all the people round about, on the right hand and on the left and Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place, even in Jerusalem. The Lord also shall save the tents of Judah first, that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem do not magnify themselves against Judah. In that day shall the Lord defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and he that is feeble among them at that day shall be as David; and the house of David shall be as God, as the angel of the Lord before them." (Zech. xii. 6-8.) From which it is manifest that the tribe of Judah shall be encamped in the tented field, and saved in the battle by the arm of the Lord. Also, because wherever it is written concerning the drying up of the streams of Euphrates, it is always in order to make a way for the dispersed of Israel; as in Isa. xi. 15, 16: "And the Lord shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian see; and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river, and shall smite it in the seven streams, and make men go over dry-shod. And there shall be an highway for the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria; like as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out of the land of Egypt." And in Isa. xxvii. 12, 13: "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall beat off from the channel of the river unto the stream of Egypt; and ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet shall be blown, and they

shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem." When with these I join the continual promises of God to make use of Israel as the instrument of his destructive wrath, in the day of the consumption of her oppressors, as for example, Isa. xli. 14-16: “Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I will help thee, saith the Lord, and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them: and thou shalt rejoice in the Lord, and shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel;" I have little doubt in adhering to my conviction, that these kings of the East are the gathered tribes of Israel, delivered with a high hand and an outstretched arm, "not out of the land of Egypt," which was only the type of this future deliverance, but "out of the north country, and from all countries whether I had driven them, saith the Lord of Hosts." (Jer. xxiii. 8.) And if any one ask me by what right they are called 'kings of the East," I turn his attention to the language in which God speaks to the assembled nations concerning Abraham the father of the nation, Isa. xli. 2, 3. And that this high destinanation is not intended for Abraham alone, but for the whole nation of the Jews, is not only manifest from the whole context which hath ado with the holy nation called and chosen in him, but also from other parts of Scripture, as from that promise in the xixth chapter of Exodus: "Ye shall be

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to me a kingdom of priests;" which priesthood in the times to come is not after Aaron's, but Melchizedec's order; that is, kings and priests, power and holiness in union and combination. But it is still more manifest from the language of the xlv th Psalm, where it is written concerning the king's daughter, the betrothed wife of his son; not only that king's daughters shall be amongst her honourable women, and that there shall stand upon his right hand the queen in gold of Ophir; but also, "instead of thy fathers shall be thy children, whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth;" in reference to which, the high privileges and prerogatives of the Jewish nation, the Apostle Peter saith of us who have been graffed into the same root, that we are a royal priesthood and an holy nation. On all these accounts, I think we cannot refuse to give to them the honour which is their due, and to believe that these kings of the East, for whom the way is prepared by the drying up of the waters of Euphrates, are no other than the seed of the house of Israel, by whom the Lord is to work in a signal manner the overthrow of the Antichristian power, and Apostate nations of the West.

Yet, while I adopt this interpretation, I do not reject the other, but do believe most certainly, that amongst other great ends and purposes for which the Lord hath given to this nation such great and mighty empire in the East, driven on and extended by an unseen and Almighty hand, most marvellously; one end, and perhaps the chief one, is in order that when the Lord shall bring the seed of Israel from the East, and gather them from the west, when he shall say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back; the ships of Chittim

may be ready, and the army of the people that feareth the Lord may be ready to bring his sons from far, and his daughters from the ends of the earth. To which hope I am the more inclined by the study of the history of the British empire in India, which I judge to be the most extraordinary work of Divine Providence upon record, carried on against our will, against our policy, in order that under our feet, under the feet of the only unapostate Protestant Christian nation, he might lay the banners of Mohammed, of Bramah, and of Budhu, and give our armies to trample upon their consecrated capitals, and our soldiers to worship the Lord Jesus Christ in their pagoda-temples. And now, behold, after having used the sword of our mighty and valiant men to overthrow the glory of their idolatries, he is beginning, in a most marvellous manner, to evangelize our captains and our governors in the East, that they may be apt to know, and understand, and ready to take part in the ultimate warfare, and last array of battle, which shall come up from that quarter to meet the confederated apostate powers of the West, and to offer them up an holocaust upon the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem. And whereas, I find that after Joshua had discomfited the ten confederate kings, and the hailstones of the Lord had slain them in the going down of Bethhoron, he did ask of the Lord a strange, yea, a very strange thing, saying, "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon; wherefore, the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people avenged themselves upon their enemies;" the like of which hath never been seen upon the earth, except perhaps in the case of Hezekiah upon the eve of Sennacherib's overthrow, which is also typi