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النشر الإلكتروني

SERMON XVIII.

2 PETER i. 20, 21.

Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not at any time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

FROM the digression which closed my last discourse, I now return to my principal subject; and shall immediately proceed to the last general topic I proposed to treat,—namely, to show that this same text of the apostle, which is so sure a guide to the sense of the prophecies, will also furnish a satisfactory answer to the most specious objection which the adversaries of our most holy faith have ever been able to produce against that particular evidence of the truth of our Lord's pretensions, which arises from the supposed completion of the prophecies of the Old Testament in him and in his doctrines.

The objection, indeed, is nothing less than this,-that although the divine inspiration of the Jewish prophets be admitted, their prophecies will afford no support to our Lord's pretensions; for this reason, that in the application of these prophecies to him, and to the propagation of his doctrine, they are drawn by the writers of the New Testament to a sense in which they were never understood by the prophets themselves who delivered them and since the true sense of any writing can be no

other than that which the author intended to convey, and which was understood by him to be contained in the expressions which he thought proper to employ, an application of a prophecy in a sense not intended by the prophet must be a misinterpretation.

The assertion upon which this objection is founded, "that the first preachers of Christianity understood prophecies in one sense which were uttered in another," cannot altogether be denied; and, unless it could be denied in every instance, it is to little purpose to refute it, which might easily be done, in some: for if a single instance should remain, in which the apostles and evangelists should seem to have been guilty of a wilful misinterpretation of prophecy, or of an erroneous application of it, the credit of their doctrine would be greatly shaken, since a single instance of a fraud would fasten on them the imputation of dishonesty, and a single instance of mistake concerning the sense of the ancient Scriptures would invalidate their claim to inspiration. The truth, however, is, that though the fact upon which this objection is founded were as universally alleged,-which is not the case,-yet, were it so, we have in this text of the apostle a double answer to the adversary's argument, which is inconclusive, for two reasons; first, because the assumption is false, that the prophets were the authors of their prophecies, "for the prophecy came not at any time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost;" and, secondly, were the assumption true, still the conclusion might not stand, "because no prophecy of holy writ is its own interpreter." I will endeavour to make you un. derstand the propriety of both these answers, which at first perhaps may not strike you.

First, then, I say we deny the adversary's rash conclusion, though in part we grant his premises, because his assumption is false, that the prophets were the au

thors of their prophecies. The assumption is false, upon the principles upon which the adversary who urges this objection professes to dispute. He professes to dispute upon a concession of the divine inspiration of the Jewish prophets. But, if the prophets were inspired, they were not the authors of their prophecies;-the Holy Spirit of God was the author of every prophecy or of every saying of a prophet, so far at least as it is prophetic; and the views of that Omniscient Spirit who gave the prophecy-not the surmises of the men whose faculties or whose organs that spirit employed-are to be the stand ard of interpretation; and this upon that very principle which the adversary alleges,that the meaning of every book, and of every sentence in the book, is its author's meaning.

To explain this more distinctly, I must observe, that all prophecy is speech, in which the prophet is made to express ideas of the Divine Mind, in uttering his own; and the prophecies of holy writ are divisible into two different kinds, distinguished by two different manners, in which this utterance of the mind of God by the mouth of the prophet was usually effected. The first kind consisted in a scene allegorically descriptive of futurity, which was displayed to the imagination of the prophet, who was left to paint the images excited in his phantasy in such language as his natural talents of poetical description might supply. Of this kind are the prophecies delivered by Jacob and by Moses, not long before their death-the prophecies of Balaam, and many that occur in the writings of those who were prophets by profession. The other kind consists merely in verbal allusions, when the prophet, speaking perhaps of himself or of his own times, or of distant events set clearly in his view, was directed by the inspiring Spirit to the choice of expressions to which later events have been found to correspond with more exactness than those to

which the prophet himself applied them. This kind of prophecy particularly abounds in the Psalms of David, who often speaks of the fortunes of his own life, the difficulties with which he had to struggle, and his providential deliverances, in terms which carry only a figu. rative meaning as applied to David himself, but are literally descriptive of the most remarkable occurrences in the holy life of Jesus. Nor is this kind of prophecy unfrequent in the writings of the other prophets, who were often made to allude to the general redemption, when they would speak in the most explicit terms of deliverances of the Jewish people; and were seldom permitted to deplore present calamities, or to denounce impending judgments, but in expressions literally descriptive of the sufferings of Christ and the afflictions of his church.

In both kinds of prophecy the Spirit of God and the mind of man had each its proper part. In prophecies of

the first kind, the matter was furnished by the Spirit of God, and the language only is the man's. In these prophecies we often find a double obscurity, of which one part is to be imputed to the man, and arises from the concise and broken manner in which he utters his conceptions. Carried away by the strength of the images presented to him, the prophet seems often to forget that his hearers were not apprized of what was passing in his own fancy; he addresses them upon the subject of what he sces, as joint spectators of the interesting scene, in brief allusions, and in animated remarks upon the most striking parts, rather than in a just and cool description of the whole. Now, this obscurity may indeed be best removed by inquiring the prophet's meaning-by col lecting, from his abrupt hints and oblique intimations, what might be the entire picture exhibited to his mind. But, when this is sufficiently understood, another ob scurity, arising from the matter of the prophecy, may

yet remain. The mystic sense couched under the allegorical images may yet be hidden; and for clearing this difficulty, on which the real interpretation of the prophecy, as prophecy, depends, it may be to little purpose to inquire or to know what meaning the prophet might affix to the images he saw, unless it were certain that the prophet was so far in the secret of Heaven as to know of what particular events these images were designed to be the emblems. But this, it is certain, he could not know but by a second inspiration, of which there is no evidence,-by an operation of the Divine Spirit on the man's understanding, which might enable him to decypher the allegorical scenery which his imagination had been made to conceive: for, that the sight of the picture should be accompanied with any natural discernment of its mystic meaning, is no more necessary than that a waking man's recollection of his dream should be accompanied with a clear understanding of its signification; the reverse of which we know to have been the case in ancient times, when prophetic dreams were not unfrequent. The dreamer could describe every particular of his dream, but, for the meaning of it, 'twas necessary he should have recourse to other persons with whom the gift of interpretation was deposited; and had God been pleased to withhold this gift, a prophetic dream would have had no interpretation antecedent to its completion, and yet, by the completion, would have been understood to be prophetic. Now, what is a dream which is distinctly remembered, and not at all understood, but one instance of a prophetic vision, of which the sense is unknown to the prophet? In prophecies, therefore, of this first kind, there is no reason to suppose that the prophet's meaning was the whole meaning of the inspiring Spirit; but there is the greatest reason from analogy for the contrary conclusion.

In prophecies of the second kind, the whole matter is

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