stood before they were fulfilled. As they relate to different periods, they may have been intended for exciting the attention of mankind from time to time, both to Providence and Scripture, and to furnish every age with new evidence of the truth of divine revelation; by which means they serve the same purpose to the last ages of the world, that miracles did to the first. Whereas, if they had been in every respect clear and obvious from the beginning, this wise purpose had been in a great measure defeated. Curiosity, industry, and attention would at once be at an end; or, by being too easily gratified, would be but little exercised.

"In like manner, the prophecies relating to the Messiah had a view both to his first and his second coming; they spoke of him as suffering, and yet conquering and reigning. The Jews, led by their situation first to wish, and then to expect a conquering Messiah, did not clearly see the order of the prophecy, and that it behoved Christ first to suffer, and then to enter into his glory; and, therefore, ignorantly and in unbelief, they were instrumental in fulfilling the prophecy, by shedding that blood which was to atone for the sins of mankind:

but this they could never have been so impious as to have attempted, had they known that they were crucifying the Lord of Glory.

"Daniel understood from the prophecies of Jeremiah, the time at which the captivity in Babylon was to be at end; and the scribes knew from Micah, and told Herod where the Messiah was to be born. A very little attention might have enabled them to understand other prophecies. But the degree of obscurity which sometimes attends prophecy, does not always proceed from the circumstances or subject; it frequently proceeds from the highly poetical and figurative style in which prophecy is for the most part conveyed, and of which it will be proper to give some account. To speak of all the rhetorical figures with which the prophets adorn their style, would lead us into a field too wide, and would be more the province of a rhetorician than of the commentator. will be sufficient for our purpose at present, to attend to the most common of them, consisting of allegory, parable, and metaphor; and then to consider the sources from which the prophets most frequently borrow their images in those figures, and the sense they wish to convey by them.

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"By Allegory, the first of the figures mentioned, is meant that mode of speech in which the writer or speaker means to convey a different idea from what the words in their primary signification bear. Thus 'break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns,' is to be understood not of tillage but repentance.

"To this figure the Parable, in which the prophets frequently speak, is nearly allied. It consists of the application of some feigned narrative to some real truth, which might have been less striking, or more disagreeable, if expressed in plain terms. Such as the following one in Isaiah, 'My beloved hath a vineyard, in a fruitful hill. And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a wine-press therein and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes.' The 7th verse of the chapter tells us that the vineyard was the house of Israel, which had so ill requited the favour which God had shown it.

"There is, besides, another kind of allegory not uncommon with the prophets, called mystical allegory, or double prophecy. Thus, it is

said of Eliakim, (xxii. 22), ' And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder, and he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.' In the first and obvious sense, the words relate to Eliakim, but in the secondary or mystical sense, to the Messiah."

Of precisely the like kind is the language here used, with that of Moses when he says by the inspiration of God, " And God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness," because these words, in their first and obvious sense, relate to the material image of the primitive Adam, which the apostle confirms by saying, "Howbeit, that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual." Still, in their secondary or mystical sense, the same words relate to the natural image of Christ; and in all cases where man is made a type of his Creator, the natural body is figuratively intended to represent the natural image of Christ's person, which is of great frequency in the Scriptures, in order to familiarize the manhood of Immanuel to us in an especial manner. It is, therefore, now left to the reader's

discretion to decide whether the declared purpose of Christ's incarnation, uttered before the creation of man, is or is not of a prophetical kind, and after the order of mystical allegory, or double prophecy, for although man was not in being when the words, "Let us make man," &c. were spoken, yet that revelation was designed for man's information.