first under the Babylonians, and then under the Persians; but she revived after each of these visitations, first in the reign of Amasis after the Babylonian conquest; and, secondly, during the dominion of the Ptolemies, when she was again independent, powerful, and flourishing, yet never rose to that pitch of greatness to which she had attained under the empire of the Pharaohs.

The higher sense of these prophecies must depend on the higher or spiritual meaning of the term Egypt. Jerome interprets it as signifying simply an evil power, the power of Satan; and its inhabitants are those who have been subjected to the evil power, but are taken away from it, and dispersed, and winnowed, and then brought back and planted, as it were, in the Church, but are now stripped of their pride, and humbled, and obedient. But the Prophet expresses that they shall be planted again in their own land, the land of their birth or origin; and it is hard to understand how this can mean the Church. Nor does Jerome's interpretation rest on any other foundation so far as appears, that the supposed etymological meaning of the word Pathros, which he explains as signifying "Panis conculcatus","" ubi panis ille qui dixerat,

n Jerome merely says, “ Phatures, quæ interpretatur panis conculcatus.” Did he connect the word with pedibus calcare, and panis albus ? The first of these Gesenius connects with several words in the Indo-Germanic languages, observing "Pedibus calcare plurimis in linguis syllabâ Pat exprimitur varie inflexâ, v. Sanscr. pati via, Zend. pethó, páte semita, Gr. wáros, Tarśw, Germ. inf. padden, pedden, xarsiv. Pfad, Fuss, Angl. path, foot, ab Hebræis t in sibilum verso pas, bas." This etymology, and the allusion to hæretica pravitas, afford a specimen of the characteristic faults not of Jerome only, but of many others of the Christian writers of the first five centuries; faults so obvious that there would be no use in ever noticing them, were it not for the unwise admiration which makes these writers idols, and calls upon the Church to fall down and worship them. The Hebrew is merely an Egyptian name for Upper Egypt, Pathoures in Egyptian signifying the Land of the South. See Gesenius on Isaiah xi. 11. who has taken his interpretation of the Egyptian word from Jablonsky. It is added in a note on the article Pathros in Jablonsky's work, " Collectio et Explicatio Vocum Ægypti

E

ego sum panis qui de cælo descendi, pravitate hæreticâ conculcatus est." If Egypt may be taken as the world in that milder sense which I have noticed above, the peculiarity of the prophecy may be supposed to consist in the declaration, that God's judgments denounced upon it are corrective, and not simply penal. (Ezekiel xxix. 13-15. Compare Jeremiah xlvi. 26.) The world is judged, and its greatness brought low, not for its utter destruction, but that it may "remember itself, and be turned unto the Lord." Psalm xxii. 27. Compare also Isaiah xxvi. 9. "When thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness."

Finally I may observe, that those passages in the prophecies which speak of the conversion of Egypt and of Assyria, and of their union with Israel, appear to me decisive proofs that it is not the literal Babylon, or Edom, or Egypt, which is the real subject of the denunciations of prophecy in their full extent. For as on the one hand we have in the case of Babylon and Edom denunciations of utter and hopeless destruction, so on the other hand we find also in some instances a language of mercy which, if addressed to the same subject as the threatenings of extreme vengeance, would seem to involve a contradiction. Thus in the eighty-seventh Psalm, the fourth verse is interpreted almost by common consent as signifying, "I will make mention of Egypt and Babylon, as being amongst those who know me:" that is, as being no more strangers and enemies, but as being fellow citizens with God's people, and of the household of God. And no less remarkable are the concluding verses of the nineteenth chapter of Isaiah, " In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the acarum,' ," &c. Lugdun. Bat. 1804-1813, that Upper Egypt is called the Land of the South by the Arabian geographers, by Abulfeda, and Abulpharagius.

midst of the land; whom the Lord of Hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance." It seems to me that this language absolutely forbids us to apply the extreme threatenings of Prophecy to the literal Babylon or to the literal Egypt. In both Christ's Church was planted, and both therefore, as the prophet expresses it, received the blessing of the Lord of Hosts. "Tunc et opus manuum Domini erit in Assyriis," says Jerome, ❝hæ enim vel maxime gentes monachorum florent examinibus, Ægyptus et Mesopotamia, et pari inter se pietate contendunt." From that hour the threatenings against Babylon and Egypt lost their historical sense altogether; the literal Egypt was become Israel, the literal Babylon was become Israel; the Egypt and Babylon of Prophecy were from henceforth exclusively what they had always been predominantly, the world which knew not God, and the world which was his enemy.

Note 6, page 16.

"Passages which, according to the undoubted evidence of their context, were historically and literally spoken of some imperfect prophet, or priest, or king," &c.

The notion of a double sense in Prophecy has been treated by some persons with contempt. Yet it may be said, that it is almost involved necessarily in the very idea of Prophecy.

Every prophecy has, according to the very definition of the word, a double source; it has, if I may venture so to speak, two authors, the one human, the other divine. For as, on the one hand, the word implies that it is uttered by the tongue of man, so it implies, on the other hand, that its author and origin is God. Again, if uttered by the

tongue of man, it must also, unless we suppose him to be a mere instrument, in the same sense in which a flute or a harp utter sounds without understanding or consciousness, be coloured by his own mind. The prophet expresses in words certain truths conveyed to his mind; but his mind does not fully embrace them, nor can it; for how can man fully comprehend the mind of God? Every man lives in time and belongs to time; the present must be to him clearer than the future; and if the future were fully laid open before him so that he could understand it as he understands the actual world around him, he would cease to partake of the conditions of man's nature. But with God there is no past nor future; every truth is present to Him in all its extent, so that his expression of it, if I may so speak, differs essentially from that which can be comprehended by the mind or uttered by the tongue of man. Thus every prophecy as uttered by man, that is by an intelligent and not a mere mechanical instrument, and at the same time as inspired by God, must have as far as appears a double sense; one the sense entertained by the human mind of the writer, and the other the sense infused into it by God; nor can we venture to say in any case that the prophet understood or meant to convey all the mind of God, or that God designed to declare nothing more than was apprehended by the mind of the prophet.

But although a double sense of prophecy appears thus to be a necessary condition of the very idea of prophecy, yet it is a great question to what degree the prophet was blind to the divine meaning of the prophecies which he uttered, and how far his human meaning coincided with that divine meaning or fell short of it. And here the conceivable difference is exceedingly great; for we may suppose the prophet, on the one hand, to be totally ignorant

of the divine meaning of his words, and to intend to express a meaning of his own quite unlike God's meaning; or, on the other hand, we may suppose him to be so aware of their divine meaning, as actually to give an appearance of incongruity to his language, so that his words under this conviction shall at times rise out of all proportion to their ordinary tenor, as expressing the meaning commonly, and as it were naturally, present to his own mind.

Of these two extremes, the first is exemplified in the well-known words of Caiaphas. "It is expedient," he said, "that one man should die for the nation." "But this," says St. John," he spake not of himself, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation." That is, the words which he spoke in one sense, God, speaking by him as the High Priest of Israel, uttered as it were in another sense. Here we see the two meanings of the human and of the divine author of a prophecy, and they differ from one another not in degree only, but in kind.

But we should not be warranted, I suppose, in extending this case to any of God's willing prophets, who gave themselves up obediently and gladly to utter his word. We may believe that their minds did not embrace the full extent of the truths which they declared, but we cannot think that they were wholly blind, much less that they were actually adverse to them.

Here however we have a declaration from one of our Lord's Apostles, which authorizes what we might of ourselves have conjectured. "Of the salvation of your souls," says St. Peter," the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: searching what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory