what shall we say to those who, with real or affected insensibility, tell us that, "because different persons often bear the same name, it seems needless to perplex ourselves about so common a case?" (See note on Luke iii, in Scott's Bible.) Surely if ever a reasonable candour might see cause to allow the conjecture that words originally in the margin had crept into the text, it is here; where these two names have the effect of exhibiting Salathiel as the son of two different fathers, Jechonias and Neri. Consider the nature of this roll, extending through three thousand years, and can any thing be more credible to a plain man's apprehension than that the names Salathiel and Zorobabel should have been at first written opposite their contemporaries, Neri and Rhesa, to denote the date of this part of the record, and should afterwards have been inadvertently introduced by copyists into the text; of which there are other examples? And is not this conjecture corroborated by the evidence still extant, that, in the time of Irenæus, the table of St. Luke contained only seventy-two descents?* See also the Codex S. Eusebii (4to. Mediolani, 1748), which omits the two

names.

In conclusion, let us not stumble at the discovery that the general body of Christians have, for so many ages, been in error on this subject. The design of the genealogies was to bear witness to the Son of David expected by the Jews. Their primary and direct uses ceased with the dispersion of that nation and the destruction of its records. Prior to that event, no objection appears to have been made to the two genealogies. There is no ground, therefore, at this day, for the Jews' objection to them; and the discrepancies with which they have come down to us, are to them as to us-mere critical difficulties. The importance of the question under discussion - to the present age-may perhaps be exaggerated. At least, the error, if it be one, has been permitted to exist in connexion with the inestimable blessing of a clear revelation of the Way of Peace to men, The reason why it has been so long permitted to exist may hereafter be better understood. Assuredly it will not be the first instance in which a prima facie obscurity has yielded a singular and convincing illustration of the independence and veracity of the evangelists; and also, of what is to us of immense importancenamely, that their writings have come down to us unadulterated even by attempts to remove a difficulty of seventeen centuries standing.

• Lucas genealogiam quæ est a generatione Domini usque ad Adam septuaginta duas generationes habere ostendit, finem conjungens initio. And elsewhere, Lucas initium generationis a Domino inchoans in Adam retulit. S. Iren. Adv. Hær. 1. iii. c. 33. It seems probable that the names Levi and Matthat, ver. 24, occurring again together in ver. 29, have been by mistake of copyists inserted in one or the other place.

VOL. VI.-July, 1834.

C

If, on a full review of the foregoing remarks, anything bearing on the question has been passed over, it is, that the Talmud, in one or two obscure passages, is thought to allude to Mary by the term "daughter of Heli." But how poorly the Jews of the age of the Talmud were qualified for historians is well known; and also how studious to avoid any distinct reference to the history and progress of the new religion until a time when they of necessity depended on Christian sources for their information. Little weight, therefore, can belong to such passages, or to such references, or even to much more direct testimony from that quarter, if any such could be adduced; and if, at a still earlier period, their Rabbins were better informed, they, at all events, were little likely to lend their aid to elucidate a matter that had even then begun to embarrass the Christian fathers.

The writer has already disclaimed all share in the origination of the principal views here opened. He must add the expression of his regret that, from want of acquaintance with the Hebrew, he is unable to appreciate, and therefore declines adducing the speculations of the ingenious author on supposed readings of St. Matthew's Hebrew gospel. The little work itself is however still in his possession, and there will be no unwillingness to place it in abler hands. 2.

42, Piccadilly.

MANUSCRIPT LETTERS OF BISHOP HORSLEY.

LETTER VI.

To the Author of “ Antichrist in the French Convention.”

(Continued from vol. v. p. 527.)

DEAR SIR,-I hope by this time you are in possession of my long letter upon the Falling Stars, and hope that the freedom with which I canvass your interpretation gives you neither offence nor uneasiness. It really gives me concern when you say, you tremble to think of the objections I may raise. I am sure that, in these subjects, it can be no disgrace to any man to be in a mistake; but it would be disgraceful for any man to be positive. Our discussion is not for victory on either side, but for mutual information. On neither side, therefore, is there any room either for trembling or triumph. It would give me no uneasiness that any particular interpretation of my own should be confuted, and another established. For amidst all the variety and uncertainty of exposition of all parts of these prophecies, the consolation arising from the expectation, which the general source of the whole affords, that our Lord is coming to set all things to rights, and that the afflictions of the church, grievous as they have been, and grievous as they yet may be, will terminate in a period of peace and security in this world, to be succeeded by the happiness of

the future life, remains the same to every true believer. Laying hold of this great anchor of hope, we may investigate with that degree of indifference about the fate of any particular exposition which is necessary for the patient prosecution of inquiry, and by no means inconsistent with that serious and interested attention to these Divine oracles which may keep alive our diligence in the pursuit.

By your favour of the 20th, which I received this morning (Saturday, July 22nd), I perceive (what, indeed, I suspected before,) that you have, in some degree, misapprehended my notion of the wilful king. I never conceived that the wilful king was to be understood of the Roman Power separately. In the 31st verse, indeed, of the 11th chapter, I think the prophecy passes from the subject of Antiochus to that of the Romans, who, as the enemies of God's people, were the successors of Antiochus. But in the 36th verse, the prophecy passes again to another subject-that of a wicked persecuting government, which will come to its height in the last ages; which government is described under the name of the wilful king. This abominable government will arise (as I conceive) from the union of two great powers, which are already in existence separately, but have not yet formed their coalition. For as the Roman empire, after it became Christian, consisted of two branches, the western and the eastern, so I conceive this antichristian empire (extending, perhaps, over the very same immense tract of country which composed the Roman empire,) will consist of a western and an eastern branch. The western branch is represented in the 7th chapter under the image of the little horn, being France, with her conquests. The eastern is the little horn of the goat (chap. viii.), which I take to be the Turk.* The coalition of these two will be the antichristian

I must confess that this interpretation of the two horns, more especially of the first or little horn of Daniel's 8th chapter, when I first met with it, astonished and puzzled me not a little. And notwithstanding my being fully aware that my father was the very last man in the world to have been diverted, by passing occurrences, from a calm review of his subject, yet I was almost tempted to think, that, in the matter before us, he had suffered the extraordinary events of the times to warp his judgment, so far, at least, as to render him forgetful of that golden rule for the interpretation of the prophetic word, which he himself has deduced from the 2nd Peter, i. 20, 21, and expounded with so much ability and perspicuity in his admirable sermons on that passage of the Apostle. That the principal (if, indeed, not all) characteristics of the little horn which arose among the ten horns, were to be found in the public acts of the French nation, and in the dreadful spectacle of anarchy and irreligion which she presented in 1794, I was fully sensible; but I was equally sensible that, unless the application of the prophecy to the French nation could be made to agree with the chain of predictions to which it is linked, it could not be the right one; because, this would be to interpret the particular prophecy with reference merely to the terms of the single prediction taken by itself, without considering it in connexion with the series to which it evidently belongs; and to make (what the Bishop, in the sermons I have alluded to, proves we are never at liberty to do,)" the prophecy its own interpreter." How this reconciliation between his application of the particular prophecy and the chain of predictions to which it belongs, could be brought about, I

monarchy in its full growth, described in the 11th, under the image of the wilful king. Good God! what a monster will this be the Turk fraternized by the French democracy! united in the nefarious project of exterminating the Christian religion; and, for that purpose, studiously corrupting the morals of their subjects, by releasing them from the restraints of matrimony. A business in which the French, at present, far outdo the Turk; but the Turk, I dare say, will be an apt scholar. With this view of the subject, I said in my letter of the 8th instant, that I took the little horn of the 7th chapter to be the French nation, the little horn of the goat to be the Ottoman Porte, and the wilful king to be the antichristian power in its plenitude and perfection, an empire formed by a strange confederacy or coalition between

was totally at a loss to discover. The little horn of Daniel's ten-horned beast was, in order of time, to rise up "after," or subsequent, to the ten horns; still, as it was to arise from "among" them, they must all have been in existence at the time of its appearance; and, again, as it rose up from "among" them, it could not be one of them, but must be a distinct and separate horn. With regard to the ten horns, there never has been any doubt about them; indeed, the terms of the prophecy are too explicit to leave the smallest room for doubt, and, however commentators may have varied in their classification, yet all agree that they are to be found in those kingdoms and states into which the Roman earth became parcelled out, after the dismemberment of the empire. Now, then, how were the two circumstances, which I have just mentioned as being connected with the appearance of the little horn, to be made to agree with my father's application of the prophecy? If it did not sprout till the end of the last century, or, even if it had not attained, till that period, such maturity as to be recognised as a horn, it could not have been co-existent with the ten horns; for ages before the close of the last century, several of these (besides the three which the little horn itself was to destroy,) had ceased to exist as original horns; therefore, the co-existence of the little with the ten horns, necessary to the completion of the prophecy in all its parts, seemed to me to be wanting in the Bishop's interpretation of it. Again, by every commentator, ancient or modern, that I am acquainted with, the Franks have always been considered as one of the ten horns-but if one of the ten, they cannot be the little; for, as I have already observed, the terms of the prophecy make it clear that this horn was to be a distinct and separate horn. This, then, appeared to be another impediment in the way of my father's interpretation, and not finding any solution of these difficulties in any of the letters which I am now publishing, and having searched for one in his interleaved Bible, and among the marginal notes in his copy of Wintle's Daniel, in vain, I abandoned the investigation in despair, and was tempted to draw the conclusion which I have stated at the commencement of this note. In this opinion I remained till within these very few weeks; for it is since these letters have been sent to the Editor of the Magazine, that I, by the merest accident, discovered the solution for which I have so long been in search. Having occasion, the other day, to consult Bishop Lowth's Isaiah, I found among its pages a MS. written on half a sheet of letter paper, entitled "Of the Little Horn of the Fourth Beast, chap. vii." How this should have remained so long undiscovered in a book which I am constantly opening, I cannot account for, but so it is. The contents of the paper I here subjoin, and whatever may be thought of the Bishop's application of the prophecy, this is at any rate evident from the tenor of his remarks on the little horn, that he was himself fully alive to the objections which might be raised against it, and that, on this occasion (and it would be impossible, I believe, to find the instance in which he sat down to the exposition of Holy Writ, in which such was not the case), he had all his wits about him. Nevertheless, I own I infinitely prefer Mr. Faber's interpretation of the prophecy to his. The error of the generality of expositors has been, that they have interpreted the little or eleventh horn of the temporal instead of the spiritual sovereignty assumed by the Pope. A

the little horns. I have now explained myself more at large, and perhaps you may see this point of the subject in a new light. As to a new kingdom in Africa, I never thought of a kingdom to arise in Africa, or anywhere else (except our Lord's own kingdom), after the destruction of Antichrist, but before it. The antichristian power will aim, as I conceive, at universal empire; but when his end is approaching (see chap. ix. ver. 40), a king of the south and a king of the north are to make head against him. God knows whether I was right in the conjecture, that the king of the south will be an African power-some have understood it of Persia. Thus much, however, seems pretty clear, that the terms north and south are to be referred to the site of Antichrist's eastern dominions. For I think we may gather from the 41st verse, that the scene of Antichrist's last exploits, and of his final

horn, as my father truly observes, represents the alliances from which the states, denoted by the beasts, derive their supplies of military force, that is to say, it is representative of earthly sovereignty; but, in like manner, a horn is used in Scripture to represent the source from which spiritual succour is to be derived (2 Sam. xxii. 3; Luke i. 69; et in multis aliis), and is thus representative of spiritual Sovereignty. Now, Mr. Faber shews, in my humble opinion, with all the force and clearness of mathematical demonstration, that all the characteristics of the little horn are to be found in the spiritual tyranny exercised by the papacy. Nor is he guilty of the inconsistency which my father justly attributes to the majority of commentators; for he is equally successful in his delineation of the seventh head of the ten-horned beast of the Apocalypse, which he applies not to the pope, either as a temporal or spiritual sovereign, but to the Francic emperorship in the person of Napoleon Buonaparte.

Notwithstanding the length to which this note has already run, I cannot conclude it without offering one or two remarks on my father's interpretation of the second little horn, or the horn of the goat in the 8th chapter. I cannot conceive how this symbol can be applicable to the Turk, further than as the temporal sovereign at the head of the Mahometan religion. Here again Mr. Faber successfully establishes that if we interpret the first little horn, or, as he properly terms it, the horn of the west, of a spiritual tyranny, the principle of homogeneity requires that the second little horn, or the horn of the east, should be an ecclesiastical kingdom likewise, and accordingly he considers the second little horn to be the ecclesiastical kingdom of Mahomet. Moreover, I cannot imagine that the power of the Turk, although an antichristian tyranny, can have any share in compounding (if I may so express myself,) the character of the wilful king. For the wilful king is to go on triumphantly, and will be in the plenitude of his power at the coming of our Lord, by whom his final destruction is to be achieved. Whereas, if anything be clear in the Apocalypse, it is the prediction of the downfal of the Ottoman empire (Rev. xvi. 12), under the effusion of the sixth vial; and how any one living in these days, and witnessing the almost total annihilation of the Turk as an independent sovereign, can call in question the inspiration of the book in which such a prediction is contained, or doubt that the sixth vial is, at this instant, rapidly discharging its contents, is to me perfectly astonishing. The wilful king is not a character or tyrannising power to be formed out of the infidelity of this nation, or of that, BUT OF ALL, “a combination" (to use my father's own words in a sermon, which, together with these letters and some other interesting papers, I shall shortly publish in one volume)—" a combination of all the Gentile nations of the earth against the Lord, and against his Anointed." That in this impious confederacy, the first little horn of Daniel, or the eleventh horn of the beast, may have his share, there is too much reason to apprehend. Indeed, they must be blind to what is passing in the world around them, who do not perceive strong symptoms of the union having commenced, and that of late popery and infidelity have been "made friends together.".

H. H.