TO HENRY DRUMMOND, ESQ. AND TO ALL THE BRETHREN WHO ARE WAITING FOR THE PERSONAL APPEARING AND REIGN OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST. MY HONOUred friend AND BELOVED BRETHREN, After casting about in my own mind to whom I might most fitly dedicate these Occasional Discourses, which are chiefly of a public and political character, as having been almost all preached on week-days, for public objects, and, as I may say, on secular occasions, (for even the Bible Society is, by its chief advocates, held to be not a religious but a secular association,) I had little difficulty in making choice of you from the throng of presidents and vice-presidents, governors and life-governors, and other functionaries of the religious world.' For, to wave all considerations of personal friendship and esteem, no one whom the religious stir and tumult of the last thirty years hath brought conspicuously before the church, hath so strenuously served her best interests through good and through bad report, or doth so well deserve her thanks, as doth the man who brought forward from their obscurity and persecutions both Burckhardt and Wolff, and upheld their way against the sharp tongues of prudential and worldly-wise Christians : who laid the foundation of the Continental Society, and hath built it up in the frown and opposition of the religious world;' who detected and dragged to light the false reports concerning the state of religion on the Continent, with which the Bible Society, in its palmy times, had glozed the charitable ear of the church; who has stood forth as the friend and patron of every society which hath any shew of favour to the Jews; and finally, who hath taken us poor despised interpreters of prophecy under your wing, and made AND OCCASIONAL DISCOURSES. BY THE REV. EDWARD IRVING, M. A. MINISTER OF THE NATIONAL SCOTCH CHURCH, REGENT SQUARE. OTHE IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. BIBL ON SUBJECTS NATIONAL AND PROPHETICAL, LONDON: PUBLISHED BY R. B. SEELEY AND W. BURNSIDE; AND SOLD BY L. B. SEELEY & SONS, FLEET STREET; J. NISBET, BERNERS STREET; A. PANTON, oxford STREET; W. OLIPHANT, AND J. BOYD, EDINBURGH; AND W. COLLINS, GLASGOW. MDCCCXXVIII. |