Thus the patriarch Jacob prophesied, on his death bed, "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the law-giver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be." No one, I believe, questions that Shiloh means Christ, and equally clear must it be to every reader of sacred and profane history, that he offered himself as the great atoning sacrifice, just about the time when the Romans came to take away, not "the sceptre" only, but "the place and nation" of the Jews. Still more explicit is the prophet Daniel. "Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people, and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy. Know, therefore, and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to build Jerusalem, unto Messiah the Prince, shall be seven weeks, and three score and two weeks. And after three score and two weeks, shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the Prince shall come and shall destroy the city and the sanctuary." I stop not to inquire when these prophetic weeks begun or ended. My sole object in quoting the passage is to show that there was,

not an indefinite, but a set time, for the manifestation of the Son of God, to take away the sins of the world.

Now, with such examples before us, how can we help inferring, that God must have a set time for the conversion of the world also, even before we inquire what the spirit of prophecy says on the subject? But when we open the Bible, with special reference to this point, we find the commencement and glories of the millennium marked by the sacred writers, with a particularity which pertains to very few other grand prophetic eras. Thus, according to Daniel and the visions of the Apocalypse, the reign of Anti-Christ, or the apostate Romish hierarchy, is to last twelve hundred and sixty days, or forty and two months. Now all the best commentators, ancient and modern, I believe, agree in reckoning these prophetic days as so many years, and in dating the rapid conversion of the world from the close of this period. If these views are correct, or if the prophetic numbers of Daniel and John refer at all to the final overthrow of the man of sin, and the setting up of Christ's kingdom, then there is a set time for these great and glorious events. I hasten to remark,

III.

That the time is near. Whenever we use the word near, it is to be understood, like every

other comparative term, by the connection. When I say that my next neighbor's house is near my own, I mean one thing: but when I say that Jupiter is near the sun, I mean a very different thing. So in time; when you take out your watch, and tell me it is near twelve oclock, I understand you to mean that it lacks but a few minutes of it; when you tell me that you was born near the close of September, I understand you to mean, a few days before the end of the month; when you say such and such events transpired near the time of the French revolution, I suppose you mean within a few years, either before or after; and when we talk of being near the end of the present thousand years, we mean that by far the greater part of this period has already elapsed. So when I say that the millennium is near, I mean that but a little time remains, compared with the long and dreary period, during which the prince of the power of the air has ruled in the hearts of the children of disobedience."

To go into the subject fully, and prove that the jubilee of universal emancipation is near, would require a volume. I can only glance at it, in the present discourse. Writers on the prophecies are not agreed, and it may be impossible to determine, with certainty, when the twelve hundred and sixty

years begin. But whether with some, we date from the year of Christ 606, when the Pope was declared to be universal bishop, or with others, from 756, when he became a temporal prince, the final overthrow of Anti-Christ, which is immediately to precede the universal spread of the gospel, must be near. In one case, it will happen before the end of the present thousand years; and in the other, soon after the beginning of the next. And it is worthy of special notice, I think, that, whatever prophetic data the most approved commentators assume, and whatever trains of reasoning they pursue, they come at last to the same general conclusion, viz., that the millennial reign of Christ over all lands, will commence within about a hundred and fifty or two hundred and fifty years from the present time; and this is a very short period, compared with the five thousand and eight hundred years, which have already elapsed.

Did the time permit, I think it would be easy to show, from the fulfilment of other prophecies, intimately connected with those which insure the conversion of the world, that the time draweth near. But not to insist upon these, there is certainly a great deal in the present state of the world, and in the onward movements of the church, to strengthen the faith of all who have an eye to

"discover the signs of the times." Although there is no active nor latent revivifying principle in any of the forms of idolatry, from which we can derive the least gleam of hope, there are indications, particularly in some parts of India, that it is crumbling down under the weight of its own hoary and unutterable abominations; and that, by thus, without hands, levelling the most formidable bulwarks of paganism, God is preparing the way for the rapid spread of the gospel. It is wonderful to think how many great and effectual doors have been opened, within the last five and twenty years, in every quarter of the heathen world. At the beginning of this period, the question was, Where can we go? Who will receive the gospel at our hands? Who will even allow us to preach it in "the dark places of the earth?" But now I might almost ask, Where can we not go? Who-where are the rulers to forbid us, or the people to stone us? Look the dark map of paganism all over, and tell me. What is there to hinder in the thousand islands, with which the great Pacific is sown? What in the great islands of the Indian ocean, so populous, and till lately supposed to be inaccessible to missionaries of the cross? Who now will forbid the church from penetrating into the heart of Africa, and carrying the news of salvation to all the