instead of flowing pure as the crystal stream which gushes from the rock, should ever be polluted with the foul commixture of worldly politics or worldly party, how dreadful will our condition be? May the indulgent providence of God avert far from us so dire a disaster! And may those, to whom the supreme magistrate entrusts his authority, continue to exert their best endeavours to preserve civil order, to restrain the exorbitant passions of men, and to punish vice! Thus will the effects of their wise and virtuous conduct be happily experienced. Bad men will fear them; good men will honour and esteem them; God will bless them, and impartial posterity will resound their names with approbation and applause.

AN

INQUIRY

INTO THE

PROPHETIC CHARACTER

OF THE

ROMANS,

AS DESCRIBED IN DANIEL, CHAP. VIII. 23–25.

(Newcastle upon Tyne, 1792.)

VOL. I.

F

AN INQUIRY, &c.

THE correspondence subsisting between many

facts, and the predictions prior to those facts as recorded in the books of the Old Testament, is too obvious to escape the notice, and too accurate not to excite the admiration, of every unprejudiced inquirer after truth. When we read of the descendents of Ishmael-that they were to be multiplied exceedingly, so as not to be numbered for multitude*; that they were to live in tribes, free and uncontrolled, like wild asses' colts t, their hand against every man,

* Gen. xvi. 10.

+ Job, xi. 12. This animal is no beast of prey, and therefore a fit emblem not of the rapacity of the Arabs, but only of their roaming and vagrant kind of life. And, in this view, the passage in the book of Job is most happily descriptive of the manners of the Arabs, as they have been represented in all ages. Who hath sent out the wild ass free? Or who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass? Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. He scorneth the multitude of the city; neither regardeth he the crying of the driver. The range of the mountains is his pasture; and he searcheth after every green thing. xxxix. 5-8. See Jer. îîi. 3.; Hosea, viii. 9.; and Pococke's Theological Works, II. 356.

and every man's hand against them*-we discover the manners of the inhabitants of Arabia, the Sword of the Wilderness, as they seem to have been called by Jeremiaht. They have always lived, and still continue to live, an independent and wandering people; a company of robbers, engaged in hereditary wars with all mankind, and exulting in rapine and devastation.

It was prophesied of Egypt, the land of fertility and plenty, that after the reign of Nebuchadnezzar it should be the basest of the kingdoms, neither should it exalt itself any more above the nations. And have not the Egyptians been, from that period, a wretched people? Have they not been for many ages a prey to every invader, groaning successively under the government of the PERSIANS, the MACEDONIANS, the ROMANS, the SARACENS, and the TURKS§? Do they not,

Every one of these savages (the Arabs) dealeth with all men uncivilly and cruelly, even like a wilderness full of wild beasts, living all upon rapine and robbery, wanting all sense of humanity, more than a show of appearance; whereby being combined together, they do tyrannise over all, from the Red Sea to Babylon."

(The Nineteen Years of W. Lithgow, &c. p. 209.) With respect to the modern Arabs, see Savary's Letters on Egypt, I. 377, II. 411; and Bruce's Travels, I. 289.

* Gen. xvi. 12.

+ Lam. v. 9.

Ezek. xxix. 15.

§ Jortin's Remarks on Ecclesiastical History, I. 174.