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The "dumb watchmen," who cannot tell us the hour of the night, have not warned us of the approach of the enemy as an angel of light. Satan has come into the midst of us, teaching all the glorious truth above stated; and perverting the manifestation of the Spirit of Jesus in us into the manifestation of Jesus of Nazareth, the man in person; and thus leading men to deny the letter altogether. In this subtle error many of the best disposed of the followers of Joanna Southcote are snared ; and in this error many of those who amongst the Evangelical body have spiritualized the Scriptures so as to deny their letter, are snared also. Take heed here: all spiritual truth is only true as it is true in the letter. Every promise in the letter shall be fulfilled in the Jews and in the Christian Church in the letter, while the same shall be fulfilled first in the spirit to the spiritual people of God. There may be more in God's purpose than we see; there cannot be less than the plain language declares: God is honest, and will deal with honest hearts: there is no trick, no double-entendre, no subtlety, no exaggeration, no ornaments of style, with God.

The whole priesthood is in a very fearful condition. They are giving no more note of preparation for coming trouble than the infidels, who know not God. Owen from his Bazaar, and Carlile from the Rotunda, sound as high a note of warning as the Archbishops, or the Evangelical, or the Dissenting, Clergy; so that whatever little of the same kind they do say is only in accordance with the common testimony of all men alike. But the Lord says, "I will make Jerusalem heaps, and a den of dragons; and I will make the cities of Judah desolate without inhabitant. Who is the wise man that may understand this? and who is he to whom the mouth of the Lord hath spoken, that he may declare it, FOR WHAT THE LAND PERISHETH," &c. ? Ah! it is indeed "woe to the foolish prophets, that walk after their own spirit, and have seen nothing."

Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard; they have trodden my portion under foot; they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness: THEY have made it desolate; and being desolate, it mourneth unto me: the whole land is made desolate, because no man layeth it to heart."

We have a word of warning to three distinct classes, who are in the greatest danger because they think themselves the most secure. The first is to the whole body of professors of Evangelical Religion. They know more of Jesus Christ than the rest of the world: they acknowledge and regret that religion amongst themselves is not upon the increase, and as they desire that it should be. There are some among them who have known as much truth as they know now, for twenty, thirty, forty, and fifty years their respective acquaintances lament behind their backs

that there is no apparent advance in them. They have been urged to the study of God's mind and will concerning present and future purposes in heaven and earth, and they have contemptuously turned from the exhortation, as an unprofitable thing. Some have done this from sloth, in which Satan has wrapt them, and may yet be delivered; but they who have done this advisedly, are as much at enmity with the revealed mind of God as they who pass for the ungodly world.

The next class is they who have studied, and do believe, the prophetic Scriptures, and who withhold the knowledge which God has taught them from the world. They come under the description of those of whom the Lord has said, "Curse ye the inhabitants of Meroz, because they came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty." They have wrapt their talent in a napkin: they have counted the truth of God a common thing; and consented to a compromise with man, and to keep back, from fear of offending the creature, the declarations of the Creator. The world has not been warned by them; the church has had no testimony lifted up within her in this matter: and the blood of those that perish lies at the door of these faithless watchmen. Of these it is written, "Woe unto you, that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? The day of the Lord is darkness, and not light: as if a man should flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him: shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?" The case of this class is very fearful: up to this time they "seemed to have run well:" but now they say they do not see the use of having the voice of the Spirit in the churches. Indeed! What was the use of their learning any of the doctrines of religion? Oh, that their souls may be saved. Very well: but what was the use of their studying Prophecy? This question has been asked by those who refused to study it, and many of the students could not, or at least did not, give a satisfactory answer. The fact is, that it was studied for its novelty, its poetry, its romance, its intellectual interest: it was preached by some because it was unusual, and therefore attracted a more crowded auditory, as it was withheld by others because it was unpopular : by both it was equally disbelieved to be essential to the Christian to understand. And wherefore was this? simply because these persons prove that they deal with doctrines as they do with ordinances,-prize them only for the value which they fancy them to contain intrinsically; not knowing that neither ordinances nor doctrines have any intrinsic good whatever, but are only to be prized as they bring men nearer to God. The study of the prophetic Scriptures is essentially necessary, because without it no man can know the mind of God: without knowing the mind of God he cannot be conformed to it; and without being con

formed to it he cannot be prepared to meet him. Preparation for this meeting is the sum and substance of all religion; and they who are in earnest to be prepared, do now rejoice in the Spirit's work, because they find that that work prepares them still more than any other means which their Father's love has ever yet sent them for that end: while they who have studied Prophecy to so little purpose as to doubt that He is at the door, or to suppose that the Jews are to be restored to Judea before He come, shew now that their end in studying it was not in order to be conformed to the mind of Jesus, but for some intrinsic beauty, or advantage terminating short of God. It is to be feared, too, that many who embraced the restoration of the Jews were seduced by Satan into the belief also of the ultimate restoration of impenitent men and devils,—a doctrine which they had not sufficient honesty to preach or to avow, but which palsied all the truth they knew upon the rest of the subject.

The last class is, they who have believed and proclaimed the coming of the Lord to speedy judgment; who have recognised and who have borne witness to the present work of the Spirit of God in the midst of us; but who are now in danger of being beguiled by the adversary out of their hope, by the subtle device that the present work of the Spirit returning into the church is the Second Advent of the Son of Man spoken of in the Scriptures. We have alluded to this already, and must recur to it again, on account of its great importance. To this delusion many of the most spiritually minded-or perhaps we ought more correctly to write, the most metaphysically minded-in the first and second classes, are likely to come. It is the delusion of those flocks and persons usually reckoned the most spiritual in London; who think that " trampling nations under foot," means "trampling down unruly passions" in men's hearts; and such like folly: it is also the delusion of the followers of Joanna Southcote, and of the Swedenborgians: it bids fair to divide the Evangelical body, by uniting all these classes together, while the rest openly unite themselves with the Liberals, Infidels, Socinians, &c., as the Dissenters are now doing almost to a man.

Against all these classes we have girded ourselves to the war; and we beseech the few faithful witnesses, who will stand for the plain truth of God, to be very earnest in prayer for strength to fight this fight of faith; and to never lose an occasion of shewing that nothing is true, or can be true, of the spirit, which is not true of the letter, and of the fact. Satan is mustering his hosts, and his confederates (Isa. vii.-xii.) will increase every day until he has enlisted the whole of Christendom, religious and infidel, on his side. Jesus is likewise mustering his hosts; but their numbers will daily diminish, like the army of Gideon, until none are left but they alone in whom His Spirit dwells.

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REVIEWS AND MISCELLANIES.

ON THE ANCIENT CHALDEAN AND EGYPTIAN CHRONOLOGY, By ISAAC CULLIMORE, Esq.

$1. Of the First Chaldean Astronomical Æra; and of the Periods of Callisthenes and Epigenes.

THE early progress of the Chaldeans in astronomy is witnessed by the unanimous voice of antiquity; and the known accuracy of their observations, from the age of Nabonassar (B.c. 747) downwards, renders the account of the more ancient series found at Babylon on the reduction of that city by the Macedonians, and transmitted by Callisthenes to Aristotle, highly credible, and well worthy of examination. These observations were preserved on a series of sculptured brick tablets, according to Epigenes and as the observations were made from, and laid up in, the temple of Belus, it seems not improbable that some of them may yet be discovered, in the progress of deciphering the Babylonian inscriptions, and thus lead to a certain elucidation of Babylonian topography as well as history.

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In the mean time, it is important to ascertain how far the reality of the series may be verified from history and calculation. The era of the 1903 years' observations found by Callisthenes does not merely depend on Simplicius's record of the circumstance, in combination with the near coincidence of the new moon and vernal equinox in the year B.c. 2233, to which this period ascends; although this concurrence, the only one, I believe, hitherto detected, is doubtless of great importance.

Pliny the naturalist, on the authority of Epigenes, attests that the Assyro-Chaldean records contained observations of 720,000 years; for though the best editions read 720 years only, the inference of Pliny*, compared with the other enormous Chaldean periods (the 150,000 or 2,150,000 years of Alexander Polyhistor, the 432,000 and 480,000 of Berosus, the 473,000 of Diodorus, the 470,000 of Cicero, and the 270,000 of Hipparchus), is more than enough to determine 720,000 to be the true reading.

These periods, we know from the evidence of ancient writers and common sense, compared with the prophetic periods of Scripture, in which days are put to represent years, consist of years put for diurnal revolutions. Hence the 720,000 days of Epigenes amount to 1971 Julian years and 92 days, or 68 years more than the period of Callisthenes, originating B.C. 2233.

* "Ex quo apparet æternus literarum usus."-Lib. vii. c. 56.

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Computing 1971 years downwards, from the vernal equinox of that year, we are conducted to about the summer solstice in the year B.C. 262, where the 69th year of the first Calippic period, in which Antiochus Theos began to reign, originated. Accordingly, there the Chaldean annals of Berosus, the source of nearly all the information we possess on Babylonian affairs, independently of Scripture, ended; for Berosus, who was priest of Belus and the superintendant of the Chaldean observations when Alexander took Babylon, dedicated his history to Antiochus Theos, or Antiochus the third king of Syria after Alexander, as Tatian informs us;_Seleucus being the first, and Antiochus Soter the second. But the first of Antiochus being the 69th Calippic year after the taking of Babylon, or the difference of time between the periods of Callisthenes and Epigenes, Berosus could not therefore at this time have been less than ninety years old; which unquestionably fixes the dedication and conclusion of his annals to the beginning of Antiochus's reign.

Berosus was one of the most learned men of his time, and composed works on the astronomy as well as history of the Chaldeans, which he translated into Greek, as we learn from Josephus. After the taking of Babylon by Alexander, he travelled into Greece and other countries, and taught astronomy at Athens, where there was a statue with a golden tongue erected to him. It cannot therefore be doubted that he continued his observations as long as his literary labours and hence the sixty-eight years' additional observations to those found by Callisthenes; of which latter it seems more than probable that Berosus himself was the bearer into Greece. The period of Calippus being in general use among the astronomers of that age, it accounts for the last Chaldean observations terminating with a Calippic year.

Thus these two periods of observations, 1903 and 1971 years, unite at the vernal equinox in the year B.C. 2233; the one computed upwards from the taking of Babylon by the Macedonians, and the other from the first year of Antiochus Theos: they therefore reciprocally confirm each other, and, combined with the equinoctio-lunar character of that æra, trebly authenticate its validity. That the near concurrence of the new moon and vernal equinox was necessary to it, will appear as we proceed.

§ 2. Of the Nature and Origin of the Nabonassarean Æra.

But this epoch is rendered indisputable by its connection with that of Nabonassar; from which latter date the astronomer Hipparchus transcribed not only the names and reigns of the kings of Babylon and Persia, but also the Chaldean observations

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