truth of our Lord's pretensions which arises from the supposed completion of the prophecies of the Old Testament in him and in his doctrines.

The objection indeed is nothing less than this, that although the divine inspiration of the Jewish prophets be admitted, their prophecies will afford no support to our Lord's pretensions; for this reason, that in the application of these prophecies to him, and to the propagation of his doctrine, they are drawn by the writers of the New Testament to a sense in which they were never understood by the prophets themselves who delivered them: And since the true sense of any writing can be no other than that which the author intended to convey, and which was understood by him to be contained in the expressions which he thought proper to employ, an application of a prophecy in a sense not intended by the prophet must be a misinterpretation.

The assertion upon which this objection is founded, "that the first preachers of Christianity understood prophecies in one

sense which were uttered in another," cannot altogether be denied; and, unless it could be denied in every instance, it is to little purpose to refute it, which might easily be done, in some: For if a single instance should remain in which the apostles and evangelists should seem to have been guilty of a wilful misinterpretation of prophecy, or of an erroneous application of it, the credit of their doctrine would be greatly shaken; since a single instance of a fraud would fasten on them the imputation of dishonesty, and a single instance of mistake concerning the sense of the ancient Scriptures would invalidate their claim to inspiration. The truth however is, that though the fact upon which this objection is founded were as universally true as it is universally alleged, — which is not the

case,

yet were it so, we have in this text of the apostle a double answer to the adversary's argument; which is inconclusive, for two reasons, first, Because the assumption is false, that the prophets were the authors of their prophecies: "For the prophecy came not at any time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved

by the Holy Ghost;" and secondly, Were the assumption true, still the conclusion might not stand; because "no prophecy of holy writ is its own interpreter." I will endeavour to make you understand the propriety of both these answers; which at first perhaps may not strike you.

First, then, I say we deny the adversary's rash conclusion, though in part we grant his premises, because his assumption is false, that the prophets were the authors of their prophecies. The assumption is false, upon the principles upon which the adversary who urges this objection professes to dispute. He professes to dispute upon a concession of the divine inspiration of the Jewish prophets. But, if the prophets were inspired, they were not the authors of their prophecies: The Holy Spirit of God was the author of every prophecy or of every saying of a prophet, so far at least as it is prophetic; and the views of that Omniscient Spirit who gave the prophecy - not the surmises of the men whose faculties or whose that Spirit employed — are to be the standard of interpretation; and this upon

organs

that very principle which the adversary alleges, that the meaning of every book, and of every sentence in the book, is its author's meaning.

To explain this more distinctly, I must observe, that all prophecy is speech, in which the prophet is made to express ideas of the Divine Mind, in uttering his own; and the prophecies of holy writ are divisible into two different kinds, distinguished by two different manners, in which this utterance of the mind of God by the mouth of the prophet was usually effected. The first kind consisted in a scene allegorically descriptive of futurity, which was displayed to the imagination of the prophet, who was left to paint the images excited in his phantasy in such language as his natural talents of poetical description might supply. Of this kind are the prophecies delivered by Jacob and by Moses not long before their death, the prophecies of Balaam, and many that occur in the writings of those who were prophets by profession. The other kind consists merely in verbal allusions; when the prophet, speaking perhaps of himself or of his own times, or of distant events set

clearly in his view, was directed by the inspiring Spirit to the choice of expressions to which later events have been found to correspond with more exactness than those to which the prophet himself applied them. This kind of prophecy particularly abounds in the Psalms of David; who often speaks of the fortunes of his own life, the difficulties with which he had to struggle, and his providential deliverances, in terms which carry only a figurative meaning as applied to David himself, but are literally descriptive of the most remarkable occurrences in the holy life of Jesus. Nor is this kind of prophecy unfrequent in the writings of the other prophets; who were often made to allude to the general redemption when they would speak in the most explicit terms of deliverances of the Jewish people; and were seldom permitted to deplore present calamities, or to denounce impending judgments, but in expressions literally descriptive of the sufferings of Christ and the afflictions of his church.

In both kinds of prophecy, the Spirit of God and the mind of man had each its