Ib. c. 15. s. 2.
Fourthly. The "little horn", Dan. vii, that rules "for a time and times and half a time", it is evident that it is not Antiochus Epiphanes, because this "little horn" is part of the fourth beast--namely, the Roman.
Is it quite clear that the Macedonian was not the fourth empire;
1. the a.s.syrian; 2. the Median; 3. the Persian; 4. the Macedonian?
However, what a strange prophecy, that, "e confesso" having been fulfilled, remains as obscure as before!
Ib. s. 6
"And ye shall have the tribulation of ten days",--that is, the utmost extent of tribulation; beyond which there is nothing further, as there is no number beyond ten.
It means, I think, the very contrary. "Decent dierum" is used even in Terence for a very short time. [2] In the same way we say, a nine days"
wonder.
Ib. c. 16. s. 1.
But for further conviction of the excellency of Mr. Mede"s way above that of Grotius, I shall compare some of their main interpretations.
Hard to say which of the two, Mede"s or Grotius", is the more improbable. Beyond doubt, however, the Cherubim are meant as the scenic ornature borrowed from the Temple.
Ib. s. 2.
That this "rider of the white horse" is Christ, they both agree in.
The "white horse" is, I conceive, Victory or Triumph--that is, of the Roman power--followed by Slaughter, Famine, and Pestilence. All this is plain enough. The difficulty commences after the writer is deserted by his historical facts, that is, after the sacking of Jerusalem.
Ib. s. 5.
It would be no easy matter to decide, whether Mede plus More was at a greater distance from the meaning, or Grotius from the poetry, of this eleventh chapter of the Revelations; whether Mede was more wild, or Grotius more tame, flat, and prosaic.
Ib. c. 17. s. 8.
The Old and New Testament, which by a "prosopopoeia" are here called the "two witnesses."
Where is the probability of this so long before the existence of the collection since called the New Testament?
Ib. vi. c. l. s. 2.
We may draw from this pa.s.sage (1 "Thess". iv. 16, 17.) the strongest support of the fact of the ascension of Christ, or at least of St.
Paul"s (and of course of the first generation of Christians") belief of it. For had they not believed his ascent, whence could they have derived the universal expectation of his descent,--his bodily, personal descent?
The only scruple is, that all these circ.u.mstances were parts of the Jewish "cabala" or idea of the Messiah by the spiritualists before the Christian aera, and therefore taken for granted with respect to Jesus as soon as he was admitted to be the Messiah.
Ib. s. 6.
But light-minded men, whose hearts are made dark with infidelity, care not what antic distortions they make in interpreting Scripture, so they bring it to any show of compliance with their own fancy and incredulity.
Why so very harsh a censure? What moral or spiritual, or even what physical, difference can be inferred from all men"s dying, this of one thing, that of another, a third, like the martyrs, burnt alive, or all in the same way? In any case they all die, and all pa.s.s to judgment.
Ib. c. 15.
With his "semi"-Cartesian, "semi"-Platonic, "semi"-Christian notions, Henry More makes a sad jumble in his a.s.sertion of chronochorhistorical Christianity. One decisive reference to the ascension of the visible and tangible Jesus from the surface of the earth upward through the clouds, pointed out in the writings of St. Paul or in the Gospel, beginning as it certainly did, and as in the copy according to Mark it now does, with the baptism of John, or in the writings of the Apostle John, would have been more effective in flooring Old Nic of Amsterdam [3] and his familiars, than volumes of such "maybe"s," "perhapses," and "should be rendered," as these.
Ib. viii. c. 2. c. 6.
I must confess our Saviour compiled no books, it being a piece of pedantry below so n.o.ble and divine a person, &c.
Alas! all this is woefully beneath the dignity of Henry More, and shockingly against the majesty of the High and Holy One, so very unnecessarily compared with Hendrick Nicholas, of Amsterdam, mercer!
Ib. x. c. 13. s. 5, 6.
A new sect naturally attracts to itself a portion of the madmen of the time, and sets another portion into activity as alarmists and oppugnants. I cannot therefore pretend to say what More might not have found in the writings, or heard from the mouth, of some lunatic who called himself a Quaker. But I do not recollect, in any work of an acknowledged Friend, a denial of the facts narrated by the Evangelists, as having really taken place in the same sense as any other facts of history. If they were symbols of spiritual acts and processes, as Fox and Penn contended, they must have been, or happened;--else how could they be symbols?
It is too true, however, that the positive creed of the Quakers is and ever has been extremely vague and misty. The deification of the conscience, under the name of the Spirit, seems the main article of their faith; and of the rest they form no opinion at all, considering it neither necessary nor desirable. I speak of Quakers in general. But what a lesson of experience does not this thirteenth chapter of so great and good a man as H. More afford to us, who know what the Quakers really are! Had the followers of George Fox, or any number of them collectively, acknowledged the mad notions of this Hendrick Nicholas? If not----
INQUIRY INTO THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
Part II. ii. c. 2.
Confutation of Grotius on the 17th chapter of the Apocalypse.
Has or has not Grotius been overrated? If Grotius applied these words ("magnus testis et historiarum diligentissimus inquisitor") to Epiphanius in honest earnest, and not ironically, he must have been greatly inferior in sound sense and critical tact both to Joseph Scaliger and to Rhenferd. Strange, that to Henry More, a poet and a man of fine imagination, it should never have occurred to ask himself, whether this scene, Patmos, with which the drama commences, was not a part of the poem, and, like all other parts, to be interpreted symbolically? That the poetic--and I see no reason for doubting the real--date of the Apocalypse is under Vespasian, is so evidently implied in the five kings preceding (for Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, were abortive emperors) that it seems to me quite lawless to deny it. That [Greek: Lateinos] is the meaning of the 666, (c. xiii. 18.) and the treasonable character of this, are both shown by Irenaeus"s pretended rejection, and his proposal of the perfectly senseless "Teitan" instead.
[Footnote 1: Folio. 1708.--Ed.]
[Footnote 2: "Decem dierum vix mihi est familia". Heaut. v. i.--Ed.]
[Footnote 3: Hendrick Nicholas and the Family of Love.--Ed.]