Disc.  XII. p. 519.

Four such ruling kingdoms did arise.  The first, the Babylonian, was in being when the prophecy is represented to have been given.  It was followed by the Persian; the Persian gave way to the Grecian; the Roman closed the series.

This is stoutly denied by Eichhorn, who contends that the Mede or Medo-Persian is the second—­if I recollect aright.  But it always struck me that Eichhorn, like other learned Infidels, is caught in his own snares.  For if the prophecies are of the age of the first Empire, and actually delivered by Daniel, there is no reason why the Roman Empire should not have been predicted;—­for superhuman predictions, the last two at least must have been.  But if the book was a forgery, or a political poem like Gray’s Bard or Lycophron’s Cassandra, and later than Antiochus Epiphanes, it is strange and most improbable that the Roman should have escaped notice.  In both cases the omission of the last and most important Empire is inexplicable.

Ib. p. 521.

  Yet we have it on authority of Josephus, that Daniel’s prophecies were
  read publicly among the Jews in their worship, as well as their other
  received Scriptures.

It is but fair, however, to remember that the Jewish Church ranked the book of Daniel in the third class only, among the Hagiographic —­passionately almost as the Jews before and at the time of our Saviour were attached to it.

Ib. p. 522-3.

But to a Jewish eye, or to any eye placed in the same position of view in the age of Antiochus Epiphanes, it is utterly impossible to admit that this superior strength of the Roman power to reduce and destroy, this heavier arm of subjugation, could have revealed itself so plainly, as to warrant the express deliberate description of it.

‘Quaere’.  See Polybius.

Ib.

  We shall yet have to inquire how it could be foreseen that this
  fourth, this yet unestablished empire, should be the last in the line.

This is a sound and weighty argument, which the preceding does not, I confess, strike me as being.  On the contrary, the admission that by a writer of the Maccabaic aera the Roman power could scarcely have been overlooked, greatly strengthens this second argument, as naturally suggesting expectations of change, and wave-like succession of empires, rather than the idea of a last.  In the age of Augustus this might possibly have occurred to a profound thinker; but the age of Antiochus was too late to permit the Roman power to escape notice; and not late enough to suggest its exclusive establishment so as to leave no source of succession.

[Footnote 1:  Discourses on Prophecy, in which are considered its structure, use and inspiration, being the substance of twelve Sermons preached in the Chapel of Lincoln’s Inn in the Lecture founded by the Right Rev. William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester.  By John Davison, B.D. 2nd edit.  London, 1825.]