relation to other prophecies, is left in obscurity.  The experience of those who have busied themselves with the computation of these dates teaches, not that we should wholly withdraw ourselves from inquiries of this kind, but that to pursue them in a confident and dogmatic spirit, as if we had been admitted to the council-chamber of heaven, and had there learned the exact day and hour on which the papal throne must fall, or our Lord reappear on earth, is a mark, not of wisdom, but of weakness and folly.

5.  In the second and larger class of prophecies relating to the last days, the element of time, and especially that of succession in time, is either wholly wanting, or is indicated in only a vague and general way.

Examples of this class of prophecies are almost innumerable.  A remarkable specimen is found in the fourth chapter of Isaiah, viewed in connection with the preceding context.  The prophet’s position is that of his own day.  He writes at a time when heavy calamities are impending over his countrymen.  With these calamities he begins:  “Behold the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth take away from Judah and Jerusalem the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water, the mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient, the captain of fifty, and the honorable man, and the counsellor, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator.”  Chap. 3:1-3.  So he proceeds, in terms which must apply primarily to the Babylonish captivity, to the end of the third chapter, which closes with the terrible denunciation:  “Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty men in war.  And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she, being desolate, shall sit upon the ground” (ver. 25, 26).  To complete the picture of desolation, it is added in the beginning of the fourth chapter:  “And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel:  only let us be called by thy name to take away our reproach.”  The obvious meaning of this last threatening is, that the mass of the men shall perish in war, so that the surviving women cannot find husbands.  Seven of them, therefore, ask of one man the privilege of being called each his wife, while they offer to forego all the usual advantages of that relation.  Thus far the prophet proceeds in a strain of threatening.  But now, with the single formula, “in that day,” there is a sudden transition to promise, and promise of such a character that it must cover the whole future period of the Messiah’s kingdom:  “In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel” (chap. 4:2); and so he goes on to describe the glory of the latter days, when the Lord, having “purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of burning,” “will