filled, are no other than a disguised mode of correspondence
to facilitate those objects: it served them as a cypher, or secret
alphabet. If they are not this, they are tales, reveries, and nonsense;
or at least a fanciful way of wearing off the wearisomeness of
captivity; but the presumption is, they are the former.

Ezekiel begins his book by speaking of a vision of cherubims, and of a
wheel within a wheel, which he says he saw by the river Chebar, in
the land of his captivity. Is it not reasonable to suppose that by the
cherubims he meant the temple at Jerusalem, where they had figures of
cherubims? and by a wheel within a wheel (which as a figure has always
been understood to signify political contrivance) the project or means
of recovering Jerusalem? In the latter part of his book he supposes
himself transported to Jerusalem, and into the temple; and he refers
back to the vision on the river Chebar, and says, (xliii- 3,) that this
last vision was like the vision on the river Chebar; which indicates
that those pretended dreams and visions had for their object the
recovery of Jerusalem, and nothing further.

As to the romantic interpretations and applications, wild as the dreams
and visions they undertake to explain, which commentators and priests
have made of those books, that of converting them into things which they
call prophecies, and making them bend to times and circumstances as far
remote even as the present day, it shows the fraud or the extreme folly
to which credulity or priestcraft can go.

Scarcely anything can be more absurd than to suppose that men situated
as Ezekiel and Daniel were, whose country was over-run, and in the
possession of the enemy, all their friends and relations in captivity
abroad, or in slavery at home, or massacred, or in continual danger of
it; scarcely any thing, I say, can be more absurd than to suppose that
such men should find nothing to do but that of employing their time and
their thoughts about what was to happen to other nations a thousand or
two thousand years after they were dead; at the same time nothing more
natural than that they should meditate the recovery of Jerusalem, and
their own deliverance; and that this was the sole object of all the
obscure and apparently frantic writing contained in those books.

In this sense the mode of writing used in those two books being forced
by necessity, and not adopted by choice, is not irrational; but, if we
are to use the book