of
opportunities, to think more than to read; and therefore it is, with
very due diffidence, that as far as others and their judgments are
concerned, I can ever hope to claim originality or novelty. To my own
conscience, however, these things are reversed; for contemplation has
produced that as new to my own mind, which may be old to others deeper
read, and has thought those ideas original, which are only so to its own
fancy. Very little, then, must such as I reasonably hope to add on
Prophetical Interpretation; the Universal Wisdom of two millenaries
cannot be expected to gain any thing from the passing thought of a
hodiernal unit: if any fancies in my brain are really new, and hitherto
unbroached upon the subject, it can scarcely be doubted but that they
are false; so very little reliance do principles of catholicity allow to
be placed upon "private interpretations."

With thus much of apology to those alike who will find, and those who
will not find, any thing of novelty in my notions, I still do not
withhold them. By here a little and there a little, is the general mind
instructed: it would be better for the world if every mighty tome really
contributed its grain.

The prophecies of Holy Writ appear to me to have one great peculiarity,
distinguishing them from all other prophecies, if any, real or
pretended; and that peculiarity I deferentially conceive to be this:
that, whereas all human prophecies profess to have but one fulfilment,
the divine have avowedly many true fulfilments. The former may indeed
light upon some one coincidence, and may exult in the accident as a
proof of truth; the latter bounds as it were (like George Herbert's
sabbaths) from one to another, and another, through some forty
centuries, equally fulfilled in each case, but still looking forward
with hope to some grander catastrophe: it is not that they are loosely
suited, like the Delphic oracles, to whatever may turn up, but that
they, by a felicitous adaptation, sit closely into each era which the
Architect of Ages has arranged. Pythonic divination may be likened to a
loose bag, which would hold and involve with equal ease almost any
circumstance; biblical prophecy to an exact mould, into which alone,
though not all similar in perfection, its own true casts will fit: or
again, in another view of the matter, accept this similitude: let the
All-seeing Eye be the centre of many concentric circles, beholding
equally in perspective the circumfer