and some prophecies, like a master key,
open several successive events, and thus show that the same mind planned
both locks and key. When the prediction is fulfilled all mystery
vanishes, and men see plainly that thus it was written; that is to say,
men who look; for the man who will not open his eyes will never see
anything that it concerns him to know. But the man who thinks that it
concerns him so much to know what God will do with the world a hundred
years after he is dead, that unless the prophecies of the Bible are all
made plain to him, he will neither read God's word, nor obey his law,
may go on his own way. We expound no mysteries to such persons; for it
is written, "None of the wicked shall understand."

As to the objection taken from the symbolical language of prophecy, and
which seems to a number of our modern critics so weighty that they
remove to the purely mythologic ground everything "couched in symbolical
language," and account nothing to be prediction unless "literal history
written in advance"--I would merely ask, How is it possible to reveal
heavenly things to earth-born men but by earthly figures? Do you know a
single word in your own, or any other language to express a spiritual
state, or mental operation, that is not the name of some material state,
or physical operation, used symbolically? Heart, soul, spirit, idea,
memory, imagination, inclination, etc., every one of them a figure of
speech--a symbol. Nay, is there a letter in your own, or in any other
alphabet, that was not originally a picture of something? I demand to
know in what way God or man could teach you to know anything you have
never seen, but by either showing you a picture of it, or telling you
what it is like? That is simply by type or symbol; these are the only
possible media of conveying heavenly truth, or future history to our
minds. When, therefore, the skeptic insists that prophecy be given
literally, in the style of history written in advance, he simply
requires that God would make it utterly unintelligible. We can gather
clear and definite ideas from the significant hieroglyphics of
symbolical language, but the literalities of history written in advance
would be worse to decipher than the arrow-headed inscriptions of
Nineveh. Just imagine to yourself Alexander the Great reading Guizot,
instead of Daniel; or Hildreth, as being less mysterious than Ezekiel;
and meeting, for instance, such a record as this: "In the year of
Chr