The Holy Scripture - english version B.indd - Sabbat

Interpretation in post-Reformation Times.397in their rising and in their ruin, that the one exercises the power of the other, andthus, whatever be their meaning, that they are necessarily synchronous. He thentraces the position of the remaining visons of the Apocalypse as they stand relatedto these, showing which precede these central visions, which synchronise withthem, and which succeed them ; thus making out and establishing the connexionand order of the entire series of visions ; and this, as I have already stated, apartfrom all question of interpretation. Having gone through the book of Revelationthus, Mede next proceeds to expound and demonstrate its fulfilment in the eventsof history.I have said that Mede’s work on Revelation was approved and printed by thePuritan Parliament. Just at that time the Westminster Assembly of Divines drewup its most valuable Confession of Faith, a Confession subsequently acceptedby the national Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Here is a copy containing alist of the hundred Puritan divines who met in the Westminster Assembly, headedby the name of Dr. William Twisse, the prolocutor, who wrote the preface toMede’s work to which I have already referred. The Westminster Confession ofFaith endorsed the historical interpretation of prophecy, and declared theRoman pontiff to be the predicted “man of sin.” Weigh wellthe following words of the Westminster divines upon this subject, embodied inthe 25th chapter of their solemn declaration of the things they held and taught onthe authority of Scripture. “There is no other head of the Church but the Lord[Master] Jesus Christ [Yahshua the Messiah], nor can the Pope of Romein any sense be head thereof, but is that antichrist, thatman of sin and son of perdition, that exalts himself in theChurch against Christ [the Messiah] and all that is calledGod.”One of the divines who put his hand to this statement was the famous Puritanwriter, Dr. Thomas Goodwin, of London, and he has left us an exposition ofthe book of Revelation of which this is a copy. It belongs, I need hardly say,to the historical school, and describes the Apocalypse as “the story of Christ’skingdom.”Sir Isaac Newton followed Mede and the Puritan writers and further advancedthe comprehension of prophecy. He was a Christian as well as a philosopher,and took delight in studying and comparing the works and word of God. Thevastness of his genius led him to the most extensive views of things natural andDivine. He studied nature as a whole, history as a whole, chronology as a whole,and, in connexion with these, prophecy as a whole. While Mede directed hisattention especially to the Apocalypse. Newton investigated both it and thebook of Daniel, tracing out their connexions with the course of history andchronology, utilizing in the latter his unrivalled astronomical skill. Here is a copyof his “Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of John,”printed in the year 1733, six years after his death. In the first chapter Newton says:“Among the old prophets Daniel is most distinct in order of time, and easiest tobe understood, and therefore in those things which relate to the last times hemust be made the key to the rest.” In the third chapter he says: