Ambrose Lisle Phillipps

“ It is evident that for the human mind to dwell upon the future is not only a necessary result of the order of God, strictly according to the nature of things, but the highest duty and interest of man, strictly reasonable, inasmuch as it relates to what in its own nature is far more important, than anything that is present, or even the whole assemblage of what is recorded in the history of the past. ”

“ I beheld, till thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days sat: his garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like unto clean wool; his throne like flames of fire; the wheels of it like a burning fire. ”

“ Hence the whole history of the human race may be compared to a sublime epic, in which the contending powers are, in the invisible world, Almighty God with His blessed angels against Satan and the rebel angels; in the visible world, Christ and Antichrist ”

“ No doubt the past must ever occupy a large portion of human thought; a human faculty has been created to exercise itself upon it the memory: and as we dwell upon it we feel in turn joy or sorrow, remorse or satisfaction, hope or fear. It contains, as Revelation assures us, the catalogue of those acts, which, whether good or bad, are to decide our future and everlasting destiny. The past then in its own nature must exert a stronger influence over the human mind, and excite deeper feelings, than the present ever can. ”

“ All Protestants, as far as I know, admit that the little horn of the Macedonian he-goat did, in point of fact, not appear until after the breaking up of the Roman empire: I therefore conclude, peremptorily, that the little horn described by the Prophet as issuing out of the Roman beast is the little horn of the Macedonian he-goat, consequently that the Roman little horn is to be looked for within the precincts of the Eastern, not the Western Roman empire, that is, in other words, within the geographical limits of the domains of the Macedonian he-goat. ”

“ To satisfy, then, the cravings of mankind to dive into the future, God has given prophecy, and, like every other Divine gift, we ought to receive it with thankfulness and humility. It is no part of our present object to discuss the question of true as distinguished from apocryphal prophecy, or even that of the general test of true prophecies; we assume throughout the truth of the prophecies recorded in the Bible, and accepted by all Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant. ”

“ Peter : "We have also a more sure word of prophecy, to which ye do well to give heed, as unto a light shining in a dark place, until the day shine forth" (2 Peter i. 19–21) ; that is, until the event manifest its fulfilment; while we learn, from the same words, that the great object of prophecy, separate from that still higher one of serving as an evidence of revelation, is "to shine as a light in a dark place;" ”

“ And He gave him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues, shall serve him; his power is an everlasting power that shall not be taken away: and his kingdom that shall not be destroyed."
In these sublime and mysterious words, does the Prophet Daniel lay open to us the whole mystery of God, containing the prediction of all the principal events from his own time even unto the end of the world. ”

“ Of these two great events we may say, that as, on the one hand, Almighty God has made every human event subservient to His great and glorious designs, manifested and accomplished in the incarnation of his Son, that is, in the coming of Christ; so, on the other, man's great enemy, Satan, has endeavoured to render the same subservient to that grand scheme which he devised to counteract the work of God, namely, the coming of Antichrist. ”

“ But, besides these four empires, the Prophet speaks of a fifth, which he clearly intimates should be different from all the rest, which should be the kingdom set up by Almighty God Himself; and that its first establishment should take place before the expiration of the period allotted to the four empires, which we have just named. This is revealed to us in the forty-fourth verse of the second chapter of Daniel in these words: " But, in the days of those kingdoms, the God of Heaven shall set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed." ”

“ The limited mind of the creature cannot know what is in the future; but God, in whom all that is, lives, and moves, and has its being, God knows what is in the future, because He knows, and must know, all things. Man may guess some of the things that are in the future, because, reasoning from what has passed, he may calculate upon certain results springing from certain causes ”

“ Jerome then proceeds in his commentary to the fourth beast. "'After this,' saith the Prophet, ' I beheld in the vision of the night, and lo! a fourth beast, terrible and wonderful, and exceeding strong; it had great iron teeth . . . . . and it had ten horns: I considered the horns, and behold another little horn sprung out of the midst of them: and three of the first horns were plucked up at the presence thereof: and behold eyes like the eyes of a man were in this horn, and a mouth speaking great things.' This fourth beast signifieth the Roman empire, which now governs the whole world ”

“ The lioness would signify a mighty people, emerging from the desert of barbarism, and the wings that aided it in its flight would signify the arts and appliances of civilization, which enabled it to soar above the low and grovelling pursuits of savage life, while the nature and character of the lioness would express the moral and physical qualities of that people. ”

“ God, then, knows all things, whether past or future; man is ignorant of the future, but he feels himself urged on to the consideration of it. What is he to do? From the earliest moments of human history God Himself has given us an answer to the question, in revealing to men from time to time the secrets of the future. ”

“ So also students of prophecy may have erred in supposing that the events of their own day had any place at all in prophecy, at least any distinct and definite place, and yet that ought not discourage others from considering other events in their possible relation to prophecy. The only conclusion, that it seems to me may be fairly drawn from any such past failures of interpretation, is, not that we should not endeavour to find out any such relation between what is going on in the world and prophecy ”

“ Jerome rejects this as utterly untenable,—the fourth beast referring to the Roman empire, and not to the kingdoms into which Alexander's empire was subdivided; and, after declaring this, he winds up with these remarkable words: "Let us therefore say, what hath been handed down to us by all ecclesiastical writers: that in the latter days of the world, when the Roman empire shall have been destroyed, ten kings shall arise, who shall parcel out the Roman territory between themselves: after which an eleventh king shall arise, small in his beginnings, who shall subdue three of those other kings." ”

“ And we read in the Prophet Amos (Amos ix.) : 'Though he go down to the depth of the sea, there will I command the dragon, and he shall devour him?' But as for the four beasts that arose from the sea, and were different one from the other, if we listen to the angel's interpretation, we may know the meaning of the vision. These four great beasts, says he, are four kingdoms, that shall arise from the earth. ”

“ And though, at the moment, in the application of particular prophecies to particular events, great mistakes may very naturally be made, still it will be found that there was much that was valuable connected with the labours, even of those who blundered in some of their conclusions, inasmuch as they laid down principles of interpretation, which others afterwards found to be of the greatest value, not only in ascertaining truth, but in rectifying their blunders. ”

“ Under this conviction, we find that good men in all ages of the Church, both before and after the coming of our Saviour, have made prophecy the subject of their studies, while they endeavoured by means of its light to read the purposes of God in what was passed and accomplished, as well as to enter into those same Divine purposes in what still remained as yet unfulfilled. ”

“ In a word, if a part of this mechanism be what is termed free will, that is, a power vested by its Maker in the creature of acting according to or against His own Divine will, which power, He assures us, was granted to the creature for a moral purpose, namely, for rendering it fit or unfit to be hereafter associated with Himself ”

“ This prophecy is, perhaps, one of the most important in the whole book, as it gives us the clue for calculating the period when Antichrist shall perish, and the sanctuary of God, that is, the Holy Land and Jerusalem, if we understand it literally, shall be freed from his pollutions, and if we take it mystically, when the Holy Catholic Church shall be delivered from the defiling contact of his impious conflict. ”

“ In this sense the politician, the philosopher, the poet, may be said to prophesy. In this sense, aided, too, no doubt, by the superior craft and experience of evil spirits, as the holy fathers of the Catholic Church abundantly prove, the heathen oracles foretold, and foretold correctly, many events. ”

“ All commentators agree that the four beasts signified the four great monarchies or empires, which were destined to arise on the earth, successively holding dominion over all nations. In fact this interpretation was revealed to Daniel along with the vision itself, as we find stated in the same chapter, from the 16th to the 28th verse. ”

“ In maintaining this theory, in opposition to our's, which asserts the identity of the two little horns, Protestants seem to forget that the Roman beast must represent the whole Roman empire, and not alone the western half of it ”

“ The 'three rows' then in the mouth of the Persian beast, and in the teeth thereof, must signify three kingdoms—those of the Babylonians, the Medes, and the Persians, which were fused into one kingdom. And whereas the prophet continues, ' And thus they said unto it: Arise, devour much flesh; ' that may refer to the period of Assuerus, whom the Septuagint names Artaxerxes, when Aman exhorted him in one day to slay all the Jews. ”