CHAPTER II THE DEFENSE

As the most celebrated works in defense of Christianity have been called forth by attacks on the Christian religion, so the ablest works in defense of the Protestant interpretation of Prophecy have been evoked by the controversial war waged against it in recent times. Among these the works of Cunninghame, Faber, O’Sullivan, Birks, and Elliott occupy a foremost place. Of the masterly book written by the Rev. T. R. Birks in 1843, under the title “First EIements of Sacred Prophecy, including an examination of several recent expositions, and of the year-day theory,”Faber says, “the attacks of ‘modern speculatists’ have called forth a most able and seasonable work in which they have been triumphantly exposed with a force of demonstration scarcely equalled, never excelled. The ‘First Elements of Sacred Prophecy’ I should pronounce to be a book henceforth indispensable to every honest and laborious student of the predictions of Daniel and St. John.”1 “By his masterly work on the First Elements of Prophecy, Mr. Birks,”says Elliott, “has advanced the cause of truth, and shown himself its martel and hammer, against what I must beg permission to call the reveries of the Futurist.”2

The work of the Rev. Mortimer O’Sullivan, D.D., on “The Apostasy Predicted by St. Paul,”published in 1842, is an able answer to Dr. Todd’s lectures on the subject. Dedicated to “the Provost, the Fellows and the Students of the Dublin University,”it is marked by candour and learning, by its Christian spirit, by the beauty of its style, and the strength of its argument. 3

O’Sullivan writes as one who had deeply studied both the Word of God, and the character of Romanism. No tone of bitterness mars his pages. They pour their sunlight into the dark caverns of the papal system, and produce a profound conviction that that system is the great apostasy predicted in the Pauline prophecy of the “Man of Sin.”

The “Horae Apocalypticae” of Elliott, which may well be considered as the most important and valuable commentary on the Apocalypse which has ever been written, was also called into existence by Futurist attacks on the Protestant interpretation of prophecy. In his preface to the fifth edition Elliott says:—”When I first began to give attention to the subject some twenty years ago, it was the increasing prevalence among Christian men in our country of the Futurist system of Apocalyptic interpretation—a system which involved the abandonment of the opinion held by all the chief fathers and doctors of our Church respecting the Roman Popes and Popedom as the great intended anti-Christian power of Scripture- prophecy,—that suggested to me the desirableness and indeed necessity, of a more thoroughly careful investigation of the whole subject than had been made previously. For thereby I trusted that we might see God’s mind on the question; all engaged in that controversy being alike agreed as to the fact of its being expressed in this prophecy, rightly understood: and whether indeed in His view Popery was that monstrous evil, and the Reformation a deliverance to our Church and nation as mighty and blessed, as we had been taught from early youth to regard them. Even yet more does the importance of the work strike us at the present time, when infidelity has become notoriously prevalent among our educated men, and even from ordained ministers in our own church a voice has been raised somewhat pretentiously, with questionings of the truth of Christianity as a religion supernaturally revealed from heaven, and denial of all supernatural inspiration of the Christian Scriptures. For supposing the evidence in proof of the fulfilment of the Apocalyptic prophecy in the history of Christendom since St. John’s time to be satisfactory and irrefragable, we have herein a proof similarly irrefragable not only of the possibility but also of the fact of the divine supernatural inspiration of one book at least of Holy Scripture;—a fact annihilative of the sceptic’s doctrine as to the impossibility in the nature of things of such inspiration, and rendering more than prob- able, ‘a priori’ the idea of divine supernatural inspiration in other of its prophetic books also.”

Elliott’s Commentary was practically the work of the lifetime of one of the most learned and laborious expositors of modern times. Like Gibbon’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” to which it frequently refers, it stands alone in its sphere, as a monumental work of surpassing value. The ten thousand references it contains to ancient and modern works bearing on the subject elucidated greatly enhance its value. We may safely say that during the half century which has elapsed since its publication, no other work on historic lines of interpretation has appeared of equal importance.

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