The Sacred Calendar of Prophecy

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. RESPECTING THE FIGURATIVE AND SYMBOLICAL LANGUAGE OF PROPHECY. Prophecy, like Science, has its own peculiar language. For understanding the prophecies, tJiere- fore, as Sir Isaac Newton justly observes, we are, in the first place, to acquaint ourselves with the figurative language of the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. RESPECTING THE FIGURATIVE AND SYMBOLICAL LANGUAGE OF PROPHECY. Prophecy, like Science, has its own peculiar language. For understanding the prophecies, tJiere- fore, as Sir Isaac Newton justly observes, we are, in the first place, to acquaint ourselves with the figurative language of the prophets1. In the infancy of society, ideas were more copious than words. Hence, until language had enlarged itself, and in thus enlarging itself had acquired a greater degree of precision; men were obliged to employ the few words which they possessed, not only in their natural and direct sense, but likewise in an artificial and tropical sense. This circumstance has ever caused the phraseology of primitive or half-civilised nations to abound in metaphor and allegory. We are apt to talk of the figured language of the East, as if it were something peculiar to the Orientals: but such is very far from being the case. A North-American chieftain will harangue his tribe in phraseology, which is quite as tropical 1 Observ. on the Proph. of Daniel and St. John, p. 16. as any that has been used in the East: nor does this, in either instance arise from any inherent or peculiar taste for poetry. Sheer necessity alone originally led to the adoption of such a mode of speech: though, what sprang at first from poverty, was afterward retained as a graceful appendage to poetry. Why is it, that a Cherokee warrior talks of burying the hatchet and of lighting the pipe? Is it that the man is born a poet ? Nothing of the sort. His meagre language cannot supply him with .the various terms, which the precision of modern -diplomacy has rendered familiar to Europeans: and, therefore, he expresses the making of a peace by an allusion to certain well known ceremonies, which are attendant upon it. W...