destruction, will be the east, perhaps the Holy Land (v. 45); perhaps the city of Jerusalem. It never entered my imagination, however, that Antichrist would receive his death-blow from the hands of those kings of the south or of the north. If anything be explicit in prophecy, it is that this wicked power will be destroyed "by our Lord himself, and by the brightness of his coming." The king of the south will certainly be subdued by Antichrist. It is not said so expressly that he will subdue the king of the north: on the contrary, the king of the north comes against him a second time. For, after the entire subjugation of Egypt, Lybia, and Ethiopia, tidings out of the east and out of the north shall trouble him. "The consequence will be, that he will go forth with great fury to destroy," and, as it should seem, with success. For "he will plant the curtains of his pavillion between the seas in the mountain of the glory of holiness." But, notwithstanding this, though he will get the better of these alarms from the east and from the north, and establish himself in the holy mountain, " yet he shall come to his end, and none shall help him." None will be able to afford him help against the mighty arm which will be at last stretched forth against him. The word which, in the 45th verse, is rendered palace (for which I have put pavillion), is, in this place, of very doubtful meaning. It occurs, indeed, frequently in the Hebrew Scriptures as a verb; it signifies to gird "or bind close to the body," as a new, a close garment," particularly the ephod "of the High Priest; and in the feminine for the girdle of the ephod." In the Chaldee dialect, it signifies a royal pavillion. Symmachus must have referred it to a root of the Syriac dialect, which signifies" a pair of horses harnessed to a chariot, or a pair of oxen yoked to a plough." But to this Syriac root it bears but a remote resemblance. As to the desire of women, "or, as I render it, the pleasures of women," I confess I have no great doubt about it. This, sense I take it, is the most natural sense of the original words. Though the construction is such, that the passage, without something of paraphrase, must appear obscure in any translation, and carry that very obscurity which you describe, that it will look as if something were wanting, and yet in the original nothing is wanting. This I will endeavour to explain. "And of the God of his fathers he will make no account, Nor use any discretion in the pleasure of women.” For these two English expressions of mine," make account" and "use discretion," we have in the original only one verb, introduced only in the first clause. That one verb signifies either "to make account of, or to use discretion, in according to the object to which it is applied; applied to God, it signifies to make account of," or to regard; applied to the indulgence of the appe tites, it signifies "to use discretion in." But as we have no word in English to take in both these meanings, the Hebrew verb must be rendered by different expressions in the different clauses, or the translation will be very obscure. Had I rendered thus "And of the God of his fathers we will make no account, Nor in the pleasures of women, you would naturally have thought that I had omitted something of consequence in the second line; and had I rendered thus "And of the God of his fathers he will make no account, Nor, of the pleasures of women, you would not have suspected that anything was omitted in the second line, but the meaning conveyed to your mind by the translation would have been directly the reverse of the meaning of the original. For you would have conceived the sense to be, that this wilful king would not be addicted to the pleasures of women; whereas, the real sense of the original is, that this wilful king will not be intelligent, will not make use of his intellect, either about God, or about the pleasures of women. He will disown and defy the God of his fathers, and he will wallow in the gratification of lust: and this being said, not of an individual, but of a government, describes a government that will patronize atheism and profane marriage. It is a very common idiom of the Hebrew language to make one verb serve for two clauses of a sentence, though its sense is so different in the two as to require two different verbs in any other language. You will naturally ask, if the construction of the passage be clear and obvious, whence is it that the translations are so different? The truth I take to be, that the translations differ less than you suppose. Theodotion's translation, which, since the time of Origen, has been in use in the Christian church, with Origen's emendations, instead of the version of the LXX, gives the same sense of the passage as I have done. For the Greek verb seems to be used by Theodotion as a word that would answer to the Hebrew verb in both its senses, as, indeed, by the etymology which Plato gives of it, it may; and yet the manner of using it is such as no Greek writer would have adopted, except a translator copying (from a desire to translate exactly,) the idioms of a foreign language. Aquila's translation of this passage, as it is quoted by Jerome, appears to have been the very same with Theodotion. The Latin of the Vulgate evidently describes a lascivious character. I have not the Polyglot at hand, but it is not long since I consulted it, and, if my recollection does not much deceive me, the Syriac and the old versions express lasciviousness, a profanation of marriage. As to modern translators, it is no uncommon thing with them to perplex plain texts, and to differ from one another in a degree that leads those who are unacquainted with the original to sus pect that it must be quite inexplicable; and the reason I take to be this-hardly any one of them takes up a text of prophecy without having formed some previous opinion about the application of it. And then, instead of attending to the most obvious and natural construction, they seek for one which may be consistent with the application they wish to establish, or inconsistent with some other they wish to confute. Thus they are all put to their shifts-those of different persuasions are put to different shiftsand they contrive to impose the most opposite meanings upon the same text. The true method would be the reverse of this. We should first seek the natural grammatical sense of the words, without doing violence to the usual idioms of the language; then we should inquire what application of the prophecy will be most consistent with the sense of the words previously determined. If we could all lay our prejudices so far aside as to adhere resolutely to this method, innumerable imagined difficulties would disappear. I cannot but lament that you have not some knowledge of the Hebrew language: it is by no means a difficult attainment. With a knowledge of the original, a variety of translations may be consulted with great advantage; but without a knowledge of the original, you will often be apt to misapprehend the translator's meaning; and the more literal the translations, the more this will be the case; because, though the words may be Greek, or Latin, or English, the idiom will be Hebrew, and, for that reason, what is perspicuous in the original, will become obscure in a literal translation; and the only remedy for this obscurity is to go back to the original language. The passage we have been considering I take to be one remarkable instance of this. Had I first studied the passage in the Greek translations, I question whether I should ever have fallen upon the true meaning of Theodotion's or Aquila's Greek, if I could not have compared it with the Hebrew text. But from the comparison I derive this satisfaction, I see that Theodotion and Aquila understood the passage as I do (I speak of the grammatical sense of the words), and have only expressed the sense obscurely, by aiming at an exactness of translation, which is seldom to be attained without some loss of perspicuity; and I think there are many passages in the Septuagint which a very good Greek scholar, ignorant of Hebrew, will but imperfectly comprehend. I think in three months, with a well printed Hebrew Bible, and Mr. Parkhurst's Lexicon, you might make considerable proficiency; and I am sure it would be a source of great satisfaction to yourself, and evidently of public service. I think your progress since the year 94 has been very considerable indeed. But you must not suffer yourself to feel any disappointment if the world should pay you less attention than is due to the importance of the subject and to your manner of treating it. Is it not prophesied, that there will be a general inattention to the signs of the times till the last period draws very near? Bromley, July 25th, 1797. Of the Little Horn of the 4th Beast, chap. 7. The horns of animals are their principal weapons of offence and defence; hence, the horns of these typical beasts of prophecy represent the alliances from which the States, denoted by the beast, derive their supplies of military forces. Accordingly, in the Apocalypse, the angel tells St. John that the ten horns (chap. xvii. 12, 13) are ten kings (i. e., kingdoms), which, for a certain time, give their power to the beast; i. e., serve him as his auxiliaries. Now, this little horn of Daniel's fourth beast, which arises" among" the other ten, and "after" them (chap. vii. 8 and 24), though it was different from the rest, was still a horn; that is, some independent kingdom, or some state under a government of its own, which, for some time, contributed to the military strength of the beast. This horn, therefore, cannot be the pope, for the pope was not the head of any independent foreign state, which, in the latter times of the Roman empire, furnished a quota of auxiliaries. Indeed, those interpreters who expound the little horn of the pope, are inconsistent with themselves; for they likewise make the pope the seventh head of the ten-horned beast in the Apocalypse. But that ten-horned beast is unquestionably the same with this ten-horned beast of Daniel, and it is impossible that the same thing should be both a head and a horn of the same beast. The pope, therefore, cannot be a horn in Daniel, and a head in the Apocalypse-the beast in one and the other being the same. Indeed, the pope is neither horn nor head-not a horn, for the reasons given; not a head, for the pope never was, in any period, the secular sovereign of the Roman empire. We must look, therefore, for this little horn among those foreign independent states, which, having been for some time in alliance with the Roman empire, and in that character horns of the beast, at last turned their arms against it. If we should find eleven such states in all, and among them one, at first inconsiderable in comparison of the rest, but rising afterwards to power and consequence, and conquering three of the other ten, this will be likely to be the little horn; and if, in the progress of its history, it should exhibit the other parts of the character of that impious power, its claim to the title will be indisputable. Now, the auxiliaries of the Roman empire in its decline, which at last dismembered it, and entirely overthrew the western branch, were these:-1. Visigoths-2. Ostragoths-3. Huns-4. Alens-5. Vandals-6. Saxons-7. Burgundians-8. Heruli-9. SueviVOL. VI.-July, 1834. D 10. Lombards-11. Franks. Of these, the Franks, at first, whether as allies or as enemies of the empire, were by far the most inconsiderable: they settled in the most distant part of Gaul, where they remained for some centuries quiet and unnoticed. But all the time their power was gradually growing, and, in the beginning of the 9th century, it was become so great, that they conquered the Lombards, and drove them out of Italy. In process of time, they mastered the whole of Gaul, uniting to their own dominion the kingdom of the Visigoths in the south, and the midland kingdom of the Burgundians. Thus having reduced three of the ten horns-namely, the kingdom of the Lombards, in Italy; the kingdom of the Visigoths, in Gaul; and the kingdom of the Burgundians-these Franks, or French, began to take the shape of the little horn, but were not noticed as such for many centuries, as it has been only since the Revolution that they began to play the pranks described in the 25th verse, which unequivocally mark the character. S. ROCHESTer. HISTORICAL NOTICES AND DESCRIPTIONS OF CHRISTIAN Second Class.-ANGLO-SAXON SPECIMENS. NO. V. STOW CHURCH, REPTON CHURCH, ETC. To the Editor of the British Magazine. SIR,-The accompanying views of Stow Church are intended to characterize the exterior architectural features, and those of the interior of the chancel. In neither of these will the critical antiquary recognise any decisive and marked peculiarities of, what we are endeavouring to ascertain-the Saxon style; nor will he be inclined to admit that the arrangement of a transept, in a parochial church, is likely to have been of Saxon design. Most of the provincial sacred edifices, built by that people in England, were small in size, and plain and simple in their different members and details; whereas that of Stow-at least the edifice now standing-has a nave, choir, transept, and central tower, also three door-ways of ornamented workmanship-viz. at the west end, and on the south and north sides of the nave. The arches of these are semicircular, and adorned with the chevron, or zigzag ornament. That of the west end has three columns, on each side, retiring obliquely from the outer wall. Four of these have plain shafts, whilst the other two are sculptured with a zigzag fillet ornament. As shewn in the exterior view, there are flat pilaster buttresses |