grateful to themselves, is peculiarly acceptable to that Being who loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity*.

Amongst other emblematical figures of Justice, she was sometimes exhibited to her votaries with a veil over her face, to denote that all personal considerations were to be laid aside, and that every cause was to be decided by it's genuine merits. She has been, with no less propriety, represented with the veil torn from before her eyes, attended by Religion; while the sun from above illuminates every thing around: thus intimating, that in the dispensation of justice the most reverential awe of the Supreme Being is essentially necessary, without any dark or artful concealment. Such a picture is in perfect agreement with that truly elegant description, in which the Psalmist has introduced her, as associating herself with Mercy, Truth, and Peace, in the closest bonds of friendship and affection t. But where is this lovely assemblage to be found, if not in this land of civil and religious liberty? With us justice is properly tempered with mercy, while the investigation of truth and the preservation of peace are the great objects, which it pursues with unwearied assiduity.

If through the intrigues of jarring and discordant interests the administration of the laws.

* Heb. i. 9. + Ps. lxxxix. 10.

instead of flowing pure as the crystal stream which gushes from the rock, should ever be polluted with the foul commixture of worldly politics or worldly party, how dreadful will our condition be? May the indulgent providence of God avert far from us so dire a disaster! And may those, to whom the supreme magistrate entrusts his authority, continue to exert their best endeavours to preserve civil order, to restrain the exorbitant passions of men, and to punish vice! Thus will the effects of their wise and virtuous conduct be happily experienced. Bad men will fear them; good men will honour and esteem them; God will bless them, and impartial posterity will resound their names with approbation and applause.

AN

INQUIRY

INTO THE

PROPHETIC CHARACTER

OF THE

ROMANS,

AS DESCRIBED IN DANIEL, CHAP. VIII. 23–25.

(Newcastle upon Tyne, 1792.)

VOL. I.

F

AN INQUIRY, &c.

THE HE correspondence subsisting between many facts, and the predictions prior to those facts as recorded in the books of the Old Testament, is too obvious to escape the notice, and too accurate not to excite the admiration, of every unprejudiced inquirer after truth. When we read of the descendents of Ishmael-that they were to be multiplied exceedingly, so as not to be numbered for multitude*; that they were to live in tribes, free and uncontrolled, like wild asses' coltst, their hand against every man,

* Gen. xvi. 10.

† Job, xi. 12. This animal is no beast of prey, and therefore a fit emblem not of the rapacity of the Arabs, but only of their roaming and vagrant kind of life. And, in this view, the passage in the book of Job is most happily descriptive of the manners of the Arabs, as they have been represented in all ages. Who hath sent out the wild ass free? Or who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass? Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. He scorneth the multitude of the city; neither regardeth he the crying of the driver. The range of the mountains is his pasture; and he searcheth after every green thing. xxxix. 5—8. See Jer. iii. 3.; Hosea, viii. 9.; and Pococke's Theological Works, II. 356.