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Many eminent expositors, in the early part of the present century, while the first Napoleon was waging successful war with the other powers of Europe, expressed their belief with much confidence, that the seventh angel had begun to sound. They were evidently mistaken. Christendom will not fail to hear the voice of the third woe.
You may draw what inferences you will. The matter is profoundly significant. Thirteen decades after the death of Confucius, Plato died in Greece; and about that time two men arose in China to carry forward, bring down, and be the expositors of, the work of the two great Teachers of the sixth and seventh centuries.
My judgment inclines to what seems a medium between two extremes, between the decision of some German philosophical expositors who are too critical, and the decision of some English practical preachers who are not critical enough.
In this attitude he appears immediately on the opening of the seals of that book, which all sober expositors consider as the symbol of God's purposes, especially of those "unvailed" in this prophetic book. When in the sixth chapter, the "four animals" say in succession, "Come and see," is Jesus Christ the only object to be seen? the exclusive object unvailed? or even always the primary object?
And yet when people listened to Jesus, they heard something ringing in His voice that they missed in the rabbis. They only set themselves up, in their highest claims, as being commentators upon, and the expositors of, the Law.
They must find other men to interpret for them the will of God. The scribes were the professional teachers of the day, the trained expositors of the Law. Most of them were Pharisees. They were of all men the most bitter enemies of Christ; they were jealous of his power; they were angered at his claims; and finally they had been goaded to desperation by their humiliating defeat at his hands.
The technical severance of the two elements of jurisprudence entailed some confusion and some inconvenience, and there were certain of the stubborner doctrines of the Civil Law with which neither the authors nor the expositors of the Edict had ventured to interfere.
But assuming the correctness of the phraseology of secular historians and Christian expositors, when in a popular sense they speak of the Roman empire as the object of penal inflictions; we by no means agree with the latter class of writers, when they limit the empire to the geographical boundaries as it existed at the time of this prediction.
The good would fain be free; and the bad too. From first to last the net is to all its inmates and to all alike a dreaded prison. I do not descry a solitary feature of resemblance between the parable at this stage and the doctrine regarding Church discipline which the expositors deduce from it.
Each one's own spiritual perception was his only guide. A hundred different expositors, therefore, might give as many different expositions of the same text." Rev. B. F. Barrett. Every natural object is the form and embodiment of some spiritual idea or principle; and therefore it is the most perfect expression or type or picture of that idea.
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