To point out that defect, which the writer fancies he has discovered, is the object of the present attempt; whether he be right or wrong, the reader must decide. The traveller who mistakes his road, only goes the farther astray the more he prolongs his journey. So the commentator on prophecy, who labours to force the text to a sense which it was not intended to bear, the more learning and ingenuity he employs, the more he becomes involved in intricacy and obscurity. In expounding the prophecies relating to the Jews, commentators have had chiefly in view their temporal and political state; whereas the writer conceives, that their moral and religious, that is, their spiritual condition, is really the main purport of those which relate to the restoration of Israel. Let any one read the description of the New Jerusalem in the 21st chapter of Revelations, and ask himself, if this can possibly apply to a literal city, or political state. It evidently cannot; and yet it must apply to some state of the Jews on earth; for the Messiah’s kingdom is always described as a kingdom on earth; and, therefore, if the description does not apply to their temporal, it must to their spiritual condition. The Messiah’s kingdom is allowed to be the chief subject of these prophecies; but if Christ be the Messiah, his kingdom is a spiritual one, and what relates to it must be spiritually understood. We marvel at the blindness which prevents the Jews from perceiving in prophecy the numerous intimations of a spiritual Messiah, all of which appear to us to have been distinctly fulfilled in the person of Christ; and yet that very blindness to their spirituality is what prevents ourselves from understanding other prophecies relating to the same subject. Let this be steadily and uniformly kept in view, and most of the difficulties will vanish; and an interpretation will unfold itself, not only historically minute, and chronologically accurate, but which is, moreover, as far as scriptural language admits, literal; for in what relates to spiritual affairs, the spiritual is the most literal interpretation. This, then, is the principle of the following exposition, and when it has been found necessary to correct the translation, it was not for the purpose of finding out more recondite meanings, but to bring back the words of the text to their ordinary and literal signification.