32 in accordance with the principle of a day for a year. “According to this, Nebuchadnezzar must have been mad and eat grass 2520 years.”[21] The limited life of man renders any such extension of times here positively absurd. So also with the other case, so much insisted on by the Day-day theorists, of Daniel fasting three weeks.[22] “Surely no one will contend that Daniel fasted twenty-one years.” No, but not to mention that this is not a prophecy at all, the circumstances of the case forbid it; and besides, in this place, we have the addition of יָמִים (weeks of _days_), “inserted expressly to bar any such interpretation as would assign to it, as its first sense, the meaning of years.”[23] It would, therefore, be most unwise[24] to argue from these exceptive passages, where there can be no danger of mistakes, against the application of the Year-day principle to the great leading prophecies in Daniel and John, regarding the glorious epochs of the church, and the times especially of the consummation. Nor can anyone rationally contend, that because these prophets have adopted this style of a day for a year, in predictions of the character above specified――predictions which form the chief part of their writings――that they are in no single instance to depart from that style――that they are never to lay aside {xx} the symbolic and assume the natural. Birks and Elliott, it may be noticed finally, find, in those passages where the Year-day theory is applicable, a purpose of _temporary concealment_; it being “the express design of God, that the church should be kept in the constant expectation of Christ’s advent,” and that, “yet as the time of the consummation drew near, there should be evidence of it sufficiently clear to each faithful inquirer.” “This,” adds the latter writer, “sets aside, from its very nature, the objections that have been drawn from sundry prophetic periods, known to be literally expressed, in prophecies where no such temporary concealment was intended.”[25] 3. Having seen that the symbolical character of the predictions in which the disputed times for the most part occur, affords a strong presumption, amounting as nearly as possible to proof, in favour of some such principle as that involved in the Year-day theory, we inquire next _whether there be any indications of such principle in Scripture_?