Now what should be the result on our minds? What effect should such facts have on ourselves? Should they not strengthen faith and confirm us in a simple, childlike, unquestioning trust in the inspired word of the living God? Who but God Himself could have foretold either to Daniel or John the rise and decay of the Ottoman Empire? It is God’s own word, then, with which we are dealing when we study Holy Scripture. There may be things in it completely beyond all power of human calculation, as the history of the Ottoman Empire was utterly beyond the human calculation of either Daniel or John. But God’s truth does not depend on our power of calculation. It is beyond us altogether, infinite, eternal, divine; and our part is, whether we can fit it together or not, to receive the whole as God has given it, and as weak, ignorant, short-lived, and short-sighted creatures, to receive His will as He has revealed it, into our hands, and hearts, and say, ‘I believe God, that it shall be as it was said unto me.’ IV. THE FROGS. IN opening our subject in the last lecture, I said that there were three questions to be considered: 1. Has the present state of Turkey been foretold in prophecy? 2. Does it teach us any lessons respecting our spiritual position? and 3. Does it throw any light on the blessed hope of our Lord’s return? The first of these questions we examined in the last lecture, and surely it was proved that in the symbol of the drying up of the Euphrates we have a most remarkable symbolic prophecy of the exhaustion of the Ottoman power. To-day we are to pass on to the second question: Is our own spiritual position affected by the exhaustion of Turkish power? Now I can quite understand the thought that has no doubt occurred to many of you, that the two things can have no possible connexion with each other, for there seems to our mind to be no possible connexion of even the most remote character between the Turkish Empire and our own spiritual life. We may well say, ‘What have we to do with the Turks, or the Turks with us in our own daily, private walk with God?’ It may surprise some of you when I say that, although no man can explain the reason of the connexion, I believe it to be very intimate, and that the religious life of modern Christendom is in a most remarkable manner bound up with the decline of the Turkish Empire.