_Dan. 12:8, 9—_“And I heard, but I understood not; then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the issue of these things? And he said, Go thy way, Daniel; for the words are shut up and sealed till the time of the end”; _2 Pet. 1:19_—prophecy is “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawn”—not until day dawns can distant objects be seen; _20—_“no prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation”—only God, by the event, can interpret it. Sir Isaac Newton: “God gave the prophecies, not to gratify men’s curiosity by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own providence, not the interpreter’s, be thereby manifested to the world.” Alexander McLaren: “Great tracts of Scripture are dark to us till life explains them, and then they come on us with the force of a new revelation, like the messages which of old were sent by a strip of parchment coiled upon a bâton and then written upon, and which were unintelligible unless the receiver had a corresponding bâton to wrap them round.” A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 23—“Archilochus, a poet of about 700 B. C., speaks of ‘a grievous _scytale_’—the _scytale_ being the staff on which a strip of leather for writing purposes was rolled slantwise, so that the message inscribed upon the strip could not be read until the leather was rolled again upon another staff of the same size; since only the writer and the receiver possessed staves of the proper size, the _scytale_ answered all the ends of a message in cypher.” Prophecy is like the German sentence,—it can be understood only when we have read its last word. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 48—“God’s providence is like the Hebrew Bible; we must begin at the end and read backward, in order to understand it.” Yet Dr. Gordon seems to assert that such understanding is possible even before fulfilment: “Christ did not know the day of the end when here in his state of humiliation; but he does know now. He has shown his knowledge in the Apocalypse, and we have received ‘The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show unto his servants, even the things which must shortly come to pass’_ (Rev. 1:1)_.” A study however of the multitudinous and conflicting views of the so-called interpreters of prophecy leads us to prefer to Dr. Gordon’s view that of Briggs, Messianic Prophecies, 49—“The first advent is the resolver of all Old Testament prophecy; ... the second advent will give the key to New Testament prophecy. It is ‘the Lamb that hath been slain’_ (Rev. 5:12)_ ... who alone opens the sealed book, solves the riddles of time, and resolves the symbols of prophecy.”