3. Because, in their forced applications of the prophecies, Christians, finding themselves hard pressed by the simple and natural construction, forsake the literal, and take shelter in spiritual and mystical senses; fly to hyperboles and strained metaphors, and thus expound the true meaning and importance of the prophecies quite away; the intent whereof being to instruct men in so necessary a point of faith as that relating to the Messiah, it is reasonable to think they would be delivered in the most perspicuous and intelligible terms. Since ambiguous expressions (capable of such strange meanings as they pretend,) would be too slippery a foundation to build such a point of faith upon; would be of no use, or worse than none; would be unable to teach the clear truth, and apt to ensnare men into dangerous errors, by leaving too great a latitude for fanciful interpretations, and introducing darkness and confusion, and contradiction inexplicable. 4. Because, admitting (as indeed it never was, or can be denied) that many passages of scripture, and of prophetical scripture especially, must be figuratively taken; yet, we must always put a wide difference between a sense not just as the words in their first signification import, and a sense directly the contrary of what they import. And yet we complain that this latter is the sense which Christians labour to obtrude upon the gainsayers. We say, that a kingdom of this world, and not of this world; contempt and adoration; poverty and magnificence; persecution and peace; sufferings and triumph; a cross and a throne; the scandalous death of a private man upon a gibbet, and the everlasting dominion of a universal monarch, must be reconciled, and mean the self same thing, before the prophecies appealed to, can do their cause any service. Granting, then, the goodness of God (according to them,) to have been better than his word, by giving spiritual blessings, instead of temporal; yet, what will become of the truth of God, if He act contrary to his word, even when it would be for our advantage, if He misleads people by expressions, which, if they mean any thing at all, must mean what the Jews understand by them? In short, it seems to me, that if Providence has, in truth, any concern with the predictions of the Old Testament, it could not have taken more effectual care to justify the unbelief and obstinacy of the Jews, than by ordering matters so, that the life and death of Jesus should be so exactly, and so entirely, the very reverse of all those ideas under which their prophets had constantly described, and the Hebrew nation as constantly expected of their Messiah, and his coming; and to suppose that the Supreme Being meant to describe and point out such a person as Jesus by such descriptions of the Messiah as are contained in the Old Testament, is certainly substantially to accuse him of the moat unjustifiable prevarication, and mockery of his creatures.