When we appeal to the historians, we hear much of a remote antiquity in the history of man: a more than twilight gloom pervades the earlier periods; and the distances are exaggerated, as objects appear large in a fog. We measure, too, by a minute scale. There is a tacit reference to the threescore and ten years of human life; and its term of a day appears long to the ephemera. We turn from the historians to the prophets, and find the dissimilarity of style indicating a different speaker. Ezekiel's measuring-reed is graduated into cubits of the temple. The vast periods of the short-lived historian dwindled down into weeks and days. Seventy weeks indicated to Daniel, in the first year of Darius, the time of the Messiah's coming. Three years and a half limit the term of the Mohammedan delusion. Seventeen years have not yet gone by since Adam first arose from the mould; nor has the race, as such, attained to the maturity of even early manhood. But while prophecy sums up merely weeks and days, when it refers to the past, it looks forward into the future, and speaks of a thousand years. Are scales of unequally graduated parts ever used in measuring different portions of the same map or section--scales so very unequally graduated, that, while the parts in some places expand to the natural size, they are in others more than three hundred times diminished? If not,--for what save inextricable confusion would result from their use,--how avoid the conclusion, that the typical scale employed in the same book by the same prophet represents similar quantities by corresponding parts, whether applied to times of outrage, delusion, and calamity, or set off against that long and happy period in which the spirit of evil shall be bound in chains and darkness, and the kingdom of Christ shall have come? And if such be the case--if each single year of the thousand years of the future represents a term as extended as each single year of the seventeen years of the past--if the present scene of things be thus merely in its beginning--should we at all wonder to find that the formation which represents it has laid down merely its few first strata?