I challenge Bishop Watson to produce a plausible explanation of the passage according to the sense of the church. It may not be improper to observe, that Clemens Alexandrinus, many of the fathers, Calmet, and other persons of great knowledge, have flatly denied the application of the weeks of Daniel to Jesus. Those who espouse your cause lose sight of the context of Daniel, they forget chronology, and evince to what a pitch of delusion their minds have arrived. This is the famous prophecy that silenced the Jewish rabbins of Venice; it is of a pattern with Daniel's four beasts; the fourth is also a story of Antiochus Epiphanes and Judas who slays the beast. Judas is the son of man coming in clouds; he is the person of whom the prophets speak, and who has most ridiculously been distorted to Jesus Christ. This farrago of prophecies seems to have been the production of Esdras or some very late writer; and I am not sure, but the doctrine of the Pythagorean millennium gave rise to some of the expressions in both writers, about the beasts: they seem to have sprung from the same origin with those of the Apocalypse; and with the four Indian horses, they crept among the Jews, together with many other Chaldean mythological ideas: the Ancient of Ancients appears in his fiery car as Osiris triumphant, or Chreeshna conquering Chiven; the books are opened before him, as his kingdom is everlasting, like that of Vishnu with the Vedams. But visions so ridiculous as that of Daniel deserve not our consideration; whatever be their source they are but reveries, and may serve to amuse idle people in their ridiculous speculations about the world's end. Like Swedenburgh, men may dream, and interpret their own dreams, and like him have the mortification to be laughed at for the non-accomplishment of their predictions. We have had of late another Daniel in Mr. Brothers; he too saw beasts, and, what is more, he understood their meaning; but unfortunately we are not Jews, and he is cruelly imprisoned in a madhouse.