CHAPTER XX.

Their majesty and divinity are proved by the daily fulfilment of their predictions.

IN the place of this adjourned proof, we now present rather to your notice the majesty of the Scriptures instead of their age; we prove them to be divine, even if the question of their antiquity be undecided. Nor does this have to be learnt by slow processes and distant proofs; your instructors,—the world, the age, and its events,— are before you. [65] Whatever is taking place was foretold; whatever is seen was heard of before. That the earth swallows up cities, that the sea engulphs islands, that foreign and civil wars rend states, that kingdoms press violently against kingdoms, that famine and pestilence and local calamities and wild beasts lay waste many places, that the humble are exalted and the lofty abased, that equity is diminishing and iniquity increasing, that zeal for all wholesome discipline grows lax, that even the functions of the seasons and the duties of the elements are out of course, that the natural shape of animals is distorted by monstrosities and prodigies,—all these things have been foreknown and written of. Whilst we suffer them we read of them, whilst we are examining them they are proved. The verification of a prophecy is, I take it, the proper proof of its divine origin. Hence, therefore, we have also a sure confidence in future events, regarding them as in fact already proved, because they were predicted at the same time with those which are being verified daily. The same voices pronounce them, the same writings note them, the same Spirit impels them. To prophecy foretelling the future, time is all one; with men it is naturally broken up into parts while it is being fulfilled, while the present is being assigned out of the future, and then the past out of the present. How do we err, I ask you, in believing in future fulfilments, when we have already learnt to believe in them through the verifications in the two other stages of time? [66]