these tribes, and by that knowledge they are to be exalted. But this theory gives us another standard of the nation's greatness—a standard which no part of Scripture recognises, least of all the sure word of prophecy, the light in the dark place. This theory darkens the whole prophetic Word, perverting events and inverting times and seasons. It denies Israel's present guilt, and lowers our ideas of Israel's coming glory. It puts a Gentile King and Queen in the place of the nation's own Messiah, under whose sceptre alone it is to enjoy peace, blessedness and holy greatness. It rejects the apostle's symbol of the olive tree, in Rom. xi.; Not merely confounding the Jewish and the Gentile dispensation, denying that the once good olive tree has for a season become evil, and its branches cut off to make room for the grafts of the wild olive tree.
This is emphatically and pre-eminently the time of the wild olive tree, whereas this theory not only confuses the wild olive with the good, but denies that it is the grafted branches of the wild olive tree that are now bearing fruit and receiving blessing.
When the dispensation of the wild olive, or Gentile, shall end, then, but not till then, shall the blessing and the glory return to the good olive—that is, to "all Israel."
Let us take the Word of God simply as we find it. Let us beware of fanciful identifications, which, even were they true, are not worth the stress laid upon them. Suppose I could prove, not by conjecture, but by registered genealogies, that I belong to the tribe of Ephraim or Issachar, what does it profit me? Will it make me a holier man to know that I belong to those northern tribes against which the Lord, when here, pronounced His darkest woes, as primarily and pre-eminently His rejectors. "Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida! It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the Day of Judgment than for thee."
Capernaum, the representative of the Ten Tribes, had been condemned for refusing the Lord of Glory before Jerusalem was cast away.
To esteem external national prosperity as God's special mark of favour, is to carnalise all the prophets, and to
