SCHEME

OF

PROPHETIC ARRANGEMENT

OF THE

REV. EDWARD IRVING AND MR. FRERE

CRITICALLY EXAMINED;

WITH SOME REMARKS ON THE PRESENT ASPECT OF AFFAIRS IN REFERENCE TO THE FULFILMENT OF

PROPHECY.

BY WILLIAM CUNINGHAME, Esq.

OF LAINSHAW, IN THE COUNTY OF AYR.

GLASGOW:

Printed at the University Press,

FOR THOMAS CADELL, HATCHARD & SON, AND
JAMES DUNCAN, LONDON;

WAUGH & INNES, AND W. WHYTE & CO. EDINBURGH;
AND MAURICE OGLE, GLASGOW.

GLASGOW :

ANDREW DUNCAN,

Printer to the University.

PREFACE.

SINCE this Tract was sent to the press, I have procured from London a copy of the corrected edition of Mr. Frere's work lately advertised, and I find, upon consulting his chart, that I have misunderstood his meaning with regard to the extent of time which he assigns to the fifth seal. Mr. Irving considers this seal as covering the whole period of twelve hundred and sixty years, and as Mr. Irving seems throughout his work, implicitly to follow Mr. Frere, and merely to expound his system, I very naturally supposed that he expressed the matured sentiments of Mr. Frere, and that this gentleman who, in the chart prefixed to his second edition, had given to the fifth seal a period of only one year, viz. the year 606, had since then changed his views and assigned to it a duration of twelve centuries, from 606 to 1789. By the chart in his corrected edition, I find I was mistaken, and that he now supposes this seal to have commenced and ended about the year 628, still giving to it only one year. I have, however, in vain sought in tables of chronology what great event took place in the year 628, to fulfil one whole seal or roll of that book which contains the development of the

b

mysterious purposes of God, to the end of the ages. I also in vain endeavour to comprehend how the events of any one year, however important, can fulfil the language of Rev. vi. 11. which evidently belongs to the seal in question, and comprehends in it the whole period of the waiting expectation of the slaughtered saints, till the prepredicted vengeance is executed on their enemies in the period of the seventh trumpet. It seems to me, therefore, that Mr. Frere's interpretation of this seal, requires only to be set before the judicious reader in order to be rejected.

Having thus acknowledged wherein I have unintentionally misapprehended Mr. Frere, I must now complain of one or two departures from the just rules of controversy upon his part. In criticising a passage of my work relating to the fulfilment of the fourth vial, he continues in his edition of 1826, to quote from my first edition, though I have in my second edition considerably amended my former explanation. Again, Mr. Frere having in his two first editions, in reasoning against my scheme of the vials, incautiously alleged, that this scheme had been adopted by me, in subordination to my scheme of the seals, and because the consistency of my scheme of the seals and trumpets required it; I in a paper in the Christian Observer for August 1815, corrected Mr. Frere's mistake, showing him, that my scheme of the vials was laid before the public in the Christian Observer for the year 1808, and that my theory of the seals was adopted from Arch

deacon Woodhouse, whose work I did not meet with till two or three years after my paper on the vials had appeared. After such a refutation of Mr. Frere's allegation, I did not expect to have found it repeated in his edition of 1826, without the least notice of my reply. I shall, however, remark by the way, that Mr. Frere himself, however opposed to my scheme of the seals, trumpets, and vials, is obliged to confess that it is consistent with itself. Now, to form a false scheme of apocalyptic arrangement which shall be consistent with itself, I believe to be utterly impossible.

There seems in Mr. Frere's new edition, to be very little which would have drawn forth animadversion from me, even if I had seen it sooner. For the reasons assigned in the body of this tract, I must dissent from all that he offers respecting the septimo-octave head of the beast. But while I say this, I must add, that I have very long since arrived at the conclusion, that the person mentioned by Isaiah in various passages of his prophecy, under the name of the ASSYRIAN,* has not yet appeared on the theatre of the world; and that he is most probably to be the last temporal leader of the Roman Empire, who shall conduct its armies to Armageddon-similar in character and exploits to the late Napoleon Bonaparte. To this conclusion I was led many years ago, by a strict attention to the language of the Evangelical prophet, and the

* See Isaiah x. 24-34, xiv. 25. xxx. 31.