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that this Feast of Tabernacles differs from the others, in having no prospective reference; or we must seek in some future event its completion or antitype; and it will probably incline us to this latter opinion, when we consider, that the Jews will undoubtedly be brought back to Judea, when the fulness of the Gentiles shall be come in; and if we suppose the season of the Feast of Tabernacles to coincide with that of their future return, as it appears to have done with their return from the Babylonish Captivity, we shall have a fulfilment of the three Jewish festivals completed finally in the conversion of the Jews to Christianity, which, with their return to their own land, will furnish a perpetual cause for thanksgiving and religious observance.

"Of the reference of this festival to the final restoration of the Jews, some of their traditions and practices may, perhaps, afford a further confirmation. It was their custom on the last day of the feast, to bring water from the fountain of Siloah, which the priests poured on the altar, singing the words of Isaiah, (xii. 3,) With joy shall ye draw water from the fountain of salvation; which words the Targum interprets, With joy shall ye receive a new doctrine from the elect of the just; and they appear from the preceding chapter, to relate to the final restoration of the Jews. The feast itself was also called HOSANNA, Save we beseech thee; and was the time when our Lord spoke the remarkable words mentioned in St. John, (ch. vii. 37, 38,) marking the relation which the ceremony of pouring out the water bore to his ministry. And among the traditions of the Jews we find that the defeat of Gog and Magog shall fall out upon the feast of Tabernacles, or that the consequent seven months cleansing of the land (Ezek. xxxix. 12,) shall terminate at that period; and there seems little reason to doubt the reference of that prophecy to the final restoration of the Jews."*

* Graves's Lectures on the Four last books of the Pentateuch, vol. ii. pp. 482-485. Lond. 1807, 8vo.

8. Of the emblematical and introductory nature of the Mosaic dispensation, and its adumbration of spiritual and Divine privileges, intimations were frequently given by prophetic explanations and promises. "I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth." (Deut. xviii. 18, 19.) -“Behold the days come when I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers." (Jer. xxxi, 31, 32, 33, 34.)" Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me." (Psalm xl. 6, 7, 8.) -"Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, and the Desire of all nations shall come." (Haggai ii. 6, 7.)-"Behold to obey is better than sacrifice." (1 Sam. xv. 22.)-" The Lord God will circumcise thine heart." (Deut. xxx. 6.)

"If we, therefore, advert to the internal structure of the Law, which was accommodated to the temporary circumstances of the Israelites, restricted as it was from the nature of the times, and the genius of the people, who were thus appointed the guardians of God's truth and oracles, it will appear most eminently adapted to the preservation of the more ancient promises and revelations, and in every way fitted to be the connecting medium between the patriarchal economy and the Gospel. Its very deficiencies contained indications, that the end of its institution remained to be accomplished; its obscurities intimated, that its object and intent would hereafter be plenarily disclosed. Its whole catalogue of ceremonies was so constructed, that, surrounded as the Hebrews were by nations, who veiled their esoteric faith in external symbols or hieroglyphical devices, it was impossible that they should not have directed the inquirer, even at the time when they were confining him to the pure worship of the ONE ETERNAL GOD, to have sought in them a hidden and fuller signification; and,

if at any time observant of the depravity of the Canaanite, or inquisitive respecting the superstitions of the house of bondage, the Israelite might have been induced to compare his legislative code with the laws of other communities, he must have perceived, that it had proceeded beyond the cultivation of the rest of the world; and could not have failed to have remarked, that it ranked above all others in a pre-eminent distinction, that, bearing the impress of divine revelation, it contained provisions for the future, and prefigured, in its whole body of services, a far more expansive, although distant communication from God to man. And although these evidences were dispersed through the whole economy, they nevertheless may be said to have been more especially comprised in the TYPES which rendered the sacrifices, oblations, and expiations, figurative of HIM, in whom they were ordained to receive their completion in the fulness of time: and as they supplied the student of Moses with the requisites to identify the true Messiah at his appearance, and established an union between the two Testaments, which then evinced both to have been revealed by the same All-wise Being, so they doubtless compensated to the Israelites for the absence of those mysteries and secret rites which the Gentiles had engrafted on Theology, and which even the divinely-taught Hebrew appears, from his numerous defections and his endless propensity to idolatry, to have required."*

Dr. D. G. Wait's Course of Sermons, preached before the University of Cambridge, in the year 1825.- Sermon ii. pp. 40-45. Lond. 1826. 8vo.

DISSERTATION VII.

ON

THE LEPROSY.

THE LEPROSY derives its name from the Greek term Anga (lepra) from ATIS (lepis) a scale, the body, in this dreadful disease, being covered with thin white scales, or smooth shining patches, so as to give it, in some instances, the appearance of snow. Nosologists class some species of this malady under the order Squama, or scaly diseases, and other species of it under the order Tuberculæ, or tubercular affections. That kind of Leprosy which is described by Moses in Leviticus xiii, appears to have been what was termed by the Greeks Leuce, (λeuxn,) and by the Arabians Albaras, or more correctly Baras. In some instances it has been considered as assuming the form of Elephantiasis, and in others not appearing very dissimilar from the Frambasia, or Yaws, of the West Indies.*

The Leuce or White Leprosy is thus described by Mr. Robinson, a medical practitioner of India :-" One or two circumscribed patches appear upon the skin, (generally the feet or hands, but sometimes the trunk or face,) rather lighter-coloured than the neighbouring skin, neither raised nor depressed, shining and wrinkled, the furrows not co-inciding with the lines of the contiguous sound cuticle.

* See Dr. T. Bateman's Practical Synopsis of Cutaneous Diseases: Order II. p. 25, and Order VII. p. 273. London 1819, 8vo., Fifth edition.

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The skin thus circumscribed is so entirely insensible, that you may with hot irons burn to the muscle, before the patient feels any pain. These patches spread slowly until the skin of the whole of the legs, arms, and gradually often of the whole body, becomes alike devoid of sense : wherever it is so affected, there is no perspiration; no itching, no pain, and very seldom any swelling. Until this singular apathy has occupied the greater part of the skin, it may rather be considered a blemish than a disease: nevertheless it is most important to mark well these appearances, for they are the invariable commencement of the most gigantic and incurable diseases, that have succeeded the fall of man: and it is in this state chiefly (though not exclusively) that we are most able to be the means of cure. The next symptoms-are the first which denote internal disease or derangement of any functions. The pulse becomes very slow, not small but heavy, as if moving through mud :'-the toes and fingers numbed, as with frost, glazed and rather swelled, and nearly inflexible. The mind is at this time sluggish and slow in apprehension, and the patient appears always half asleep. The soles of the feet and the palms of the hands then crack into fissures, dry, and hard as the parched soil of the country; and the extremities of the toes and fingers under the nails are incrusted with a furfuraceous substance, and the nails are gradually lifted up, until absorption and ulceration occur. Still there is little or no pain; the legs and fore-arms swell, and the skin is every where cracked and rough. Contemporary with the last symptoms, or very soon afterwards, ulcers appear at the inside of the joints of the toes and fingers, directly under the last joint of the metatarsal or metacarpal bones, or they corrode the thick sole under the joint of the os calcis, or os cuboides. There is no previous tumour, suppuration, or pain, but apparently a simple absorption of the integuments, which slough off in successive layers of half an inch in diameter. A sanious discharge comes on;

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