“4. The Length of the Prophetic Periods.
“5. The Commencement of the Seventy Weeks of Dan. 9.
“6. Their Connection with the 2300 days of Dan. 8.
“7. The Rise of the Little Horn of the 7th.
“8. The Nature of Christ’s Second Advent.
“9. The Return of the Jews.
“10. The Epoch of the Resurrection.
“Mr. Miller laid no claim to originality in his position respecting any of the above points; but maintained that they were established opinions of the church, and, being so, that his conclusions from such premises were well sustained by human as well as by divine teachings. While his opponents attacked the view he took of these points, no one of them assailed the whole; but each admitted his correctness on some of the points; and, among them, the whole were admitted.
“1. The Fourth Kingdom of Daniel. This he claimed to be the Roman. In this, he had the support of the ablest and most judicious expositors of every age. William Cunninghame, Esq., of England, an eminent expositor, in speaking of the four parts of the great image of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, says that they are ‘respectively applied by Daniel himself to four kingdoms, which have, by the unanimous voice of the Jewish and Christian churches, for more than eighteen centuries, been identified with the empires of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.’ Should this be questioned, the witnesses are abundant. In the Jewish church, we have the Targum of Jonathan Ben Uzziel, Josephus, and the whole modern synagogue, including the names of Abarbanal, Kimchi, David, Levi, and others. In the Christian church, such as Barnabas, Irenæus, Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem in his catechism, Jerome, and according to him, all ecclesiastical writers, Hyppolitus and Lactantius in the early ages; since the Reformation, Luther, Calvin, Mede, T. H. Horne,[18] Sir Isaac Newton, Bishop Newton, Dr. Hales, Scott, Clarke, Brown,[19] Watson,[20] Bishop Lloyd, Daubuz, Brightman, Faber, Noel, Dr. Hopkins, and almost every biblical expositor of any note in the Protestant church. Those who make this application of the four parts of the image have no difficulty in making a like application of the four beasts of Daniel seventh. The remarkable similarity of the two visions requires this.
“This long-established opinion was controverted by Prof. Stuart of Andover, in his ‘Hints,’ before referred to. He said: ‘The fourth beast in Dan. 7:6, &c., is, beyond all reasonable doubt, the divided Grecian dominion, which succeeded the reign of Alexander the Great.’—Hints, p. 86.