Revelation 11:2

the court which is without the temple The words might be translated "the outer court of the Temple." It must be remembered that "the courts of the Lord's House" were the ordinary place for the worshippers to assemble, even before the outer and larger "Court of the Gentiles," with its magnificent colonnades, was added to Herod's Temple. Probably the latter is thought of, in its assignment to the Gentiles: but the meaning appears to be, that allthe courts shall be profaned, up to the walls of the inmost Sanctuary.

leave out Hardly a strong enough expression: the original is, "cast out outside." The sense must be, "leave out for profanation." This excludes the hypothesis (otherwise not without plausibility) that the measurement of the Temple is for destruction, not for preservation: see 2 Kings 21:13; Lamentations 2:8: and for the destruction being regarded as the work of the prophet, cf. Ezekiel 43:3.

tread under foot So St Luke 21:24, which is no doubt referred to. Hitherto, the correspondences in this book with that Prophecy of our Lord's have been closest with St Matthew's version of it. Varying parallels like these serve to authenticate the reports of His words in the different Gospels shewing that they are to be taken as mutually supplementary, not as more or less inaccurate. Of course, St John did not useour Gospels (though St Matthew's at least was in existence), but wrote independently from his own recollection.

forty and two months So Revelation 13:5. This period is apparently identical with the "1260 days" of the next verse, and Revelation 12:6: and with the "time, times, and half a time" (i.e. 3½ years) of Revelation 12:14. In Daniel 7:25; Daniel 12:7 we have this last measure of the period given, and the time indicated by Daniel must be either identical with or typical of that indicated by St John. It is to be noted, that in Daniel 12:11-12, we have the period extended to 1290 and 1335 days.

The key to these prophecies, that speak of definite periods of time, is generally sought in Ezekiel 4:6; it is supposed that each prophetical "day" stands for a year, and by consequence a "week" is equivalent to seven years, a "month" to 30, and a "year" to 360. This gives an approximatelysatisfactory explanation of the one prophecy of the "70 weeks" in Daniel 9: they would naturally be understood to extend from b.c. 536 (the decree of Cyrus) to b.c. 5 (the Nativity), a.d. 29 30 (the Crucifixion), and a.d. 70 (the fall of Jerusalem); but the terms in which their beginning and end are described can with a little pressure be applied to b.c. 457 (the decree of Artaxerxes), a.d. 26 (the Baptism of St John), a.d. 29 30, and a.d. 33 possiblythe date of the death of St Stephen, and so of the final rejection of the Gospel by the Jews and of the Jewish sacrifices by God. But in no other case has a prophecy been even tolerably interpreted on this principle. If it were admitted in this, we should naturally understand that Jerusalem was to have been restored in a.d. 1330 or at latest 1360 or 1405. Indeed, if the Saracen conquest instead of the Roman were taken as the starting-point, the restoration would not fall due till 1897, and it is humanly speaking quite possible that Palestine may pass into new hands then. But men ought to have learnt by this time to distrust such calculations: as we "know not the day nor the hour," so we know not the year nor the century. Two or three generations ago a number of independentcalculations were made to converge to the year 1866 as the beginning of the end: but in that year nothing considerable happened except the Austrian war, which of all recent wars perhaps had least the character of a war between Christ and Antichrist. It was at worst an instance of the painful and not innocent way in which fallen human nature works out its best desires: the Austrians were technically in the right, while the victory of the Prussians has proved honourable and beneficial to both empires alike.