An Outline of History

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 12, 1907

An Outline of History

THE prophecies of Daniel contain a long and marked outline of the history of the world. No subject is more familiar to every one who is the least versant in ancient history, than the successive dominion that was exercised over a great part of the earth by Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Cyrus, Alexander the Great, and the Cæsars are historical names universally known to boyhood. And no less familiar to every student of prophecy, so soon as they are even initiated in the subject, is the symbolical description of these empires, as they are detailed in the book of Daniel.

Under the double representation of a great image, consisting of different parts, and a succession of wild beasts (the common Scriptural emblem of kingdoms), varying in nature and form, the great successive empires were symbolized, and these symbols were also explained, in such a manner as to leave no room for any variety of opinion among commentators, and to render superfluous any reiterated explanation. The prophet gives an interpretation of both; so that the general significance of the symbols, as denoting the kingdoms that in after ages were to arise in the earth, is happily neither left to conjecture nor exposed to any cavil.

The golden head of the image was expressly declared to be the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar, or that of Babylon. When the vision was revealed, it existed in its prime. The God of heaven had given him a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. . . . He was the head of gold. After him “another kingdom” was to arise, inferior to his; namely, the united kingdom of Persia and Media, represented by the breast and arms of silver. This kingdom was, in its order, to be succeeded by another “third kingdom of brass,” “the brass-clothed Greeks,” which was to “bear rule over all the earth,” denoted, in the image, by “its belly and its thighs of brass.” . . . The iron legs of the image represent the iron kingdom of Rome, which extended at once over the west and the east, and which was the “fourth kingdom, . . . strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things.” — “The Signs of the Times,” by Alexander Keith, New York, 1832, Vol. I, pages 10, 11.