Page:David Baron – The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes.djvu/11

 in the present. Now certainly these prophecies of might and prosperity are not now being fulfilled in the "Jews"—on the other hand, see how great and influential the British nation is in the world—ergo, the British must be the "lost" Israel of the "Ten Tribes"! The "history" and philology is, so to say, an afterthought of Anglo-Israelism, by which an effort is made to support the false postulate with which it starts. The Scriptural "Identifications" with which Anglo-Israel literature abound turn out on examination to be perversions and misapplications of isolated texts taken from the English versions of the Bible without any regard for true principles of exegesis.

Some of their interpretations can only be characterised as bordering on blasphemy. Let me quote a few examples:—

I. The glorious Messianic prophecy of the stone cut without hands which smote the image of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel ii.) is applied to the British people; and the British Empire, which is one of the Gentile world-kingdoms, is made to be identical with the Kingdom of God.

"We will see what is to be the future of the British Empire, or, in other words, the stone that smote the image. It is to become a great mountain and fill the whole earth. Our Colonial Empire, then, will continue to grow till it covers the whole world. We have tried to avoid extending our Empire many and many a time, and yet God has caused it to grow larger and larger,