ligion and all its doctrines," did the Father refrain from bearing witness of the Son. There was no Elisha on earth to call down fire from heaven. Nor did there live a man on whom an apostle of Jesus had laid his hand, and thereby invested with the power of working miracles. But before the age of miracles ceased, the spirit of prophecy, in speaking of the things that were to be thereafter, kept not silence concerning the latter times; and when fanatical atheists, with envenomed fury, were plotting, in their frenzy, against the Lord and his anointed, the testimony of Jesus, though unheeded on earth, sounded the louder, and was at last to be seen the clearer, and even then the judgments of God were declared to be made manifest. And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvellous, &c. And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. And the first went and poured out his vial upon the earth, and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image, chap. xvi, 1, 2.

It was not till open infamy was deep enough to have called down, in the age of miracles, an immediate judgment from heaven, that in fulfilment of prophecy, the judgment did sit, and the last plagues began to be fulfilled, and the first vial of the wrath of God was poured out on the land where the blood of saints had been most freely shed, where one witnessing church had been exterminated, and where the guilt and open infamy, at the time, were such as to have put the worst of pagan emperors to shame. Long-suffering as God is, he will by no means acquit the guilty; and when men lived as if God had no thunderbolts, the voice of his thunder was in the heavens; and when their iniquity was ripe for judg

ment, and when the angel had lifted up his hand to heaven, and sworn by him that liveth for ever and ever,—whose existence men began as openly to disown as they defied his wrath,-that there would be delay no longer, he gave them up to hot thunderbolts; he cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, and indignation, and trouble, and he made a way to his anger.

Close to its time, and true to its character, the first vial of the wrath of God was poured upon the earth, and the revolutionary wars in Europe began. Yet so righteous are the judgments of God, that whether in chastisement of national or individual transgressions, the wicked reap but the fruit of their own doings. Their own wickedness corrects them, and their backslidings reprove them; and it is found at last to be an evil thing and bitter to have forsaken the Lord. Such was the noisome and grievous sore that fell upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. God dealt with papal Rome as with idolatrous Israel of old. Ephraim is joined to idols, let him alone-Israel and Ephraim shall fall in their iniquity. "The church of Rome had grown old," not in years only but in idolatry and crime. Long had it held supreme dominion over the minds of men, and the grossest corruption of morals was the effect of a kindred corruption of doctrine. If abominations were practised unblushingly in France, in the close of the eighteenth century, which heathens would have hid, they, at least, had never been instructed in the vir tue of indulgences or the power of absolution, or the purchaseable and transferable merits of saints, or that money could be paid during life, or after death, for the ransom of a soul from any place of trial or of torment. The moral taint remained after the cause that produced it was gone. The love of unrighteous

ness ceased not with the belief of a lie. Once men had been taught to think light of sin by its redemption at an easy price; conscience did not recover its power, when reason exposed the fooleries of superstition. Belief in the gospel ceased together with faith in the church; and even the belief of a God, "the birth-right of man," shared the fate of the profane dogmas with which it was associated, and, freed from moral restraints as well as from superstitious fears, men sinned remorselessly, without the licence of a priest. Woes had come upon apostate Christendom, and wars had succeeded but still men repented not of the works of their hands, nor of their idolatries, neither of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. The Roman Catholic body-politic was morally corrupted to the core. The peccant and pestiferous humours spread throughout the frame. No ointment on the skin could touch the malady. "Why," as unto backsliding Israel, it might be said, " why should ye be stricken any more? Ye will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores; they have not been closed nor bound up, ther mollified with ointment."

nel

The church of Rome "could explain nothing, soften nothing, renounce nothing, consistently with her assertion of infallibility." It could not reform; the evil grew till it could grow no more; and revolution was both the natural consequence and the only remedy. In a diseased body, when inflammatory action runs high, and the malady approaches its crisis, gentle palliatives would have no efficacy, and external applications, so strong as to touch the disease, might occasion a fatal revulsion; but, seizing on the most vitiated organ, a single grievous sore, bursting

from the body itself, may, though threatening death, be the only cure. Such was the first of the seven last plagues. It came not from without, in the form of a foreign enemy, as, on the first of the trumpets, the hail and fire were cast upon the earth; but this was the token of the vial being poured upon the earth, there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. It arose within the Roman Catholic kingdoms of Europe, and was seated and concentrated, at first, where the corruption was the rankest.

No power of reason could prevail against the rack, the gibbet and the pile. Neither could any meekness of wisdom melt the heart of an inquisitor. Nor is the butchery work of human slaughter the calling of Christians, the weapons of whose warfare are not carnal. Other agents were prepared for the execution of the judgment, so soon as it began to sit. "Religion cannot exist where immorality generally prevails." Infidelity was generated in the moral corruption, which was the issue of papal domination; the blackness of popery was turned into the paleness of death; and infidelity needed only to assume an active form, to fall as a grievous and noisome sore upon the men that had the mark of the beast, and upon them that worshipped his image, and to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. The term revolution implies the taking away of the dominion from those who possessed it. Till then the natural alliance had subsisted unchallenged in all Roman Catholic kingdoms, between despotic power and papal supremacy. But the revolutionary spirit of the times was specially and simultaneously directed against kings and priests. Down with both was the general rallying cry. Freedom of thought was the order of the day; liberty

and equality were the doctrines of the revolution. No sentiments could be more abhorrent to the spirit of popery, or more completely subversive of all its principles. Neither was its yoke to be borne, nor its exaltation to subsist any longer. Ridicule was a weapon which superstition could not withstand. The thunders of the Vatican were the scoff of the sceptics. The rights of man supplanted the infallibility of the church. Men sinned openly against high heaven, and sought not absolution. The charm of purchased pardons was broken when men were hardened in unbelief through the deceitfulness of sin; a seared conscience spurned all palliatives, and sought no cure; and, when once the judgments of men, after long thraldom, were exercised again, the mummeries of Catholicism could not abide the light of reason, though it was otherwise misguided. Whenever the mental yoke was thus cast away, and no power of religion remained to restrain, vengeance was unsparingly executed on the priesthood, and on all the adherents of their falling cause. And the first vial of wrath was freely poured out.

Of the horrors of the French Revolution it were needless to write. It is enough to say, that the blood of the saints began to be avenged. France had for ages yielded the neck to the papal yoke, and lent its aid to bind it on other nations; but never, even under the dictation of the Abbot of Citeaux, did the counts, or knights, and soldiers of France exercise more atrocious cruelties against the saints of the Most High, than those of which churchmen and loyalists were then the victims. Tithes were abolished; monasteries suppressed; church lands confiscated; the priests despoiled and beggared ;* and, at a time when every other form of faith was tolerated, and atheism itself

* Life of Napoleon, vol. i. p. 30.