word and render it unfruitful. While busy thus in the service of the god of this world, and loading themselves with thick clay, or dead while they live in pleasure, how lightly, nay, contemptuously, from the blindness that is in them, do men treat the word of God, not counting it worth the reading or the hearing. Yet if not blinded by the god of this world, clearly might they see, as if by actual experiment, that all the treasures of the world, if weighed against a single word of the living oracles of God, are lighter than dust in the balance. Not only were ships without number destroyed, and colonies taken, and the sea dyed with blood, but to reckon by Mammon's only rule, more than three hundred millions were, from first to last, expended by Britain alone in illustration of a single verse, with as little thought or purpose of thereby fulfilling that word, as Saracens invaded the Roman empire and overspread great part of Asia, Africa, and Europe in fulfilment of another.

The prayers of saints, are golden vials, full of odours; but the works of fanatical atheists and daring blasphemers were vials of wrath. Boldly as the British seamen rushed to the battle, it is a matter of bitter sorrow and lamentation, that, too generally, they rushed as fearlessly against the thick bosses of the buckler of the Almighty; and were guilty of doing, with the most reckless levity, what, above all things, men are commanded, in God's holy word, not to do above all things, swear not. But yet the wrath of men, blasphemers though they were, was made to praise the Lord. And, if possible, more marvellously still, and not less manifestly, we have only, in the next place, to come and see, how avowed unbelievers, utterly controverting their own infidel principles, farther accomplished the same end; and how the Directory of France, in issuing their mandates to one of the greatest. generals who

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ever filled the world with his fame, by the counsels which they devised, and the great task which they put into his hands, vied with the British Board of Admiralty in doing, in its appointed order, the express work that was written in those scriptures which they denied.

Judgments were not suspended, so soon as they began to sit, upon the earth, although the second vial of wrath had begun to be poured upon the sea. But the third vial, coming in its course, was poured out on its appointed place.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THIRD VIAL.

THE reader may, perhaps, have already seen, how prophetic terms may derive their most intelligible exposition from historical facts. And it is not now, when we have reached the period of manifest judgments, that the word of God anywise needs that man should come in with his terms of explanation. But comparing things spiritual with spiritual, the meaning may be plain. And, looking unto events that fill their place in history, and that startled the world with their magnitude, no less than the foremost of naval wars, the proof may be as clear. The sea was the scene of the second trumpet as well as of the second vial. And, in like manner, the third trumpet determines the site of the third vial.

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter, Rev. viii. 10, 11.

And the third angel poured out his vial upon the RIVERS AND FOUNTAINS OF WATERS; and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say: Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink, for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.

The first trumpet sounded over the Roman empire. The second re-echoed from the coast of Africa to the shores of Italy and Spain, and spread over the Mediterranean sea. The scene of the third was the rivers and fountains of waters, the fountains that rise and the rivers that flow from the Alps and Appenines, and which render northern Italy a land of streams. There Attila, the great star, fell. Reducing, in his course, the cities of Acquileia, Altinum, Concordia, and Padua, to heaps of stones and ashes, and, burning as it were a lamp, the inland towns of Vicenza, Verona, and Bergamo having also been exposed to the rapacious cruelty of the Huns, he spread his ravages "over the rich plains of modern Lombardy, which are divided by the Po, and bounded by the Alps and Appenines." The waters, or the same region under the same name, countinued to be wormwood to the empire of Rome, after the ravages and death of Attila. "Many. thousands of his subjects assembled on the plains of

Piedmont." And subsequently, at Tortona, at the foot of the Alps, an impetuous sedition broke out in the Roman camp, the final result of which was the extinction of the western empire. The chief of the confederates of Italy fixed his residence at Milan (situated in the midst of waters) which Attila had previously possessed, and it was from Milan that "Ricimer marched to the gates of Rome."

The locality of the rivers and fountains of waters, as a specific region in the Roman territory, abridged as then it was, and in reference to the downfall of imperial Rome, may thus be held as determined. And without attaching any diversity of meaning, or adopting any other significancy, to the same words -which would throw the subject loose to every imagination as to the winds-we have to look again to the same rivers and fountains of waters-but to the whole and not merely a part-to the cities of Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Bergamo, Pavia, Tortona; to the spot where the Mincio flows from Lake Benacus; to the palace of Milan, which Attila possessed, and to the plains of Piedmont and Lombardy which he ravaged, and which were afterwards wormwood to Rome, in order to see what accordance is to be found, in this express particular, between the decline, or the events which broke the power, both of imperial and papal Rome, and to witness thus, if indeed such witness be yet manifestly borne by history, the exact coincidence and precise affinity, in point of place, however different in time, between the completion of the third vialand of the third trumpet, corresponding to the description, in the identical terms, the rivers and fountains of waters, on which the great star fell, on the sounding of the third trumpet, and the third vial of the wrath of God, one of the last plagues, was also to be poured out.

In point of time the case is also as clear, and the

order of the judgment as manifest. The date of the pouring out of the third vial is necessarily subsequent to the period when the second vial began to be poured out. But as the great mountain burning with fire, that was cast into the sea, though it first rose, before the great star fell upon the rivers and upon the fountains of waters, continued to burn, after the sudden meteor had burned like a lamp and had fallen; so, in strict analogy, the pouring out of the third vial, though necessarily consequent to the time of the pouring out of the second, does not imply that the last drops of the previous vial were first. to be dried up, or even that the festering sore, too grievous and noisome to admit of instantaneous cure, which marked the first, was wholly healed. All were the last vials of the wrath of God; and though, like the trumpets, they might follow in quick succession, the very nature and purpose of them tend to show that the first pouring out of the vial was not the last of the judgment. All are necessarily consecutive in their origin; but as the vials of wrath, they may continue to flow, till each has perfected its own special purpose; and the pouring out of a new vial upon any specified spot on the earth, interrupted not the farther progress or action of that which had previously been poured upon the

sea.

Three years elapsed from the taking of Carthage by Genseric to the invasion of Egypt by Attila. And the same period elapsed from the siege of Toulon and the commencement of the greatest of naval wars since the days of Genseric, and unequalled either before or after, or even at that period, till every eye in Europe was fixed on the spot where Bonaparte had his station; but, looking more to earthly revolutions than to the word of God, men did not remember that it was the very region where Attila had been, amidst the rivers and fountains of