wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and bodies and souls of men."

So far we have the description of this fourth kingdom, of its destiny and doom, in the two great prophets who have written of these things. But we shall do well to take heed to Paul's advice, and not be troubled: "for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God." Paul goes on to say, speaking of the time in which he wrote, "The mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way: and then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the Spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: even him whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be condemned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness."

We need not indeed be troubled; but we may rest assured that the hindrance has long been removed; for we have already seen the development of that Wicked that should be revealed; we have seen him "whose coming is after Satan with power and signs and lying wonders;' we have seen, and, alas, felt the great falling away, which not only in times past, but more especially in our own day, has given edge to the weapons of the adversary, and pointed his barbs against us. The traitors in our own camp and country have invited the foe; and he stalks boldly amongst us, doing as he lists.

Seeing then, that our enemy, the enemy of the cross of Christ, who shall be destroyed at his coming, is still JUNE 1851.

active and gaining strength daily; seeing also that the prophecies rightly studied are a key to the future; have we any intimation, in these prophecies, of a last and fearful struggle, prior to the total destruction of the Antichrist; or may we consider the present advance of Rome's power as a mere solitary phase of her history? What is our danger and our duty? What our prospect?

While the Euphrates is represented as drying up, prior to the consummation of the present dispensation, it is said, "I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. They are the spirits of devils, working miracies, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty." And the warning follows, "Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame. And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon." And then follows the announcement of the conclusion of the whole matter, "It is done."

Is not the Euphratean power shrivelling and drying rapidly? Are not the spirits of Infidelity (the Dragon,) Tyranny (the Beast,) and Priestcraft (the False Prophet) rampant? and shall we hesitate about our position, our duty, and our prospects?

The great day of battle is at hand. "Who is on the Lord's side? Who?" This is no time for parleying with the foe. It is a time of contest, wherein our Leader says, "He that is not with me is against me." There is no safety but under Him who will destroy all his enemies with the brightness of His coming; who will thresh the earth as a threshing floor; who will consume His foes with His breath; and drive from His presence all who will not have Him to rule over them.

Let us not halt between two opinions. Either Jesus is the Lord and Rome is His foe, or Rome and all her sorceries, her idolatries, and her sins, are clear from transgression, and our

R

confidence in God is a lie. Either Rome is doomed, with all who are not opposed to her and joined to Christ, or the Scriptures are false. Flee we then from all contamination with this idolatrous antichrist, and find we refuge with Christ, who alone can shelter us against the blast of fury about to be poured upon all the earth. It is no time for hesitation. We are all weak. Our enemy is armed to the teeth, and united with all the powers of hell to trample us to the ground and to grind us to powder. The day of retribution is coming upon all the earth, and the visitation of vengeance is upon all who have not obtained the victory over this great enemy.

Our weapons must not be carnal. Where indeed should we find them? Truly the kings have agreed to give their power into the hands of the

beast. In every land he reigns triumphant. Even in our own Protestant isle, so long the bulwark of the faith, we have removed the hedges, pulled down the walls, demolished the ramparts of our faith, and the enemy has rushed in like a flood. Our hopes centered in earthly power are gone. There is no power left us but that which is from above. then seek that help which shall never fail us. Cease we from man, and put our trust in God. Then shall our victory be certain and our reward

sure.

Let us

THE parallel judgment, A. D. 433 to 453, on the old Western Empire is thus expressed in the vision of" The Third Trumpet :"* "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."

Attila the Hun, with his desolating power, fixed himself first on the middle Danube, one of the two frontier rivers of the western third of the

See the fulfilment of the third trumpet, vol. i., p. 220-222.

Roman earth, and afterwards falling on the Rhine, and then on the Alpine streams that feed the Po, he caused the bitterness of distress, and famine, and pestilence, and death, to those who drank of the waters; that is, to the inhabitants of the Roman provinces watered by those streams.

As the local scene of the judgment of the third vial is similarly the rivers and the fountains of waters, we seem bound by the law of parallelism to interpret the former, of the two great frontier rivers of Papal Christendom,* the Rhine and upper Danube; the latter, of the Po and its Alpine territories; and to conclude, that after the judgment of blood on the mari

* See Whiston, Bickens, and Keith.

time power and maritime colonies of France and other European kingdoms, a judgment of war and bloodshed would begin to be poured out on the countries watered by the Rhine and the Danube, and on the sub-Alpine provinces also of Piedmont and Lombardy. Nor on consulting the French revolutionary wars, shall we fail of discerning the fulfilment of the prediction and this as distinctly and remarkably as of the prediction of the former vial.

It was in April, 1792, that war was declared by the French National Assembly against the German Emperor; in the September following, against the King of Sardinia: and ere the close of that year, it resulted that both the Rhine began to be notable as one fateful scene of the outpouring of this vial of blood, and advance was made by the French towards a second scene, destined to suffer under it, the Alpine streams of Piedmont and Lombardy.

We read in the annals of that year that the French and Austrian armies, conflicting at Mentz, and Worms, and Spires, all situated on the middle Rhine, the very towns that Attila long before desolated; of other armies conflicting in the Austrian Netherlands, watered by the Meuse, the last tributary of the lower Rhine; and also of a third French army advancing into Savoy, as far as the foot of the Piedmontese Alpine frontier: the infection of the Republican democratic spirit having every where,-from Holland in the North, to Sardinia and Italy in the south,-prepared for, and facilitated, the progress of French invasion. In 1793 and 1794 the scene of war and bloodshed was still the same. The French army of the Netherlands, at first unsuccessful, soon recovered its ground; and driving the allies out of Flanders, advanced into Holland: uniting it thenceforward with France; and constituting it like the latter, as a democracy. In like manner the army of the middle Rhine, at first driven back across the river, returned and repulsed the allies beyond it, in battles of tremendous bloodshed. In 1795, again, the carnage was renewed with various success

on the middle Rhine and its tributaries, from Luxembourg to Metz and Manheim: and yet again in 1796, on quitting its valley, and advancing from Dusseldorf and Treves towards Nuremberg and Ingolstadt, on the Danube, as a common centre, the armies of Jourdan and Moreau were driven back to the Rhine by the Austrian Archduke Charles; the time having not yet come for the effusion of the vial on the Danube. But the Alpine springs of water were even now to experience its bitterness. The year that we speak of is ever memorable in history, as that of the first Italian campaign of Buonaparte against the allied Sardinians and Austrians. Its course is to be traced from Alpine river to river, along the whole of the north of Italy, from Coni on the Stura to Venice. In the progress of the contest, every river was made a position and battle field. During the command of the Austrian general Beaulieu, the Bormida, the Tanaro, the Adda with its bridge of Lodi, and Mincio flowing through the Lake of Garda to the Mantuan fortress; then (the veteran Wurmser having superseded Beaulieu) the Adige and the Brenta; then, on Alvinzi assuming the command, the Adige and Mincio; again at Arcoli and Rivoli ; then, after the Archduke Charles had advanced to the succour of his countrymen, the Tagliamento, and Alpine streams of Carinthia :-who can estimate the carnage? The Alpine fountains of water were indeed turned into blood. At length in 1797, after Venice itself, at the mouth of the Brenta, had felt the sprinkling of the vial, and shuddered under the terrible menace of the conqueror, "I will prove an Attila to Venice," after the Archduke had been again routed in the Carinthian Alpine defiles; and in central Germany too, the Austrians had been cotemporarily defeated, and driven by Moreau and Hoche from Coblentz and Strasburg on the Rhine to Francfort; resistance was suspended, and submission made by Austria. And so the treaty of Campo Formio was concluded; by which the whole valley of the Rhine, the one local scene of this Apocalyptic vial-from its

source in Switzerland to its mouth in Holland-together with the Austrian Netherlands and Palatinate on one side of its central stream, and Wurtemberg, Bavaria, Baden, Westphalia, on the other, now united as the Confederation of the Rhine, was all ceded or virtually subjected to France; and also Piedmont and Lombardy, the country noted as another local scene of this vial, being that of the Alpine fountains of waters. But the vial had not yet exhausted itself. In 1799, on war recommencing, the fountains of waters became the scene of the celebrated Italian campaign of Suwarroft : and they were again, stream after stream, turned into blood; as the French were repulsed along the whole line of their former victorious progress from Verona and Mantua to the Maritime Alps and Western sources of the Po; and again in 1800, they were made the scene of Buonaparte's second Italian campaign,-a campaign memorable by the passage of the St. Bernard, and decisive and terrible battle of Marengo. Moreover the Danube, the other great frontier river of the old Roman world and Papal Christendom, began now to feel also the outpouring of the vial. The war was directed by Mcreau to Ulm, the first great fortress on the upper Danube; and thence, still by the line of the Danube, to Ingolstadt:-until at length, in the winter following, the victory of Hohenlinden on the Iser, one of its tributaries, having decided the German campaign, and Moreau advancing down the Danube towards Vienna, peace was again sued for by Austria, and for three years re-established. Nor was it broken by the war of the third German coalition in 1805, except to bring down the residue of the vial of wrath on the same fated rivers and countries watered by it. The campaign of Napoleon is traced along the Danube from Ulm and Ingolstadt down to Vienna and the adjacent camp of Attila. And the German Emperor having been forced to retire northward from his capital, the battle of Austerlitz, a town on the Littawa, one of the tributaries of the same great German river, ended the war and broke the power of Austria.

The vial had now been felt in the whole range of scene allotted to it ;as on the Rhine and Alpine fountains of waters, so also on the left of the Danube. Indeed it had so made itself to be felt, as to warrant the bold assertion, that in the whole history of European wars, from the first rise of the ten Papal kingdoms in the sixth century even to the present time,-there is not recorded any one war in which these three vallies of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Po, had such a vial of wrath, or anything like it, poured out upon them.

But what the reason for judgments so terrible? Amidst many national sins that doubtless evoked them, there was one thus declared to St. John in the verses following: “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." It does not need that we here enter on the question suggested by this mention of the " Angel of the waters," whether there be attached in God's providential government, particular angelic agencies to particular countries and localities. Direct scripture proof seems wanting on the point; and certainly we shall not be warranted in inferring it from the figures of a symbolic vision, like that before

us.

On the main point set forth in the prophetic intimation, we cannot mistake, viz., on the fact of the judgments of the third vial being a righteous retribution from God on the countries and nations judged, for murders previously committed by them on His saints and prophets. And the applicability of this ground for judgment, to the nations that I have supposed intended in the prophecy,- the Piedmontese, and Austrians, and French,-is notorious. The cruelties of the French against the associated Waldenses and Albigenses before the Reformation, and the Hugonots and Albigenses after it ;-of the Piedmon