extent of their woes, and the unutterable folly of persecution. During the first 20 years after the establishment of the Inquisition, the direful havoc among the followers of the Lamb had been so boundless, that at that era, some of the more considerate French Bishops requested the inquisitorial Monks to postpone their arrests and imprisonment of the people, until their Grand Master in iniquity, the Pope had been informed of the numbers who then were apprehended; for whom they declared it was impossible for them either to provide ample subsistence, or to procure stone and mortar sufficient for the erection of prisons to confine them. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." Notwithstanding from that period until 1530, three hundred years after, the incessant oppressions and persecutions of Antichrist worried those sheep with unrelenting tortures, which they sustained with admirable constancy, patience and fortitude; yet at the commencement of the reformation, nearly one million of persons professed the religion of the primitive Waldenses. "Here is the patience of the saints. Here are they who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, that they may rest from their labours, and their works do follow them."

In consequence of the unceasing deprivations and dangers to which the Waldenses were exposed, those who could fly, escaped into other regions; where in secrecy, they might worship God according to their own conscientious dictates and the word of truth. The Bohemians and Moravians formed themselves into a compact body; and after the murder of Huss and Jerom, under the command of John Ziska, a man of most inflexible resolution and undaunted courage, resolved to defend themselves against persecution, and if they were molested, to maintain their rights by force. After a long contest, in which every act of horrid cruelty was perpetrated, the

Roman policy prevailed. Part of the warriors were cajoled into submission to the Pontiff of Rome. The remainder became the prey of imperial armies and the inquisitors' chains. Yet they survived the tornado. Immense multitudes united with Luther and Zuinglius and Calvin; and a few who retained their predilections for · the customs and economy of their ancestors, have more recently emerged from obscurity, as those pioneers of the Missionary cause, the Moravians or United Brethren.

In England, those old Protestants were originally reproached by the epithet Lollards; and in a later period, as Wiclifites. It is not a little remarkable, that the family-likeness among the pilgrims scattered in Piedmont, Bohemia and England, should have been so uniform; for in all the prime qualities, and in all the distinctive features of the children in "the household of faith," they were identical. They abjured the Papacy, despised human traditions, adhered solely to the oracles of God, rejected all the superstitions which had been incorporated with the christian system, exemplified the devotion, meekness and purity of the followers of the Lamb, and knowing in whom they had believed, and that he was able to keep that which they had committed to him against that day; patiently submitted to every excruciation, which hell inspired ingenuity could invent and raging malignity inflict.

Truth is uniform. To it, with some exceptions and additions, the opponents of the Papacy generally bowed. The experience of christians is very much assimilated in all its grand peculiarities; in that point they were but one. Their testimony, although it was almost coeval with the exaltation of "the Man of Sin," to whom the dragon gave "his power, and his seat, and great authority," was nearly identical; although affected by the continual mutations of 850 years. Our modern arguments against the Papal Hierarchy, are nothing more than repetitions a

little varied, of the original resonations of the everlasting gospel, which the angel whom John saw flying in the midst of heaven, " preached unto them that dwell on the earth;" thereby verifying with indubitable certainty, that those individual and associated witnesses are "the two olive-trees and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth."

This view of that glorious army of confessors, who in every age contested the usurpations of Antichrist, necessarily involves the question. What were the more immediate visible causes which effected the partial demolition of the sway of the beast, who "had two horns like a lamb, and spake as a dragon ?"

1. The great schism in the popedom, by the divine su⚫ perintendence, manifestly enfeebled the energies of the Apostate Hierarchy. It commenced in the arrogance of the then haughty Pope, and the boldness of Philip king of France. Boniface informed Philip, that he, as well as all other princes, was obliged, by a divine command, in all political, civil and religious affairs, to submit to the papal authority.. With the utmost contempt, Philip re torted on the pontiff in this style; "we give your fool's head to know, that in temporals we are subject to no person." The Pope immediately declared that Jesus Christ had subjected the whole human family to his au thority; and that every man who disbelieved that dogma was excluded from all possibility of salvation. In reply, the French king employed Nogaret, a most intrepid and inveterate enemy to the Popes, to publish a catalogue of accusations against Boniface, including a frightful mass of crime, and demanded a council to dethrone the spiritual tyrant. A sentence of excommunication against the king and his adherents followed; upon which Nogaret with a small force surprised and made prisoner the unwary Pope, and during the short period of his capture, dis

played to him the most marked and insulting indignity. He was rescued, and speedily after his return to Rome died of rage and anguish at his disgrace and disappointment. His successor reversed the anathema against the French king; but having filled the papal chair during a short period only, an adherent of Philip was elected Pope, who removed the seat of the papacy from Rome to Avignon in France, where it remained during 70 years. At that period began the grand separation; for after the election of Urban to the papacy, many of the Cardinals offended by his arrogance withdrew from Rome, and elected another Pope, Clement who resided at Avignon. From that era, 1308, until the council of Constance annulled the authority and prerogatives of all the Popes, by the election of Martin, the Hierarchy was involved in a dissension which filled all Europe with distress, calamity and dismay. Two or three Popes, supported by some of the horns of the Beast, maintained one ceaseless contention; and each agitated the world with his thundering anathemas against the other and his associates. Notwithstanding the general extinction of all sense of religion, and the most scandalous universal profligacy which even pretended not to concealment, the authority of the Popes received a blow incurable; and multitudes believed that the Gospel of Christ required not such a temporal and abhorrent supreme head. Those, after that "deadly wound was healed," furnished much of the materials for the fiery martyrdom.

2. The degeneracy of the ecclesiastical orders constituted another prominent reason of that excitement which filled all Europe with commotion, when Luther enkindled the torch of truth to irradiate the gloomy recesses and arcana of the Monkish system. "That word, Reformation," said Martin, "is more hated at Rome, than thunderbolts from heaven, or the last day of judgment."

In the re-action of human affairs, it is not a little marvellous, that those same vices and enormities which. introduced, aggrandized and established, also eventually obstructed, diminished and undermined the Papacy. Cruelty and slaughter gave energy to the popedom; and their ravages enkindled that enmity and opposition which have assailed it with forceful and incessant success.Avarice and ambition impelled the Monster in his ascent, and secured the acquisition of the triple crown. The inordinacy of both which was subsequently developed, taught men to feel, then to think, and finally to rebel against a jurisdiction which robbed all the comforts, and palsied all the efforts of civil society; and which rendered Christianity a burden instead of rest; and the anticipations of that "life and immortality brought to light by the Gospel," a source of never-failing gloom and anguish.

Men will submit to the yoke to a certain degree; but when their chains are too heavy, they become furious and break them. Many persons anticipated a moral concussion. One of the Cardinals addressing the Pope respecting the mission of a legate to England, to demand money to supply his magnificent voluptuousness, said,→ "Holy Father, we treat Christian kingdoms as Balaam used his ass. I am afraid they will imitate her. By the severity of his blows, she brayed most horribly, and so will they." The prediction has been fulfilled. If to those evils are subjoined the shameless impurity, the notoriously unmeasurable perfidy, their puerile superstitions, and their traditional absurdities, we feel no surprise, that combined with other causes which even the Pope in all the boundless plenitude of his power was totally unable to control, the progress of the light and the truth should have received an impetus lasting and irresistible.

In addition to the flood of human literature, the tide of which continued to swell and accelerate its progress-the