such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great. And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell; and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great, chap. xvi.

se

Before entering minutely on the subject of the " ven last plagues, in which is filled up the wrath of God,” it may not be amiss, as tending to shew the intimate connexion and systematic coherence of the whole, to take a retrospective glance at those which have pre

ceded them.

The golden magnificence of Babylon the great; the union of Media and Persia into one dominant empire, which subverted and succeeded the Babylonian; the conquest of Persia by the Greeks: the establishment of their dominion; the subsequent rise and extension of the iron empire of Rome, great, terrible, and strong exceedingly; the setting up of the kingdom of God, by superhuman means, in the days of these kingdoms, or while the last of them was at the height of its glory and in the fulness of its strength; the subdivision of the empire of Rome itself into various kingdoms; the rise among them of the papal power, diverse from the rest, attaining a secular dominion over a large portion of Italy, and exercising a high control over all the other kingdoms which Rome had ruled; the similar and nearly coeval rise of Mahometanism; the sway which it acquired over the countries of the east; the long-continued prevalence of both; and the things noted in the scripture of

truth, the Persian invasion of Greece, and the Grecian invasion and subjugation of Persia; the immediate partition, without the intervention of a single reign, of the kingdom of Alexander into four notable ones; the history of Egypt and Syria, under the Ptolemies and Seleucida; the subversion of the Jewish polity and state, and the desolation of Judea by the Romans; the preaching of the Gospel, or the instruction of many by men of understanding who knew their God, and confirmed their doctrine by marvellous works; their grievous and multiform persecutions during a long period; the little help which was all that, after three centuries of violent opposition, the conversion of an emperor could give to the cause that was of God and not of man; the consequent hypocritical profession, by many, of the Christian faith; the renewal, for a long and appointed time, of the persecution of the servants and true worshippers of God; the rise and character of the papacy, its exaltation, splendour, blasphemous pretensions, and idolatrous practices; the speedy and enduring rod that was laid on an apostate and idolatrous church, first by the Saracens from the south, and afterwards perpetuated by the Turks from the north; the irruption of the former, and the settlement of the latter, within the bounds of the Roman empire; the permanent subjugation of the world for ages, to popery, the great apostacy of the west, and to Mahometanism, the great imposture of the east, (thus set forth before the world as the two last horns, both of the fourth beast, and of the ram and the he-goat ;) and, though springing thus from the ruin of their empires, like horns from the head of a beast, the more than imperial despotism by which the earth has been held and divided between them in thraldom and bondage, not altogether yet rid of and broken, which mocked the sovereignty of Alexander and the Cæsars; are events

which, linking ancient to modern times, for the space of twenty-four centuries, without the want of a single essential fact, or the transposition of a word, are as prominently marked in the book of Daniel, as in the history of the world.

In the Revelation of Jesus Christ, on the opening of the seals, we may come and see on earth what John saw prefigured in heaven; and the whole view of the religious state of man, within the compass and even without the limits of all the kingdoms which Daniel foretold, and in the long retrospect of more than seventeen centuries, since the Revelation was given, is open before us; and we see a pure and primitive Christianity; a murderous Mahometanism; the dark superstition and spiritual tyranny of the Romish church, while all was black; and infidelity, in its livid paleness, till, spiritually, all was death; together with the persecuted followers of the Lamb, till even in their faith and patience they could not forbear from crying out, How long, O Lord? Again, looking to the political state of the world, and the various phases of such a changeful thing, we see, as if eclipses, whether partial or full, were noted in a book and calculated to their time, how, after a period of silence in heaven, and of suspended judgments on earth, and also of commotions preparatory to the downfall of Rome, the Goths and Vandals, like a storm of hail and fire, overspread and desolated the Roman world;-how Genseric ravaged the coasts and burned the fleets of the Romans, and was like unto a burning mountain cast into the sea; how Attila, burning cities in his course, and blazing like a star, ravaged the land of a thousand streams, spread his devastations within the borders of Italy, along the Po and its tributary waters, between the Alps and the Appenine, falling upon the fountains and rivers of waters. And part after part having thus been dismembered from the

empire, looking upon the imperial city, no longer a terror to the world, we see the seditious hosts, under rebellious chiefs, severing the north of Italy from the diminished empire, and establishing a rival metropolis in Milan. From hence, too, from the waters that were made bitter, the western empire was extinguished, till the sun, the moon and the stars were smitten, and the emperor, the consuls, the senate were no more. Where the emperor had reigned the pope arose; and a kingdom, or spiritual domination, diverse from all others, was gradually established on the earth. Instead of trumpets which sounded for a moment, or wars that speedily effected their objects, woes that endured for ages, came upon Christendom. As previously earthly warriors, seeking to establish an earthly dominion, devastated and finally demolished an empire, which was itself built up by war and cemented by blood, so, in like appropriate judgment, a false religion became the scourge of an apostate church. The coincident exhaustion of the eastern empire, which had first conferred on the pope the supremacy of the churches, and the fall of the great king, who had threatened the last remnant of the empire of the Cæsars with annihilation,-by which mutual destruction the power and pride of Persia was humbled in the dust, and the blaze of its glory turned into blackness, smoothed the path of the Mahometans from the deserts of Arabia to the banks of the Indus and the shores of the Atlantic. The period of the two first woes was marked by centuries. The first hurt and tormented, from the one end of Europe to the other; the second became a settled woe, and, after a preparation of nearly four centuries, the sultan of the Turks occupied the throne of the Cæsars. From the taking of Constantinople, half a century, marked by continued impenitence in Western Europe, intervened till the time of the Refor

mation, which descended upon the earth like a mighty angel from heaven, with a little open book in his hand. After the establishment of the Reformation, itself of angelic likeness, and resplendent with light like pillars of fire amidst surrounding darkness, seven great successive wars ensued, affecting the interests of protestantism, and from which the political settlement of Europe and America took the form it maintained at the eve of the French Revolution. After the seven thunders had uttered their voices, time was to be no longer; and it was given to John to prophesy again.

The various forms of religion, and commotions or revolutions of kingdoms, having thus successively passed in vision before him, a reed, like unto a rod, was put into his hand, and he was commanded to measure the temple of God and the altar, and them that worship therein. The testifying of the witnesses, clothed in sackcloth; the contest of the church from first to last; the enemies that consecutively arose to destroy or subvert the kingdom of God and of his Christ, are described or measured, as if they had been a platform at his feet, over which he had only to stretch the measuring line in his hand. To us, its termination may not yet be distinctly seen, after eighteen centuries have, in a large measure, filled up the space, which then had no local habitation but in the eye of the prophet, and which nothing on earth could then touch but the reed that was given him. Yet the oftrepeated limits of one space in time, and one eventful period in history, supply the more abundant data for warranting the presumption, if not confirming the opinion, that the 1260 years, from the time that the churches were given into the hands of the pope till the time that the judgment began to sit, comprised a period which, taking its date in the reign of Justinian, terminated in the revolution of France. If