CHAPTER V.

THE FIFTH VIAL; OR JUDGMENT BEGUN AND PROGRESSING ON THE POPEDOM.

"And the fifth Angel poured out his Vial upon the throne of the Beast: and his kingdom was darkened. And they gnawed their tongues from the pain."-Apoc.

xvi. 10.

We have here predicted the outpouring of a Vial of judgment on the Beast's throne and kingdom, consecutive on that of the former Vial; after which a notice follows of its ineffectiveness to produce repentance. It is the first of these statements only that I purpose now considering. The second, as just before observed, I reserve for the next Chapter.

Now as to the locality on which this Vial was to be poured out, there cannot, I conceive, be a doubt. The throne, or seat of the Beast, was the same as that of the seven-headed Dragon, representing the Roman Pagan power before him: for it is said, "The Dragon gave him (the Beast) his throne and power," &c. It was the throne of the seven hills, the See of ROME.3-And precisely in accordance with the prediction of the text, thus interpreted, we find that immediately after the battle of Wagram in 1809, and re-subjection of Austria,-the closing historic fact noted in my exposition of the fourth Vial, there were issued by Napoleon the two celebrated Decrees of Schoenbrunn and Vienna, (Decrees to which I shall again advert ere concluding this Chapter,) whereby the Pope's temporal authority over the Roman State was

3 Already in the end of the 4th Century, the episcopal see, or seat, was denominated a throne. So Sozomen, 49. Ο εν Αντιοχεία θρονος της εκκλησίας €σxoλασe The patriarchal see, or throne, of Antioch was vacant.

abolished, and ROME itself incorporated with France, as the second city of its empire.

But this in truth was only the consummation of insults and injuries, heaped by the French on the Papal power from almost the very commencement of their Revolution. I have had occasion to glance at this fact, and cursorily to illustrate it, more than once in the general historical sketches given in my Chapter iii. preceding. But it becomes a necessary part of my duty to set it forth more distinctly and fully in the present Chapter. For the solution of the great question of the termination of the 1260 years of prophecy is involved in it. If, as I have supposed in common with many other interpreters, the 1260 predicted year-days of Papal supremacy began primarily with the quaternion of years, from 529 to 533, that witnessed the promulgation of the Popedom-favoring Justinian Code,' then ought the quaternion of years 1260 years after, that is, from 1789 to 1793, the opening epoch of the Revolution, to be marked, as the primary end of the 1260 years, by some deadly blow at the Papal supremacy;-then Daniel's prophecy (of the "taking away of dominion from it, to consume and to destroy it unto the end,"3 to have had coincidently a commencement of accomplishment; -and the Papal kingdoms, that answered to the ten horns of the Beast, to have also then begun, agreeably with another well-accordant but more specific Apocalyptic prediction, to tear the great harlot-church, and de

1 See suprà, pp. 136, 248.

2 So Alison in his Preface. He notes four epochs in European history as connected with the French Revolution: 1st, from the meeting of the States General in 1789 to the establishment of a Republic, and murder of the king, in 1793-2nd, from 1793 to 1795; including the strife of the Girondists and Jacobins, and the Reign of Terror, until the suppression of the revolt of the National Guards, and triumph of the Convention, in October 1795:-3rd, from 1795 to 1802; a period including the rise of Bonaparte, his Italian and Egyptian campaigns, his elevation to the first Consulship, (the democratic passion having now exhausted itself) and the Peace of Amiens:-4th, Bonaparte's zenith of power, and oppression of the continental powers, from 1802 to 1815; including his fall, and the battle of Waterloo. 3 Dan. vii. 26.

4 Apoc. xvii. 12-17. "The ten horns are ten kings which receive power at one and the same time with the Beast. These have one mind, and shall give

solate its power and its wealth, with which they before committed fornication.-Let us note then what history reports on this point; and mark the earlier spoiling of the Pope's Church, ere we revert to the subsequent subversion of his throne.

Now significant symptoms had not been wanting for full half a century before the French Revolution, which showed the attachment of the kings to have more than grown cold towards the Pope, and a preparation of mind to have risen up within them for the overthrow of his domination, and spoliation of the Church his associate.1 But as yet there was no mortal blow struck against Papal supremacy; no notable commencement of any such hating, tearing, and consuming, as by fire, of the Romish Church, with the bitterness and animosity intimated in prophecy, by the then rulers and people of the kingdoms of Western Christendom. This was reserved to the epoch of the Revolution; and to that country which

their power and strength to the Beast. . . . And the ten horns shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. For God hath put it in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the Beast; until the words of God shall be fulfilled.” -That is, as I suppose, that until the time of the seventh Trumpet's sounding, when (as it is stated in Apoc. x. 7 and xi. 18) God's promises were to have a fulfilment, the ten kingdoms would adhere to the Beast, and to the harlot-church associated with him;-then (at the epoch of its sounding) revolt from him and her, and begin to tear and desolate the whore.

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"There is something unnatural," said the Venetian Envoy in 1737, "in the sight of all the Catholic governments united in a body, in violent hostility to the Roman Court. Whether it proceeds from the spread of more enlightened ideas, as many people maintain, or from a tyrannical disposition to crush the weaker party, thus much is certain,—that the kings of Europe are making rapid progress in stripping the Roman See of all its temporal rites and privileges." Ranke, Vol. iii. p. 192.-After this, Benedict XIV, Pope from 1740 to 1758,by making concessions with much political sagacity, where absolutely requisite, both to Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, Naples, &c. delayed the crisis. But," adds Ranke, "the contest between the State and the Church, which seems to originate in an internal necessity of Catholicism, could not be terminated by these slight compromises. The agitated deep soon began to heave with indications of other and far more tremendous storms." Ib. p. 196. Then, after a Section on the suppression of the Jesuits by Pope Ganganelli A.D. 1773, and another on the ecclesiastical reformations of Joseph II. of Austria, (who in these ecclesiastical reformations, A.D. 1787,-including the suppression of 1300 out of 2000 religious houses, abolition of Papal supremacy in Austria, and establishment of the toleration of Protestants,-may be considered the precursor of the anti-papalism of the French) he proceeds to describe the mightier changes of the French Revolution.

under Clovis, 1300 years before, had first of the Western Kingdoms attached itself to Rome, and of which the king thenceforward in consequence had borne the title of Eldest Son of the Church.1

The blow was there and then instantaneous. Scarce was the National Assembly constituted in the summer of 1789, when it entered on its course of spoliation. The clergy, who formed one of the Estates, had so little anticipated this, that, on the conflict between the Nobles and the Tiers Etat, they in large numbers joined the latter; and thus materially helped to turn the scale, and precipitate the Revolution. But, regardless of the help so given it, one of the first measures of the Assembly was to abolish tithes, establishing an insufficient rentcharge on the State in lieu of them; a second at one fell swoop to sever from the Church, and appropriate as national property, all ecclesiastical lands throughout the kingdom-lands, let it be observed, which had been regarded ever before as not French property only, but that of the Romish Church; and as needing therefore the Pope's sanction to its alienation. Then followed the suppression of all monastic houses in the kingdom, to the number of 4000: and, in regard of the clergy, already made pensioners of the State, the substitution of popular election for institution after the Papal Concordat; and the requirement from each of them, on pain of forfeiture of the pension, of a solemn abjuration of all allegiance to the Pope. And then in 1793, (the last year of the four,) the Decree issued for the abolition of the Christian (or rather Romish) religion in France: whereupon the Churches were many of them razed to the ground; others left in partial ruin; and of the rest, shut against priests and worshippers, (the memorial re

1 See p. 138 suprà.

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2 So Ranke, iii. 221. Elsewhere, p. 227, he speaks of the value of the lands thus alienated as 400 millions of francs.-Alison thus reports the general valuation of ecclesiastical property in France, given in to the National Assembly at the commencement of the Revolution as follows:

Tithes 130 millions of francs, of which 40 belonged to the Parochial Clergy. Ecclesiastical Lands of the whole land in France.

mained long after,)1 the most sacred places defiled, the treasures rifled, and the bells broken, and cast into cannon.2-So was the whole French ecclesiastical establishment then destroyed. As to the French clergy themselves, 24,000 were massacred,3 so as I have before stated, with every the most horrid atrocity. The rest, for the most part utterly beggared, found refuge from the popular fury only by flight into other and chiefly Protestant lands; bearing about with them every where visible evidence that the predicted hating, and tearing, and making bare of the great whore of Babylon, had indeed begun.

Begun in France, the spoliation of the harlot-Church, and of its Papal patron and head, spread quickly into the other countries of Christendom. A propagandist spirit, in respect of this as in respect of its other principles, was one of the essential characteristics of the Revolu

1 In Carr's "Stranger in France," published in the year 1802, and which was a narrative of a tour in France made during the peace of Amiens, lively notices occur, such as follows. "On turning the corner of a street, as we entered Rouen, I suddenly found coach, horses, and all, in the aisle of an ancient Catholic church. From the busy buzzing of the streets, we were translated into the silence of shattered tombs and the gloom of cloisters.... The church having devolved to the nation as its property, by force of a revolutionary decree, was sold for stables to one of the owners of the Rouen diligences. An old unsaleable cabriolet occupied the place of the altar; and the horses were eating their oats in the sacristy."-He adds, that the Cathedral of Rouen was converted during the Revolution into a sulphur and gunpowder manufactory; and the costly railing of brass gilt, which half-surrounded the altar, torn up and melted into cannon, pp. 38, 46.

In Dr. Waugh's Memoranda, who visited Paris about the same time, similar notices are found. "Dieppe. Sept. 29, 1802: Visited one of the churches :found two men winnowing wheat before the floor of the pulpit, which was still remaining but in place of the Holy Virgin at its back, as formerly, the ruffians of reformation have erected a female figure of the republic with a spear in hand, surmounted with a cap of liberty.-Rouen: One splendid church was full of wheat. M. Dupont told me, however, he expected the nuisance would be removed on the Archbishop's arrival.-St. Denis: Saw the Cathedral. The slates were torn off the roof; the jackdaws flying through and through; and the cemeteries of the kings of France violated: the lead coffins having been converted into musket bullets, the bones hurled into a common hole dug in the vicinity; the beard of Henri IV torn from his face, and worn as moustaches by a rude soldier. Not a wreck was left behind in the vaults: the place converted into a store-house for flour, of which it is now almost full." Memoirs, pp. 227, &c.

2 Scott's Life of Napoleon, ii. 306.—In a Report given to the Directory in 1794, it was stated that out of the church bells there might be cast 15,000 pieces of cannon. In the Tresor de Numismatique by M. Achille Collas, Plates xxxii, xxxvi, and xxxviii, there are copies of medals struck at Lyons and elsewhere, representing the ruined church and bell.

3 Cobbin gives this number in his Historical View of the Reformed Church in France. * See pp. 312, 322, suprà.

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