But even "Catho

under his own eye and restraint,' in the new capital of Catholicism. And indeed all tended to that result : which however could not be, because inspired prophecy connected the Popedom and Rome locally together, until Rome's final and terrible destruction, not by man but God.2 Accordingly the sudden and wonderful overthrow of Napoleon's power occurred to prevent it; an overthrow more sudden than even its rise. then, and when so strangely, as De Pradt says, licity having deserted him, four heretical kings bore the Pope back to Rome," 3 still he sate not on his throne as once before. His power was crippled; his seat unstable; the riches of his Church rifled; and a mighty precedent and principle of action established against hima precedent and principle which could scarce fail of bearing similarly bitter fruit afterwards; and so of prolonging, or renewing, the consuming judgment on the Beast predicted in Daniel, and the desolation of his Harlot-Church by the ten Horns, predicted in the Apocalypse.

And so it happened. For as to the subsequent attempted re-establishment of Papal superstition and Papal supremacy by the Bourbons, Ferdinand, Miguel, and the Pope, in France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, I must remind the reader that the revolutions which occurred in the three former countries quickly swept away the ill-cemented re-constructions :-the result, up to the end of 1842, being that in France the Romish Church still remained of Paris had been repaired for his reception. "C'est ainsi," says De Pradt, on the Pope's final removal to Fontainbleau, "qu'il l'acheminoit successivement vers le siege de Paris."

1 "Il avait devant ses yeux l'exemple de Constantin, et le souvenir des malheurs qu'avait entrainé le trop grand eloignement de ces deux pouvoirs. Il lui paraissait convenable que le chef du culte catholique residât aupres du souverain de la plus grande partie de la catholicité." Ib. p. 257.-This judgment of Napoleon on the effect of the separation of the chief temporal and chief spiritual power, may be regarded as his unintended comment on the prophecy of the necessity of the removal of the Roman Imperial let to the development of the Papal Antichrist. See p. 145, with its Note 1 and * suprà.

* See Gregory the First's just inference from Scripture to this effect, Vol. 1, p. 376, Note 2.

3 A.D. 1814. De Pradt, p. 313.-I suppose that besides the Princes of Russia, Prussia, and England, De Pradt means, as the fourth, the King of Sweden. But, if so, I do not understand why he omits Austria, the fourth of the four great allied Powers.

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spoiled, impoverished, and legally only on a footing of equality with other religions, just as under Napoleon : that in Portugal it remained spoiled of its ecclesiastical domains, by the decrees of the secular power in 1835 : 2 and that in Spain it suffered a similar confiscation of the immense church-property of that "most catholic of countries; a confiscation completed under the rule of Queen Christina and the Regent Espartero. Which last-mentioned act of spoliation is the subject of a Papal Apostolic Letter not very long since published, "ordaining public prayers on account of the unhappy state of religion in Spain, together with a plenary indulgence in the form of a jubilee :"3—a memorial in these its expressions alike of the continued harlotry of the Romish Church, and of the continued hatred, spoliation, and consuming of it, so as with fire, (to borrow again the Apocalyptic figure,) by kingdoms once the most devoted

On the expulsion of the Bourbons, and election of the duke of Orleans to be king of the French in August 1830, the Committee of the Chambers recommended the suppression of the 6th Article of the Charter (i. e. of Louis XVIII.), which declared "The Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion to be the religion of the State; as being that which had been most abused." Cited by Cuninghame, p. 197.-He adds an extract from a letter from Paris of that same date; "The fall of Charles X. has dragged with it the fall of Popery."

2 "The bill for the sale of church property in Portugal has passed into a law. The amount of the national and church property together, which is thus to be disposed of, is calculated at considerably more than twelve millions sterling. Such a dilapidation of the funds of the Romish Church has had already, it is said, a sensible effect on the revenues of the Romish See." Record of June 1, 1835; quoted by Mr. Bickersteth on the Prophecies, p. 176.

3 It states among the grievances of the Church, that the ecclesiastical property in Spain has been put up to sale, and the proceeds put into the public treasury; that all communication with the See of Rome is prohibited under severe penalties;-that no Nuncio from Rome is ever to be admitted into the kingdom to grant favours and dispensations ;-that the ancient Papal prerogative of confirming or rejecting bishops elected in Spain is altogether abolished;—and that priests who seek confirmation, and metropolitans who solicit the pallium from Rome, incur the penalty of exile.

I have already cited Berthier's illustration from Rome of one of the figures in this prophetic verse; I mean specially about the kings burning the whore with fire. See p. 352 suprà. Let me here add another, with reference to the Spanish branch of the Church of Rome, from one of the able editorial articles of the Times and Evening Mail. In the No. for April 16, 1844, his subject being Queen Christina's repentance of her anti-Romish proceedings in former years, and measures taken conjointly with Narvaez for the partial re-endowment of the Church, the writer speaks of "the signalization of her former government, by the confiscation of Church property, burning of monasteries, desecration of churches, and massacre of monks, when the infidel party in her name tore up the old ecclesiastical machinery of Spain, and shot down its adherents:" and then thus pro

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to it. And though in Italy it has hitherto kept the domains re-assigned to it at the Peace, yet significant symptoms have not been wanting to shew that there too the infidel democratic anti-Papal spirit, infused under the French domination, is not extinct; and that it only awaits its opportunity to take part in the renewal of the attack on Rome.-At the same time it must ever be remembered, in looking both to present and to future, that the prophecy intimates some return of kindly feeling towards Rome to have taken place on the part of the ten kings, ere the epoch of its great and final destruction : 2 and in what I have just stated respecting some of the Kings of Roman Christendom, we seem to have indications already visible of at least a preparation for it.

Thus have I shewn the fulfilment both of the more particular Apocalyptic prophecy of the outpouring of a vial of wrath on the throne of the Papal Beast, as the fifth act in the judgments of the seventh Trumpet, and

ceeds. "The corruptions of the church have been beyond denial or apology. Friend and foe alike confessed and proclaimed them. A fiery ordeal was necessary for it; and a fiery ordeal it has had. It has emerged from the flames shorn of much of its paraphernalia. We may hope that it has been purified, as well as punished."

"

The Pope, in his Allocution of March 2, 1841, on the same subject, given in full by Mr. Rule, pp. 313-322, well illustrates another of the figures in that same Apocalyptic verse. As for the authors of these acts, who glory in being called children of the Catholic Church, we supplicate them to open their eyes on the wounds they had inflicted on their Mother and Benefactress."-" If," observes Mr. Rule, p. 301, "the spirit which led to the spoliation of the Spanish Church was infidel, it was only a development and application of the infidelity which is indigenous to Popery in every age and country. And, standing aloof from the fray, we may admire the retributive providence of God; which in Spain (and not Spain only) has allowed to the natural offspring of the Babylonish Harlot the work of her gradual destruction.

E. g. in the outbreak of the Carbonari, only put down by the Austrian soldiery. An Encyclic Letter of Pope Gregory XVI, bearing date August 16, 1832, of which Mr. Bickersteth has given an abstract, p. 418, bears testimony to this; as well as to dangers from a different quarter, and of a more Scriptural origin. It mourns over a tempest of evils and disasters: says, "This our Roman Chair of the blessed Peter, in which Christ has placed the main strength of the Church, is most furiously assailed; and a horrible and nefarious warfare openly and avowedly waged against the Catholic faith :" and closes with a prayer to the Virgin Mary, "who alone has destroyed all heresies, and is our greatest confidence, the whole foundation of our hope."

2 It is said in Apoc. xviii. 9, that on occasion of the ultimate and total destruction of the mystic Babylonish harlot by fire from heaven, "The kings of the earth, who committed fornication with her, shall lament over her, when they see the smoke of her burning."

also of the more general prophecy of a tearing and desolating of the Papal Church by its ten horns, as enacted from the very first sounding of that Trumpet, and commencement of the French Revolution. And hence the fitness of the outbreaking of that Revolution to constitute a primary terminating epoch to the 1260 predicted year-days of Papal supremacy.' Nor need I do more, in concluding the present Chapter, than to add two further brief remarks in illustration of its fitness. The first is, that the then establishment by the revolutionary, and afterwards the Napoleonic and other Codes, of equal toleration to Protestants as to Roman Catholics, (the former a proscribed class up to that epoch in the European kingdoms,2) seems to point it out as the time when

1 So Daubuz, writing long before the French Revolution, observes that the hating, and spoiling, and consuming of the whore by the ten kings would probably determine the 1260 years. And Niebuhr, writing after it, in his Roman History, Vol. i. p. 222, after observing that Rome soon after Totila's desolation of it "had become the capital of a spiritual empire;" adds, "which, after the lapse of 12 centuries, we have seen interrupted in our days.”

2 Including France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Savoy, Austria (till 1783), and the Netherlands ;-all in short except some of the Swiss Cantons and the Dutch United Provinces.

In illustration of the state of Protestants in France, from after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV until the French Revolution, I may cite the following from an interesting abstract of facts given in the Edinburgh Review, No. 70, on the authority of De Rulhiere and others. "At the close of the American war the fact was confessed by Government, that a million of Calvinists were concealed in France without civil privileges or acknowledged existence : without means of establishing by legal evidence their births, marriages, or deaths: -husbands without lawful wives, parents without legitimate children; unable to quit their country, or remain in it without professing its religion and violating its laws;-compelled at the hour of death either to violate their conscience, or to leave their property liable to confiscation, and their bodies to insult."

"The last public execution of Protestants, for no other crime than professing the Reformed religion, took place at Toulouse in 1762. The affecting case of John Calas (one of the four persons who suffered on that occasion) aroused the sympathies of the French people, who now began to look with disgust on those frequent immolations of innocent victims: and a few words from the pen of Voltaire turned the current of public opinion against the satellites of the Holy Inquisition. Persecutions thenceforth became less frequent. The king's troops were ordered to desist from the pursuit of the defenceless Hugonots, and a respite was given to the reformed Church of the desert.* Louis XVI, prompted by his counsellors Lafayette and Malesherbes, caused an inquiry to be made into the social condition of his Protestant subjects: and, on the report of De Rulhiere, an edict was issued in 1787, by favour of which, persons professing the Reformed

* Compare the Apocalyptic figure, Apoc. xii. Also what I have observed on it, pp. 53-55 suprà, and on the witnesses still retaining their sackcloth, Vol. ii. p. 430.

the two symbolic witnesses may be considered also to have begun partially to put off their sackcloth. The second is, that the continuance in force even until then, in the several countries of Papal Christendom, of the old Popedom-favoring Code of Justinian, a Code first promulgated, as we have seen, in the years 529-533, and its then sudden and rapid supercession by new anti-Papal Codes that originated from, and expressed the spirit of, the French Revolution of 1789-1793,' are facts that furnish a very notable mark of contrast between the characters, juridically and constitutionally considered, of the epoch of primary commencement and epoch of primary ending, (according to our view of the matter,) of the 1260 years.

CHAPTER VI.

THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF THE VIALS TO PRODUCE REPENTANCE.

"And they blasphemed the God of heaven from their pains and sores.-And they repented not of their deeds." -Apoc. xvi. 11.

religion were admitted to the rights of citizenship." So Presbyter Anglicanus, in the Record. And see too Mr. Wilks' Book on the Persecutions of French Protestants.

It was in Austria just before the French Revolution that the first Edict of Toleration was past; viz. by the Emperor Joseph II, in his Ordinance of Religious Reform which I have before referred to, of the year 1783. In 1788 Louis the XVIth in France issued an Edict, giving to French Protestants a legal existence but it was not till the year following, and commencement of the Revolution, that they were permitted the public exercise of their religion.

In Spain, Portugal, and the greater part of Italy, the Inquisition had been too rigorous and searching to leave at this epoch any Protestants.

1 The following is cited very appositely by Dr. Keith, in his Signs of the Times, Vol. ii. p. 93, from Lavalette's Memoirs. 'The events that preceded the grand drama of 1789, took me by surprize in the midst of my books and my love of study. I was then reading L'Esprit des Lois; a work that charmed me by its gravity, depth, and sublimity.. I wished also to become acquainted with the Code of our own laws. But Dommanget, to whom I mentioned my desire, laughed, and pointed to the Justinian Code, the common law Code of the kingdom. . . . I thought I should do well to unite with the meditations of my closet, the observation of those scenes of disorder which were the harbingers of the Revolution."