XXIII. THE CHURCH DURING THE EFFUSION OF THE VIALS. "And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever."-REV. xi. 15. "And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people. Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.”. REV. xiv. 6, 7. "And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God. "And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways thou King of saints. "Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy for all nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy judgments are made manifest." REV. xv. 2-4. I RESUME my remarks upon that blessed Book from which we have derived much spiritual, and practical, and Scriptural instruction. This scene, which I shall endeavour to analyse, is in some degree retrospective; but it is a retrospect that necessarily follows from the chronological position at which we have arrived in our expositions of the Apocalypse. Last Sunday evening I explained the seventh vial. I shewed the scenes it disclosed, and the prospects which it leads us to anticipate. The first vial, or symbol of judgment, beginning in 1792; the last vial, now trembling in the angel's hand, now pouring out or ready to be poured out; its first sprinklings smite the earth, and at this hour the nations begin to feel its influence, and thrones to rock beneath the first of its vibrations. But having dwelt, as you perceive, upon the seven vials, which have been seven epitomes of judgment, seven successive scenes of desolation inflicted on the earth, the question will naturally occur to you, "What has become of the Church of Christ all the while?" We have heard the crashes, and seen the effects of judgments upon the world, as well as judgments upon Babylon, but where has been "the hundred forty and four thousand," "the bride of the Lamb," the true and spiritual Church "redeemed out of every kindred, and people, and tribe, and tongue?" It is my province to shew you, parallel with the effusion of the vials, the mystery of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ-to shew you, beneath the turbid torrent that bears darkening judgments on its bosom, a bright and beautiful and silver streamlet, speeding onward in all its pristine purity, to the infinite and everlasting main -to shew you, amid the smoke that rises from the judgments that overspread the earth, the bright sparks that are the foretokens of the approaching glory, and thus to let it appear, that when one hemisphere was darkened by the clouds of righteous retribution, the other hemisphere began to glow with the forecast light of approaching day. First, then, I explained, you recollect, that the seventh seal was the epitome, or in brief, of the seven trumpets; and that the seventh trumpet was the epitome, or brief description, of the seven vials; the twenty-one constituting the history of Christendom, and the seventh of each being the abstract of the contents of the seven that were to follow. Now, having shewn you this, you will notice that, in the description of the seventh trumpet, the first passage read by me is by way of anticipation-the seventh trumpet being an abstract of the contents of the seven vials. It is an anticipatory song, an outburst of prophetic feeling, "the kingdoms of this world are become," that is, when the seven vials contained under the seventh trumpet are all poured out, "the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ.' This was anticipatory: no judgment comes upon the earth that does not cast its shadow before, and no blessing shines from heaven that does not reflect backward some beams of the glory which constitutes that blessing; and therefore the Apocalyptic seer John, witnessing all the desolations of the past, and catching in his prophetic eye some bright and glowing visions of the future, burst forth into the Poean, the triumphant song, as if he already saw the great consummation arrive; the kingdoms of this world are no longer enslaved by Satan, crushed by tyranny, infected by sin, but I see them become the kingdoms of the Lord, and I hear their song of praise, intimating that the reign of Satan and of sin is terminated upon earth. After this we have another symbol, to which I shall specially allude; and that is, that an angel, just after the beginning of the pouring out of the vials, i. e. of the French Revolution, in 1793, an angel comes from heaven -a symbolic angel spreads his pinions on the air-that air, recollect, that I shewed you last Sunday evening was to be tainted and disturbed by the pouring out of the seventh vial-the angel spreads his wings on the air, sweeps over the length and breadth of the globe, and he carries in his mission, not judgment, as the preceding trumpet angels did not desolation, as the vial angels did-but the glorious Gospel of the blessed God, to preach “to every nation and kindred, and tongue and people." The point which I will specially attempt to prove this morning is, that, contemporaneous with the pouring out of the vials, and the fearful judgments that fell upon apostate Christendom, there was an expansion of the truths of the Gospel, an outburst of Christian principle and missionary zeal, unparalleled since the day of Pentecost itself. This is the explanation of the angel flying through heaven with the everlasting Gospel. The third point to which I shall particularly allude, is that beautiful and truly Apocalyptic picture, the harpers harping with their harps upon the glassy sea-a sea mingled with fire. These harpers are described in the original by a most peculiar expression. They are not called merely conquerors, or those who have gotten the victory over the beast, but they are called vivтas Ék Töv Inpiou, not only conquerors over the beast, i. e. the Papal power, as I have shewed you, but also separatists from him. So that those described as harpers on the glassy sea, are not only described as conquerors over the beast-and I explained that the beast, as you may recollect, is the Roman Catholic apostasy-and over the image of the beast, the General Councils that reflect his mind and sentiments-and over the mark of the beast; and the number of the beast and you cannot have forgotten the word λareivos, the letters of which, λ, a, 7, ɛ, ɩ, v, o, c, make up the number 666, which is declared to be the number of the beast, as I explained to you on a previous occasion; these, I say, are called not only conquerors over him, but separatists from him, and that had the victory over the number of his name: and mark this, my dear friends, I believe that those who are among the harpers on the glassy sea, are not only those who deny the supremacy of the Pope of Rome, but those persons who repudiate and abhor the very principles of the Church of Rome. The Tractarians deny one great dogma in Popery, and almost the only onethe supremacy of the Pope. I admit they are not Papists, but I contend they have got upon them the mark of the beast, and will be numbered with him in the hour of trial; and if you desire to escape those crushing and consuming judgments that are utterly to overwhelm him, you must not only be separatists from the supremacy of the Pope, but separatists from his principles and his practices-separatists from all that is Popish, and allied with all that is Scriptural, Evange lical and Protestant. -- Now then, these harpers on the glassy sea mingled with fire, are said to sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb, and this instantly refers us, by allusion, to that beautiful song recorded in the book of Exodus. You will remember, that when the Israelites had passed the Red Sea, they stood upon the opposite shore and sung their sublime song of victory, while they looked across the Red Sea that sea that was the promenade of the people of God, and the sepulchre of the children and chariots of Pharaoh-with the pillar of fire by night that flashed its splendour upon the hosts of Pharaoh, and the pillar of cloud by day that concealed from them the Israelites whom they pursued. It has been said also, that the Red Sea is so called from the effect of the sun's rays shining upon it; for an ancient writer says: "that the mountains west of the Arabian gulf, when the rays of the sun rest upon their peaks, exhibit the appearance of glowing coals, red with fire; and the splendour reflected from the mountain tops dyes the sea with the colour of red, or fire :" shewing that the statement here of their standing on the brink of the sea over which they had passed in safety, and singing the song of Moses and of the Lamb, conveys an allusion to a fact in the history of Israel, which becomes typical of a fact true of our country, and rendered probable by a consideration of the chronology of the epoch to which I am now directing your attention. It appears to me, that Great Britain and the shores of England were, in the antitype, what the shores of the Red Sea and the triumphant Israelites were in the type, during the outpouring of the vial judgments upon Europe. Is it no evidence of this, that when the great destroyer swept Europe on a wing that never tired-when, from Moscow onward to Madrid, every capital blazed with revolutionary fires-when the cup of trembling was placed in every nation's hand, and every nation was constrained to drink it to the dregs-is there no fulfilment of the allusion in the fact, that we were unscathed? We heard the distant vibrations only borne on the winds, of the earthquake that hurled down thrones, upset dynasties, and cleft kingdoms in twain; we saw but the reflected glow across the channel of the sea of those fires that blazed over all the continent of Europe; and the Christians of England, in their chapels and in their churches, stood upon this side of the glassy sea, and praised God that they were saved from the judgments that overwhelmed the rest of the world, as they heard but the echo of the sound of falling thrones and |