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who, after the announcement of the fall of Babylon, utters a warning against any longer treating the behests of the beast and its image as authoritative. "If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark on his forehead or on his hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, and shall be tormented with fire and brimstone, and the smoke of their torment ascends for ever and ever." And it is added: "Here is the patience of the saints; here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. And a voice from heaven said: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors,' Rev. xiv. 9-13. There is to be a persecution, therefore, after the fall of the nationalized hierarchies, and of so dreadful a character, that those who die in the Lord are pronounced blessed, in comparison of those who still live; and the ground of the persecution is to be a refusal by those who keep the faith of Jesus, to render submission to the authority arrogated over Christ's disciples, by the civil rulers, and the hierarchies of the Catholic church. The question at issue in that persecution is accordingly to be, whether Christ is the sole lawgiver and king of the church; or, whether those usurping powers have the supreme authority over it which they claim; and that will be the question, whether Christ issoon to come and reign on the earth, and overthrow his usurping foes; as is shown by Revelation chap. xix. that he is immediately to come and destroy the civil rulers and false teachers, who are arrayed against him.

There is thus to be a persecution of unexampled violence immediately before Christ's coming, in which the persecu tors are to be the rulers and priests who deny his advent and reign as the monarch of the world; and the victims are to be those who keep his word, and profess and teach that he is to come and assume the sceptre of the earth, destroy his enemies, and redeem and bless those who own and trust him as their Saviour and King. And during that persecution all who are exposed to it, and undoubtedly those of God's children who gaze at it from a distance, will be filled with a sense of their utter powerlessness, and be led to renounce all the false notions that are now entertained of a conversion of the world previously to Christ's coming,

and through the instrumentality of men. How distressful the condition of the true worshippers in Great Britain, for example, will then be, we may conjecture in a measure from the prediction that the persecutor is to be the beast from the abyss to which the ten kings are to give their power, and on which the woman of Babylon, drunk with the blood of the saints, is seated. That beast is defined, Rev. xvii. 11, as an eighth king of the same order as the seven represented by the beast's heads. He is to be emperor, therefore, of the whole western empire, consisting of the ten kingdoms. As Great Britain is one of the ten kingdoms, the fact that he is the imperial chief of the whole, and that the ten kings give their power to him, indicates that Great Britain is in a measure to become subordinate to him; while the fact, that he bears the woman Babylon, the symbol of the nationalized Catholic church, shows that that church is then to be nationalized in all the kingdoms, and therefore in Great Britain. The re-nationalization of that church, involving not improbably the de-nationalization of the Protestant church-will naturally meet a stern resistance from those who receive Christ's purpose to come and reign on the earth, and lead them to an open, earnest, and fearless proclamation of their belief, that the chief who has risen to imperial power over the ten kingdoms, is the beast from the abyss, and the Catholic church he has exalted again into power the Babylon of the Apocalypse; and their persuasion that the slaying of the witnesses is at hand, and that their resurrection will follow at the time foreshown in the prophecy; and will be the signal of the fall of Babylon, the revelation of the man of sin, the gathering of the kings and armies at Armageddon, and the appearance of the Messiah in glory, and destruction by his avenging fires of the beast and its auxiliaries. And that assault on them, and announcement of their doom, will doubtless present the motive that will induce the imperial chief to seize them, and put their faith and the prediction of their martyrdom to the test by slaying them, preserving them unburied, and in a form in which they can be identified, and awaiting the time of their expected resurrection. During that period, therefore, which from the renationalization of the Catholic church to the resurrection of the witnesses, may be five, six, seven, or

more years, the condition of the true worshippers in Great Britain will be one of extreme depression and peril. Not improbably they will be interdicted from assembling for worship, and thousands and myriads of them suffer the wants and miseries which Christ depicts in the parable of the judgment at his coming, Matt. xxv, hunger, thirst, nakedness, sickness, imprisonment. Their missions to Western Asia, Africa, India, Burmah, China, and the Islands of the Southern and Pacific Oceans, will be interrupted, and the feeling brought home to every heart not under the blinding sway of sin, that so far as man is concerned, the condition of the world is hopeless; and that nothing but the speedy interposition of the Almighty Redeemer, and assumption of the throne of the earth, can save the church from extinction.

Such are the great events that are approaching. Such are the proofs that are soon to appear of the error of the notion so generally entertained, that the powers of the world are to be withheld by the ministry of men from this war on Christ's kingdom, and the race, before he comes, won back from rebellion to righteousness. In the vast train of events that is to work this change in the views the people of God cherish respecting his purposes towards our world, and the office they are to fill in recalling it to obedience, we doubt not, the agitations, revolutions, and strifes that now convulse this nation, and threaten to plunge it into a fathomless gulf of crime and misery, may have an important part.

ART. X.-THE STUDY OF THE PROPHETIC SCRIPTURES SPECIALLY A DUTY AT THE PRESENT TIME.

THERE has been no period, perhaps, in which a careful study of the prophetic Scriptures, and an implicit acceptance of their teachings, were more needful and obligatory to the church than at the present time. Movements are in progress that not only are likely to exert important influences on Christ's kingdom, but are sure, in a brief space, to work great changes in the views entertained by one or

the other party into which the church is divided, of the great purposes God has revealed in respect to his kingdom in this world.

Thus, whether the year 1864, 1865, 1866, 1867, or 1868, is to be the period, or not, of the great events expositors have assigned to them, such as "the expiration of the 1260 prophetic days allotted to the tyranny of the little Roman horn, and his tool the Roman wild beast, the ending of the times of the Gentiles, and the pouring of the seventh apocalyptic vial," referred by Mr. Faber to 1864; and the exhaustion of the seventh vial, the end of the third woe, the battle of Armageddon, a figurative coming of the Son of Man, the commencement of the general conversion of the Gentiles, the binding of Satan, and other events which he assigns to 1865, will soon be determined by the passage of those years. The views, also, of those writers who have assigned those or other events to the year 1866, 1867, or 1868, will soon be subjected to a similar test by the arrival of those periods. That those theories are not to meet a verification, has already become the conviction, doubtless, of many who once entertained them.

In like manner, the question whether the change in the structure of the monarchies of the ten kingdoms, indicated Rev. xvii. 12, 13, by which the kings are to give their power and strength to the beast, who is then to be an individual monarch, is yet to take place; or whether, as many hold, it occurred ages ago, will soon be determined. If out of the great movements that are now in progress, no monarch rises to something like an imperial power over the ten kingdoms, so as to unite them in a persecution of the witnesses of Jesus, it will, in the judgment, doubtless, of most, form a decisive proof that either the meaning of the prediction. has been seriously misconceived, or else that its place in the series of events with which it is connected in the prophecy, is misjudged.

The great question, so largely debated by expositors, whether there is yet to be a persecution of Christ's witnesses, and the slaughter, under peculiar arrangements, of a great number, that is to be followed, after a brief period, by their resurrection and assumption to heaven, is soon to be shown by events. Within a few years-probably ere the present

generation passes from life-that crisis will arise; or if not, events will take a shape that will show decisively that, if still future, it is at hand. As it is to be the work of the beast from the abyss, and immediately before his destruction, whether its date is towards the close of the twelve hundred and sixty years, or the twelve hundred and ninety, it cannot be at any great distance from the present time.

So also the question, whether Babylon the Great is the symbol of the nationalized Catholic hierarchies of the ten kingdoms; whether her fall is the denationalization of those hierarchies; and whether, after her fall from her position as a state church, she is to be destroyed by the people, is soon to be decided by events. As her fall and destruction are to take place under the seventh trumpet, and that trumpet is to sound immediately after the resurrection and assumption of the witnesses, if their martyrdom takes place within a brief period, all these questions will have a like speedy determination.

And so, likewise, the question whether the Israelites are or are not to be restored to their ancient land; whether the conversion of the world is to precede or follow the second coming of Christ; and whether he is to come to new create and reign over the earth, or to consign it to annihilation, will, ere long, either be determined by events, or the great movements of Providence will assume such a shape as to indicate which of the views now entertained on the subject is in harmony with the Divine purposes.

These considerations are suited, then, to draw the attention of God's people with unusual earnestness to his prophetic word. And what duty can be more obvious than the careful study of the forewarnings he has given of these great events? What other knowledge can be so essential, in order to just views of the great permissions of his providence, the awful shapes in which the passions and follies of men are revealing themselves, and the doom which is falling on monarchs and nations? What other themes can rival these in interest? Into what nothingness the rise or fall of dynasties, the dismemberment or reconstruction of empires, the blight or success of commerce, great as they are in themselves, sink, compared with the question whether Satan is speedily to be driven from the kingdom he has so

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