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the Church of Rome stereotypes her productions, and shows that, as far as doctrine is concerned, she is unchanged, and unchangeable. I could produce innumerable and recent proofs of the awful idolatry of the Romish Church. In all her superstitions, idolatry, tyranny, cruelty, and proscription, there is no change for the better. She has not, therefore, even yet repented of the worship of demons. The streets, cathedrals, and churches of Belgium, I can state from personal knowledge, are painful proofs of this.

But the description in this passage indicates that the moral state of the Church was no better. Let any one read the decrees and accompanying discussions of councils, that were assembled, among other things, to investigate the crimes of the priests, and he will have no difficulty in seeing the fulfilment of this prophecy. The very poems and ballads, and the historians of these ages, are confirmatory proof of their terrible degeneracy. Instead of repenting of their sins, they corrupted themselves, and sinned more and more. The very legends of the saints, read to the people as practical theology, were fitted by their indelicacy alone to contaminate their moral character. The system of auricular confession, which was introduced at this time, combined with the compulsory celibacy of the clergy, was suited to increase that contamination. There was a text-book, of which forty editions are extant, first issued in the Pontificate of John XXII., in which every crime had its absolution and every sin its forgiveness for a fixed sum of money. The bishops, even, of that day, licensed the very sin which is here strongly denounced, and much of the episcopal revenue was derived from licences granted to the sensual for living in that very sin. Gerson, in the Council of Constance, publicly denounced the nunneries as "prostibula meretricum," and he could not be contradicted.

But, it is added, they did not repent of their " sorceries." What were their sorceries? Who is ignorant of pretended visions, dreams, and "lying wonders," and miracles, and pious frauds? What lists of holy relics! What remains of the cross, and of the apparel of the

Virgin. You will say, some of you, surely such sorceries are not practised now. Even now they have not repented of, or renounced them; they occur every day on the continent of Europe. It was only in 1846 that the Archbishop of Paris, with the sanction of his superior, the Pope, published the account of a miraculous Medal, which is solemnly declared to be able to convert heretics, and cure diseases. Only the other day, 1847, we have archiepiscopal sanction given to an account of an appearance of the Virgin to two children in La Salette, in which it is stated, the place she stood on became a spring, the waters of which operate miraculous cures. That no true Christian female, much less Mary, addressed the children on this occasion is plain, from the words put into Mary's mouth, "If my people will not be converted, I shall be compelled to allow them to fall into the hands of my Son"-a remark in which you may observe an essentially Popish idea. Our Saviour is represented as an offended judge, and Mary as an indulgent mediator, who sympathizes with us, in a way and to a degree in which Christ cannot. The way to propitiate Christ, as if he needed such propitiation, is, it is alleged, through Mary; and the only way of propitiating God, no less incensed, is through Christ. The Trinity is represented as all wrath, but Mary all love. The Bible says, that "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." The Virgin may not come between us and Christ. We need her not. Through Christ, God can come down low as we have fallen, and we can rise high as God is. Jesus is God: none can come between Him and God. He is also man: none can come between Christ and me. As God-man, he fills the whole chasm that sin had made between heaven and earth. He lays his right hand on the throne of Deity, and his left hand on my heart, and so makes of twain one.

I need not remind you of Lord Shrewsbury's Adolaratas, which are purely mesmeric creations. His Lordship believes that in each of the hands of one of these ladies are distinctly represented the stigmata or wounds

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of Christ, which bleed the instant the host or consecrated water is brought near, and cease bleeding whenever the host is withdrawn.*

The next sin in this dark catalogue, of which the Apostacy repented not, is theft. Indulgences had long been sold publicly in the market, and the coffers of the Vatican were filled with the produce of the sale of relics, and of jubilees, and pilgrimages. Clement VI., in his bull appointing the jubilee of 1350, says, "We also command the angels that they place his soul in paradise, entirely exempt from purgatory." Masses for the dead, the sale of ecclesiastical dignities, and the prices of licences to the priests to live in sin were so great, that Pope Leo X. exclaimed of the gospel, "How profitable this fable of Jesus Christ has been to us!"

They repented not of their "murders." In the year 1179, the third Lateran denounced heretics with anathema, and commanded their goods to be confiscated. The fourth Lateran, A. D. 1215, commanded that "the secular power be admonished, and if needs be compelled, to exterminate heretics out of their land." Every Romish Bishop swears still at his consecration, "I will persecute and attack all heretics and dissenters." Dominic began the Inquisition as an individual persecutor, and after his death the Inquisition was duly organized, a. D. 1233; that fell system of universal espionage, unsparing and ceaseless proscription, whose Argus-eyed police entered and analyzed every house, and made the human heart dread even the sound of its own beatings. In short, so little evidence of repentance was there just previous to the Reformation, that in 1460, Alan De La Roche revived the Rosary with its ten prayers to Mary, or Aves, for one Pater Noster, or prayer to God. Alexander VI., in his bull canonizing Anselm, writes: "Romanus Pontifex viros claros inter sanctos predictos debet collocare et ut sanctos ab omnibus Christi fidelibus coli venerari et adorari mandare." "The Roman Pontiff

* While this new edition of these lectures is passing through the press, I may add the fact of the recent discovery of the head of St. Andrew at Rome, and the devotional exercises in honour of it performed by Pius IX. and his Cardinals.

ought to place the foresaid eminent men among the saints, and to order them as such to be worshipped, venerated, and adored by all Christ's faithful people." At the bidding of Pope Innocent VIII. in 1488, eighteen thousand soldiers burst on the country of the Waldenses, and depopulated the Val Louise, leaving in its caves four hundred dead infants clinging to the breasts of their dead mothers. From the reorganization of the Inquisition in 1478, to the Reformation in 1517, thirteen thousand persons were burnt for heresy. All was fearful, dark, and sanguinary. God at length interposed and said, as He alone can, "Let there be light;" and Martin Luther stept upon the platform of Europe.

My dear friends, you and I, and all of us, are sinners in the sight of God. God calls upon you also to repent, not to exhibit the momentary tempest of remorse-but the lasting power-the abiding influence that renounces sin, and leads to God-that repentance in short which is not caused by fear of the punishment of sin, but by regret for sin itself. Such repentance is not natural to the heart of man-it is not indigenous-it is a flower of God's own planting. "Christ is exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sins." My dear friends, think ye that those who were thus punished for their transgressions, and their unabjured apostacy, were sinners above all? "I tell you nay; but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." Do you feel the force of these words: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” I beseech you, by the mercy of God, by the preciousness of atoning blood, by the prospect of judgment to come, by all the happiness of heaven you would inherit, by the woes of the lost you would deprecate, that you will not suffer your eyes to sleep, nor your eyelids to slumber, until you feel that you have within you the dawn of peace with God, the first presentiment and earnest of the hope of glory.

Sinners! perishing sinners, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and ye shall be saved. Turn to him with all your heart. Bow the knee of the soul at his throne. Does he not say, "Him that cometh unto Me, I will in

no wise cast out?"

LECTURE VIII.

THE REFORMATION.

"And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire:

"And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth,

"And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices.

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"And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not."-REV. x. 1—4.

THOSE who were present last Lord's day evening will recollect that I gave you a portrait, very brief, as must have been necessarily the case, of the awful and overshadowing corruption under which Christendom groaned, prior to the Reformation. I showed you too, that, notwithstanding the Gothic judgment, four times inflicted. upon it-next, the Saracenic woe, which almost consumed it-and finally, the Turkish woe, under which Constantinople fell; notwithstanding these and other judgments of God, the nations, in the language of the chapter, "repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood; which can neither see, nor hear, nor walk: neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts."

My previous lectures will show that we are arrived now just about the close of the 15th and commencement of the 16th century. If there be present those who have not heard the previous lectures, our fixing this epoch will seem to be a gratuitous assumption. But those who have heard the series will see that I have pursued