popery will not expire as a tyranny or persecuting power in England till A. D. 1857, it will be overthrown in the remaining nine kingdoms according as they submitted to Rome before or after that date. Time, perhaps, will alone determine which of these is intended by the prophecy; leaving it, therefore for the present, we proceed to the next subject of inquiry.

Our Saviour's advent, of which the four trumpets formed a part, will destroy the apostasy, and bring to light and perfect the Church. But the Northmen at first, whilst they inflicted great evils on the people they conquered, received their Christianity with all its corruptions, and, during the dark ages that immediately followed those corruptions, were brought to a fearful maturity. They would then appear at first sight not to have checked, but promoted, the evil. They, however, brought with them those free institutions and that magnanimous spirit, which originated the constitutional governments of modern

Europe. They ever kicked and often revolted at the Roman supremacy, and struggled against it for many centuries with various success, till they renounced it in many countries, and established a widely extended civil and religious liberty. The

kingdoms they founded still exist; constitutional liberty makes rapid strides; every important change, that the states of Europe undergo, weakens the Man of Sin, and hastens the time when his flesh shall be eaten, and his body given to the burning flame." Civil liberty has often been perverted, and is ever liable to run into licentiousness; but its union with religion will lessen human suffering, and prepare mankind for the reception of genuine and uncorrupted Christianity. God, who overrules these revolutionary movements to subserve his gracious purposes, "will overturn, and overturn, and overturn," till men, sick of infidelity, or liberty separated

a Rey. xvii. 16.

from religion, will learn to base every civil institution upon sound Christian principles.

Verse 13. "And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, crying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth, by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!"

The first trumpets blew in the West, because the head of the great apostasy was there, where also lying miracles and idolatry most prevailed; but true piety and many protests against those evils long continued in the Eastern church; this spirit, however, gradually died away, leaving nothing but form and ceremony; and being the mere abode of the dead, it has ever since been roused by louder trumpets, and suffered a severer woe. Though the Northmen inflicted unspeakable injuries on the vanquished, by intermarrying with them, after a length of time they became one people, and conferred the benefit of their free institutions and spirit of adventure and

energy. But the Saracens and the Turks never intermarried with the conquered, except on condition of apostasy from the faith: they have ever since kept distinct as victors, and are as truly woes now as when they began their destructive career, with this only dif ference, that they were then a spreading, but are now an incumbent, woe.

CHAPTER IX.

Fifth trumpet. - Mahomet. - Parallels. A false prophet. Made slow progress. Pretended divine authority to employ force. His followers rapidly subdue a third of the Roman empire. - Made proselytes. Islamism a spiritual death or woe. -Treatment of the conquered. Aggressive for 150 years. - Character and force. Caliph a king and priest.-150 years of decline. The Eastern Church not corrected. This woe ceased when the caliphat was supplanted by a sultany. Sixth trumpet. - Eastern empire destroyed through the corruption of its four patriarchies. — Euphrates, not literal, but metaphorical. — The Turks long restrained by the Tartars, &c. Othman commenced a career which at length overturned the empire. - Turkish cavalry. The terror of Europe. - Fire-arms. — Proselytes. Europe takes no warning. — In the mean time civilisation and liberty grow in Europe. - Promoted by union under one ecclesiastical head. Literature preserved in monasteries. - Vital religion by the Divine Spirit. -The two witnesses not always traceable. Persecuted by Popery.

Verses 1-4. "AND the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth and unto him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the