it was afterwards stigmatized and disowned, for the express purpose of condemning image-worship. It passed that public sentence of condemnation on it and behold the very next year, as historians record, the Caliphate was divided; the Mahommedan colossus broken; the scorpion-locusts carried away, as by a strong west wind, to the Euphrates; the intensity of the Saracenic woe brought to an end.

Alas! the efforts of these emperors and of the more enlightened of their subjects, always resisted by the majority, proved abortive.-In the year 781 Irene succeeded to the imperial throne: and, having murdered her iconoclastic husband, who stood in the way of her object, she gathered in 787 another synod, the famous seventh General Council; in the which the decrees of the former Council were reprobated and disavowed, and the worship of images, by a solemn act of the Catholic Church, declared lawful. It was just about this time that the Saracenic woe, though already broken, seemed as if it had received a temporary revivification. Guided by Haroun Al Rashid, the Arab forces from Bagdad swept across the lesser Asia, on provocation from the Greek Emperor, not once only, but eight times, bearing down all opposition before them. Was there not a memento of warning from heaven in it?-But the Eastern Church persisted. Under the influence of the empress Theodora the struggle ended finally, in the year 842, in the undisputed ascendency and establishment of image-worship. -And what then the consequence? With characteristic forbearance, as we have seen, the Lord continued to this guilty people the interval of mitigation and of respite, through the ninth and much of the tenth century. But would He endure the provocation much longer? How long would be the respite before another woe?

1 Called also the second Council of Nice.

CHAPTER V.

PAUSE BETWEEN THE FIFTH AND SIXTH TRUMPETS.

"One woe is past!-Behold there come two more woes hereafter." Apoc. ix. 12.

When might the Saracen woe be said to have terminated ?-Perhaps we might fix on the epoch of A. D. 934, when the Caliphate at Bagdad was stripped, as has been noted, of its temporal power: perhaps on the period of from 960 to 980 or 985, when the public and striking evidence of it was exhibited to Christendom, in the conquest, from those once terrible enemies, of Crete, Cyprus, Cilicia, Antioch; when the Greek arms were borne triumphantly eastward, even across the Euphrates; and, in the west, the last great attempt of the Moorish Saracens against the rising christian kingdoms in Spain, was, after a temporary success, totally repulsed, and the Moslems, with continually contracted dominions, reduced finally, and almost for ever, to the defensive.' Let us take the last-mentioned epoch, which dates, we said, about the close of the tenth century. In correspondence with it there seems to have been a pause in the prophetic representations and perhaps too a silence from tempests in the firmamental heaven; such as that noticed as occurring before the blowing of the Trumpets. And nothing broke it to the Evangelist on the apocalyptic scene, but the solemn intimation, "One woe is past! Behold there come two more woes after it."

:

The æra, I suppose, referred to is one memorable in European history, for a panic of very remarkable origin,

I allude to the wars of Almanzor, Vizir of Haccham the 2nd; who for a short time almost revived the Saracen woe to the Spanish Christians. In A.D. 980, he attacked and defeated them, and burnt Leon and Compostella; but was in 990 and 998 defeated by Dons Sancho and Garcia: and, after the latter repulse, in despair committed suicide. "With him," says the learned writer in the English Univ. Hist. xxii. 411, "expired the fortune of the Cordovan Moors."

and results, which then intensely agitated the minds of men, especially in Western Christendom. It was supposed that with the end of the tenth century the world would end also. The opinion arose, doubtless, from Augustine's interpretation of the apocalyptic millennium, as that millennial or rather quasi-millennial period of Christ's triumph by his church over Satan, which, beginning at his first advent and miracles, would only terminate with Satan's re-loosing and Antichrist's manifestation, just before the consummation of all things.' I say quasi-millennial, because in Augustine's own mind, we have seen, as well as in that of interpreters following him in the fifth and sixth centuries, the full definite value of 1000 years was not supposed to attach to this ecclesiastical millennium. Their expectation of the sabbatism of the saints ensuing after the world had lasted 6000 years, and belief in the Septuagint chronology, which reckoned 5500, or 5350, or at least 5200 out of the 6000, to have already elapsed at the Nativity,2 made them construe the apocalyptic millennium as only that interval which yet remained after Christ's birth to complete the sixth millennary ;—perhaps 500 years, or it might be 600, or 700, or a little more. But the Greek Septuagint with its chronology having, in the long interval since Gregory I, been altogether superseded in western Europe by the Latin Vulgate and the Hebrew chronology there given,-and the sabbatical theory too

1 Mosheim (x. 2. 3. 3) speaks of the opinion as first springing up in the ninth century; "superiori jam sæculo ex loco Johannis Apoc. xx. 3, 4, nata." He does not advert to Augustine's interpretation of the passage: an interpretation grounded by that eminent Father on our Lord's saying, Matt. xii. 29, "No man can enter a strong man's house, &c, unless he first bind the strong man;" and which I shall have to set forth more fully in the closing part of this Work.

2 See p. 373. Augustine's words are these: "Mille anni duobus modis possunt intelligi: aut quia in ultimus annis mille ista res agitur, i. e. sexto annorum milliario cujus nunc spatia posteriora volvuntur, secuturo deinde sabbato quod non habet vesperam ; ut hujus milliarii novissimam partem, quæ remanebat usque ad terminum sæculi, mille annos appellaverit : eo loquendi modo quo pars significatur à toto; aut mille annos pro annis omnibus hujus sæculi posuit." C. D. xx. 7. 2.

3 The Vulgate was the Latin translation made by Jerome from the Hebrew; and A.M. 4000 the date of Christ's birth, as computed from it. In the year A.D. 527 Dionysius, a Roman abbot, computed from, and mainly contributed to introduce into use, this the Vulgar Era.

having been probably forgotten in the darkness of those dark ages, the main point only of Augustine's interpretation was remembered; I mean his construing the time of Satan's binding to signify that of the present supremacy of the church over him. And the natural and reasonable alteration having been applied to this his opinion about the millennium, of its being not, as he had supposed likely, a mere fraction of a thousand years, but a thousand years fully and exactly, it was impossible but that as the tenth century drew near, and yet more after it had begun and was advancing, the subject should be felt one of intense personal interest. Thus it was then frequently preached on, and by breathless crowds listened to; the subject of every one's thoughts, every one's conversation. The time, they thought, was actually come; the end of all things at hand; the loosing of Satan, Antichrist's manifestation, and, what was most terrible, the day of judgment.-Belief on such a subject could not be inoperative. Its form of working took its character from that of the times. Under the impression, multitudes innumerable, says Mosheim,' having given their property to monasteries or churches, travelled to Palestine, where they expected Christ to descend to judgment. Others bound themselves by solemn oath to be serfs to churches or to priests; in hopes of a milder sentence on them, as being servants of Christ's servants. In many places buildings were let go to decay, as that of which there would be no need in future. And on occasions of eclipses of sun or moon, the people fled in multitudes for refuge to the caverns and the rocks.-But the time of the consummation fixed in God's counsels was not yet. In the apocalyptic chronology it was

Ubi suprà. In a Note he gives an interesting extract, in illustration from Abbo, Abbot of Fleuri on the Loire, who died in the year 1004. "De fine quoque mundi coram populo sermonem in ecclesiâ Parisiorum adolescentulus audivi, quòd statim finito mille annorum numero Antichristus adveniret, et non longo post tempore universale judicium succederet. . . . Fama pæne totum mundum impleverat, quòd quando Annunciatio Dominica in Parasceue contigisset, absque ullo scrupulo finis sæculi esset."

2

Almost all the donations of this century, says Mosheim, mention as their occasion, "Appropinquante mundi termino."-See too his notice of the panic, and its passing away, xi. 2. 4. 3.

written, "One woe hath past: behold there come yet two more woes after them."-The dreaded 1000th year came and past, without any great calamity accompanying; and gradually the alarm and the expectation died away. Yet there was woe at hand, the prophecy declared, though of another kind ;-the woe of the sixth Trumpet. And where to fall? and on whom? On western Christendom: which, though not without spots less dark at times, and points of relief,1 had been too universally and progressively settling down since Pope Gregory's time last-noted, into the dæmonolatrous apostacy,3 with its predicted accompaniments (of which more in a later chapter) of clerical fraud, avarice, superstition, and licentiousness; till in the tenth century its moral debasement was such, as to fix on that century the appellation of the iron age? Or was it to fall distinctively on Rome itself, the western religious capital where all these evils had been long more than elsewhere rampant; and where

2

4

1 Such, I doubt not, were to be found in some few of the Benedictine monasteries; as well as in the more eminent exceptions of reformers, like Claude of Turin. 2 See pp. 379-389 suprà.

3 Witness, for example, Claude's account of the universal image-worship in his diocese, on his entering it about A.D. 820.

4 See for the prediction Apoc. ix. 21, a passage which will come under full review in Part iii. chap. 1; and for historical proof of its incipient fulfilment, before the Turkish woe, Mosheim's dark general sketches of the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries, with the authorities in his margin.

To which let me add, by way of corroboration,-as Mr. Maitland has lately given a very different colour to the period in his "Dark Ages,"-a reference to the following Councils: the ixth and xvith of Toledo, Canons 3, 10, held A. D. 655, 693; that of Chalons, Canons 14, 15, 18, held 813; that of Aquis Granum, Canon 39, &c, held 816; that of Paris, Canon 25, held 829; that of Aquis Granum again, Canon 11, held 836; and that of Trosly, Canon 9, held 919.

In that of 836 the following statement is made respecting certain convents; a statement which will serve to introduce others similar that will be quoted in Part iii, ch. i, with reference to a later age; " Monasteria puellarum in quibusdam locis potius lupanaria videntur esse quàm monasteria." Hard. iv. 1398.-And in that of 829 there occurs an allusion to a habit, evidently not infrequent, of the clergy being licensed to live in concubinage, for a money-price paid to their ecclesiastical superiors; which will also there be shown by me to have had its continuance and expansion in a later age. Berengaud, a Benedictine monk of that æra, reprobates it in his Comment on Apoc. xviii, as a crying sin of the time: "Scelus pessimum ab iis qui archidiaconi appellantur committitur; ab adulteris presbyteris pretium accipiunt, et tacendo in malum consentiunt." The passage is well worth referring to. The Benedictine Editor refers to the Councils of Paris, Chalons, &c, in illustration.

5 So Baronius; "Sæculum quod pro boni sterilitate ferreum appellari consuevit." 6 The Roman Popes in the 8th and 9th centuries had been the main agents in effecting the enactment and reception of the idolatrous canons of the 2nd council