Mahometan, the toleration which had been refused by an orthodox government. We should remark, however, that this hope, the pretext of their desertion, was with many the suggestion of their malice: that besides the recollection of wrongs, and the desire to escape or revenge them, they were inflamed as furiously as their persecutors by that narrow sectarian spirit, which is commonly excited most keenly where the differences are most trifling; and which, while it exaggerated the lines that separated them from their fellow christians, blinded them to the broad gulf which divided all alike from the infidel.

From Egypt, the conquerors rushed along the northern shore of Africa; and though their progress in that direction was interrupted by the domestic dissentions of the prophet's family, even more than by the occasional vigor of the christians, they were in possession of Carthage before the end of the seventh century. Thence they proceeded westward, and after encountering some opposition from the native Moors, little either from the Greek or Vandal masters of the country, they completed their conquests in the year 709.

Hitherto the Mahometans had gained no footing in Europe; and it may seem strange that the most western of its provinces should have been that which was first exposed to their occupation. But the vicinity of Spain to their latest conquests, and the factious dissentions of its nobility, gave them an early opportunity to attempt the subjugation of that country. Their success was almost unusually rapid. In 711 they overthrew the Gothic monarchy by the victory of Xeres; and the two following years were sufficient to secure their dominion over the greatest part of the peninsula.

The waters of this torrent were destined to proceed still a little further. Ten years after the battle of Xeres, the Saracens crossed the Pyrenees and overran with little opposition the southwestern provinces of France- the vineyards of Gascony and the city Bourdeaux were possessed by the sovereign of Damascus and Samarcand; and the south of France, from the mouth of the Garonne to that of the Rhone, assumed the manners and religion of Arabia.' Still dissatisfied with those ample limits, or impatient of any limit, these children of the desert again marched forward into the centre of the kingdom. They were encamped between Tours and Poictiers, when Charles Martel, the mayor, or duke of the Franks, encountered them. It is too much to assert that the fate of christianity depended upon the result of the battle which followed; but if victory had declared for the Saracens, it would probably have secured to them in France the same extent, perhaps the same duration, of authority which they possessed in Spain. Next they would have carried the horrors of war and Islamism into Germany or Britain; but there, other fields must have been fought, against nations of warriors as brave as the Franks, by an invader who was becoming less powerful and even less enthusiastic, as he advanced farther from the head of his resources and his faith." Waddington's Church Hist. page 135. New York edit. 1835. This is the tyranny from which the pope has saved us, and for it civilization and religion owe him a debt which they will never be able to repay.

My opponent ran a parallel between pagan and Catholic Rome. Does he not know that the pagan religion borrowed many of its essential rites, and not a few of its forms, from the indistinct knowledge of a primary revelation made to Adam and to the patriarchs, and afterwards from the written law? And might I not run a more perfect parallel between the Catholic and the Jewish institutions, while the latter was DIVINE? The Catholics have a Pontifex Maximus, or High Priest; so had the Jews. The Catholics have a church to guide the people; the Jews had a synagogue for the same purpose. The Catholics have a famous temple, to whose doctrine and worship all must conform; so had the Jews. The Catholic pontiff enjoys some temporal power; so did the Jewish pontiff. The Catholic pontiff sprinkles holy water on the people; the Jewish pontiff sprinkled them with the blood of a heifer, that was slain. The Catholic says, when reminded by the lustral water, emblematical of the blood of Christ, of the power and mercy which can cleanse the stains of the conscience, "Thou shalt sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop, and I shall be cleans

"Da

ed; thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow. vid also said, "Thou shalt sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed; thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow." The Catholics have nuns; so had the Jews nuns, like the prophetess Ann, who for "four score and four years departed not from the temple, by fastings and prayers during night and day." Luke, xi. 36, 37. It is thus that his parallel crumbles! Lateinos is not the name of the Catholic church. The title that the pope assumes is 66 servus servorum Dei," servant of the servants of God. The name of Luther, Dioclesian, Julian, of the true God, himself, could be made to tally with the numbers 666-see Robinson's Calmet, p. 71. I could take letters out of the name of ALEXANDER CAMPBELL to mean the same thing.

MR. CAMPBELL.-If you can, I will give up the argument. (A laugh).

BISHOP PURCELL.-What language must it be? Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Latin or English? No matter. E is in some languages—

300-L is 50.

MR. CAMPBELL.-You have not yet learned the numeral alphabet. BISHOP PURCELL.-I cannot make the sum RIGHT OFF, but have a little patience with ine and I will pay you all. (A laugh.-The audience having composed themselves at the request of the Moderators, Bishop PURCELL proceeded.) Thus, you see, my friends, the name of my friend helps us in this matter, for it is the name of a man, and the name of a beast, too, with a hunch on its back, when we can find the lacking numerals to decipher him. He has made a certain admission, after having denied it all the week, that the apostles founded the see of Rome. This shows that the truth will prevail, and that my friend will laugh in his sleeve at you, if you believe all his fanciful and romancing conjectures about the man of sin. Again-another contradiction. If all that blood is to be shed, in the exarchate of Raven-> na, we are here, in Ohio, and safe enough from the danger under our happy constitution. We need have no fear of being crushed beneath the fragments of that crazy and tottering chair, the pope is sitting in so uneasily; the very rumblings of the volcanic hills will die, and their last echoes be inaudible on this side of the Atlantic, and as the Apocalyptic magician has pointed his wand, to the dilapidated jaws of the Beast, the conclusion is plain, that, as he has lost all his teeth, he can't bite! we need not be afraid of him.

We are told the pope suffers himself to be adored, and calls himself God. So far from this, we have seen how he humbles himself before the altar, how he prays the humblest of the saints to pray for him to God, and how he has had a prayer inscribed in our church liturgy, whereby we ask of God to preserve him from all evil, especially from the worst of all evils, sin. Does this look like exalting himself above every thing that is called God? The present pope is said to be one of the best of men. The only faults alleged against him are that he gives employment to a large number of poor tradesmen, rebuilding the burned church of St. Paul-and that he takes snuff somewhat profusely. I wish every one here had as little to answer for.

Much has been said about the gold and silver of the Vatican. My friend, I am sure, knows that money is a necessary evil. If we all had a little more of it, we might purchase heaven with the mammon of iniquity; but the pope is now poor. If I am rightly informed, his trea

sury is drained. He has fortunately, or unfortunately, lost this mark of the beast, if it be one. But my worthy opponent has overlooked this remarkable fact. Judea abounded in gold; St. Peter's, in Rome, was never covered all over, like the temple of Jerusalem, with plates of gold. When Titus besieged Jerusalem, the Jews swallowed their gold to hide it from their rapacious conquerors-and this was made a new incident in the dreadful vengeance of heaven upon that deicidal people, for the soldiers, in quest of gold, ripped open the bodies of the ill-fated victims whom famine, or the arrow, had precipitated from the ramparts. After the sacking of Jerusalem, so great was the quantity of gold obtained in it, that gold fell, in sterling value, throughout the Roman empire. This would prove, that Jerusalem was the beast. How vain are all the gentleman's eloquent remarks. Not one of these marks is peculiar to Rome, while many of them are not applicable to her at all. I will say nothing about the millstone; it went to the bottom, and so did the gentleman's argument.

My friends, I have one or two arguments to borrow from a very distinguished Catholic writer, Dr. Lingard, author of the history of England. We shall see whether my friend has any of the symptoms of mania here so graphically described.

During the long lapse of more than fifteen centuries, the visions of the apostle St. John had been enveloped in the thickest obscurity. At the era of the reformation, a strong ray of apocalyptic light dissipated the clouds which popery had raised and since that period every old woman, of either gender, has been able to unravel with ease the web of mystery, and to reveal to the world the true meaning of the book of Revelations. From the day's of Luther to the present, we have possessed a numerous and uninterrupted succession of translators, lecturers, expositors, and annotators, who may truly be said to have seen visions, and to have dreamed dreams; and, lest by some mishap the pious race should become extinct, Bishop Warburton has left a fund for the support or the reward of the more fiery among its members.* I may admire his zeal, but not his wisdom. He probably did not see that he was thus endeavoring to diffuse and perpetuate an alarming species of intellectual disease, which, for the sake of distinction, I shall beg leave to call the apocalyptic mania. It has not, indeed, been hitherto classed in any system of nosology; but it is not on that account less real, or less general; and, I trust, I shall confer a benefit on the public by proceeding to point out the origin, and to describe the symptoms of this theological malady.

When the magnanimous fathers of the reformation" broke from the communion of the Catholic church, they found it convenient to justify their schism, by pleading that the Pope was Antichrist, and Rome the scarlet w of Babylon. This doctrine, while it inflamed the bigotry, flattered the spiritual pride of their disciples; with conscious superiority of birth, they sought in the apocalypse for proof of the ignominious descent of their opponents, and their sacrilegious familiarity with the mysterious volume, quickly produced the disease, which is the subject of the present observations. Its progress was rapid. It soon pervaded every department in life; but its most distinguished victims were, and still are, chosen from among those churchmen, who, from the instructions of the nursery or the university, have imbibed a lively dread of the horrors of popery. The mania first manifests itself by a restless anxiety respecting the future fortunes of the church, and a strong attachment to prophetic hieroglyphics: the antichrist, and the man of sin; the beast with ten horns, and the beast with two horns; the armies of Gog and Magog; the fall of Babylon, and the arrival of the millennium, become the favorite, the only subjects of study; false and ridiculous perceptions amuse the imagination; the judgment is gradually enfeebled, and, at last, the most powerful minds sink into the imbecility of childhood. Of the truth of this description we have a melan

*According to his will, an annual sermon is preached in Lincoln's Inn Chapel, to prove the Pope to be Antichrist, &c. &c.

choly proof in the great Sir Isaac Newton. To him Nature seemed to have unlocked her choicest secrets: as a philosopher he was and is still unrivalled: but no sooner did he direct his telescope from the motions of the heavenly bodies to the visions in the apocalypse, than his head grew dizzy, the downfall of popery danced before his eyes, and he hazarded predictions which on the scale of prophets, have placed him far beneath the well known Francis Moore, physician and almanac-maker.

It should be observed, that this intellectual malady, like the other species of mania, assumes a thousand different shapes, according to the predispositions of the subject which it attacks. I shall produce a few instances. In 1789, Mr. Cook published a translation of the apocalypse, with keys to open its meaning to his readers. This reverend gentleman was Greek professor in the university at Cambridge; and, as his reading naturally led him to the Greek poets, he was determined that the author of the apocalypse should be a poet, and, moreover, the rival of Sophocles. In his opinion, the apocalypse is a tragedy formed on the same plan as the Edipus Tyrannus. "The drama opens with the temple scene; the seals, the trumpet, and the vials unfold the plot; and though the antichrist does not die, no more than Edipus, yet he falls into such calamity as makes him an object of pity, and justifies the lamentations pronounced on his downfall." Nor is this all. By trying one of his apocalyptic keys on the Odyssey of Homer, he has discovered that poem also to have been inspired, and informs us that the suitors of Penelope represent the vassals of popery, who, under the pretence of courting the bride, the christian church, devour all the good things in her house, till Christ, the true Ulysses, the odos os or safe way, arrives, and wreaks his vengeance on them.

In Mr. Granville Sharp, the favorite apocalyptic Nostradamus of the Rector of Newnton Longville, (Le Mess reply, p. 193, 202,) the mania has shewn itself in a different manner. This gentleman is known to be singularly partial to monosyllables. He has written a volume on the Hebrew letter vau, and another on the Greek articles, o, u, T. From letters and articles, he was induced, by his previous success and the importunity of his friends to proceed to the explication of the visions in the book of Revelations. Here the apocalyptic mania soon discovered itself: but the appearance of the disease was modified by his previous habits of monosyllabic investigation. He convinced himself that the name of the beast was Lateinos, and that Lateinos must signify the Latin church. The proof is curious. Lateinos, he contends, is derived from the Hebrew monosyllable LAT, which means to cover or conceal. Now the Latin church, in the celebration of the mass, conceals some of the prayers from the people, by ordering them to be pronounced with a low voice: therefore the Latin church is Lateinos, the beast in the apocalypse. Moreover the head of the Latin church resides in the palace of the Lateran, a name derived from the same monosyllable LAT: and the Lateran palace is situated in the country anciently called Latium, an appellation also derived from the same monosyllable Lat: and Latium is a province. of that part of Europe called Italy, which also derives its name from the same monosyllable LAT. Be not startled, gentle reader: apocalyptic maniacs can with equal facility read backwards or forwards; and Mr. Sharp informs us, that, if we read Italy backwards, we shall have Ylati, in the midst of which is the Hebrew monosyllable LAT. Naviget Anticyram!

Were I to describe all the varieties of the disease, these observations would swell to an unmeasurable bulk. I shall therefore content myself with noticing the prophetic, which is perhaps the most prevalent, species. When the mind is seized with this mania, the regions of futurity are instantly opened to its sight: it can point out the date and nature of every event which is to happen; it can inform us in what year popery, Mohammedism, and infidelity are to perish; when and where antichrist is to be born, reign, and die: who is to restore the Holy Land to the Jews; and in what year the new Jerusalem is to descend from heaven. It is in vain that preceding prophets have frequently outlived their own predictions: the lessons of experience are heard with contempt: and each new seer is convinced of the truth of his own visions. Among those who have suffered lately under this form of the disease, the most distinguished are Mr. Whitaker and Mr. Faber, both scholars of extensive erudition, and both equally animated against the Church of Rome. They both agree that Luther is the angel with the everlasting gospel; and, if by his gospel they mean the solifidian doctrine already noticed, they have a chance to be right. It may justly he called everlasting;

for it will probably find proselytes as long as man shall dwell on the earth. Mr. Whitaker discovers that the two horns of the beast are the two monastic orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans. Why they should claim the preference before their brethren, of greater antiquity, or more general diffusion, I know not; but it is certainly unfortunate that the beast has not four horns: then you, ye sons of Benedict and Loyola, might have had the honor of being seated on the remaining two. The same gentleman informs us that the Ottoman empire will soon fall, Rome be wrested from the pope, and the seat of the papacy be transferred to Jerusalem. Mr. Faber makes an equal display of erudition; but the third angel, Mr. Whitaker's Zuingle, he has placed in a most uncomfortable situation: he has bound him fast in the midst of the ocean, and transformed him into the insular church of England! Nor does he always agree with his rival in more important points. The two beasts he shews to be the two contemporary Roman empires, temporal and spiritual, under the emperors and the popes: and gives his readers the pleasing intelligence, that both the Turk and the Pope will expire in the year 1868. Though he does not expect to witness this happy event himself, yet he has the goodness to promise a sight of it to many of the present generation:

Τλητε, φίλοι, και μεινα επι χρονον, οφρα δαωμεν

Είστιον Χαλχας μαντεύεται, ης και εκι.

Unfortunately for these two prophets, each disputed the accuracy of the predictions of his rival: an animated controversy followed; and the result has been a conviction in the minds of most of their readers, that each has completely succeeded in demolishing the system of his adversary, and completely failed in establishing his own.

Thus have I attempted to describe the different symptoms of this disease; but I hope I shall be excused from indicating the method of cure. When the mania has once obtained possession of the brain, I doubt whether three Anticyre would be sufficient to expel it. I would rather, like Dr. Trotter in his treatise on the nervous temperament, endeavor to correct that predisposition which naturally leads to it. I would advise the Protestant theologian to suspend, for a while at least, his assent to some of those doctrines, which education has taught him to revere as sacred. I would have him learn to doubt whether it be certain, that a long succession of bishops, through many centuries, can be that one individual described by St. Paul as the man of sin: or that the church, from which almost all other churches have received the knowledge of the gospel is, "the great mother of harlots," and the kingdom of Antichrist. I would recommend to him, if he must decipher the apocalyptic hieroglyphics, to attend to the solemn assev eration of their author, which is frequently repeated both in the first and the last chapters, that his predictions were, even at the time in which he wrote, on the point of being fulfilled. In the destruction of Jerusalem, and the first period of the christian history, he may find enough to exercise his ingenuity, and may perhaps stumble on the only clue which can lead to the solution of the difficulties contained in this mysterious volume. I am aware that what I ask, will not readily be granted to me. The doctrine that popery is the beast, the pope antichrist, and christian Rome the whore of Babylon, is, I know, an important part of the new gospel preached by Luther and his associates: it forms, to use the words of a learned prelate,* "a primary pillar of the reformed faith." But when I consider the dangerous consequences of this doctrine, its deleterious effects on the judgment of some among the most distinguished writers of the Protestant communion, the ridicule which it serves to throw on the inspired writings, and the handle which it gives to the sneers and contempt of the professed infidel, I indulge a well-founded hope that, for the sake of religion and humanity, it will meet with little support from the enlightened characters, who now preside in the established church. If it once formed a pillar of the reformation, I conceive it could only be a temporary support, which may now be removed without danger to the fabric. To the pious fraud, from its utility, the first reformers might easily reconcile their consciences; at the present day it may be rejected by their successors with some credit: it cannot be retained without disgrace.

* Watson's Theological Tracts, vol. v. p. 7.