service to the cause of truth are most necessary to prevent the diversity of their banner and armorial bearings as given ch. xx. ver. 4, and the diversity of the conflict they had to endure, from being construed into any diversity of acceptancy and honour and reward from God and from the Lamb. I have often heard people, otherwise well instructed and well principled, speak slightingly of the martyrdoms endured at the hand of the Papacy, as if they were of a lower tone and character, because they were connected with questions of civil and ecclesiastical economy; which are generally looked upon as not of so sacred a character as those questions of divine faith, for the testimony of which the first Christians counted their lives not dear to them. To prevent this misjudgment, which proceeds partly from that blind admiration of antiquity to which many men are liable, and partly from too low views concerning the sacredness both of church and state as Christian constitutions for the manifestation of Christ's office and character, as the only King of the earth and the only Head of the church; to link into one common cause those who were destroyed by the dragon's voracity and by the beast's warfare, these strong expressions of companionship and confederacy in the good cause are used in the text and in various other passages of this book. It was God's pleasure to permit the enmity of the devil and the natural man towards his truth, to embody itself in two distinct forms; the one then existent in the world, the other about to arise in the progress of iniquity; the one Paganism, the other the Papacy; and being so, the form of testimony to the truth must likewise in its negative and opposing character assume a like diversity of form. One the Apostle Paul (2 Thess. ii.) speaks of as the letting or hindering the other from coming intc operation. He, as well as all the other Apostles, saw the mystery of iniquity to be then at work, but prevented. for a season from revealing the man of sin, who should be revealed in his own time: this time being fully come, behold in the bosom of the church, in the temple of God, one arise who shews himself as God, declaring that he is God, and proceeds with strong delusion to deceive mankind into priest worship and obedience, establishes himself with what strength Paganism was established, and with the same savage cruelty dares to destroy every true witness

for the worship of the only true God, and the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ.

But it may be said, Are you not taking it for granted, that this second enemy of God and the Lamb, is the pope of Rome; whereas it is a point on which the Christian church has been divided, and is divided still? I do not mean to take a point of such vital importance in the interpretation of the Apocalypse for granted; and in what I have said above, did only state the form of the question which I am now about to bring to fair and close probation. I would rather have postponed this question, till we should come to treat of the xith or xiiith chapters, where the matter lies before us in full detail, whereas it is here but seen in the distance; but for the end of explaining and justifying the causes of the severity of the sixth and seventh seals, as also for fixing their time, without which we cannot come to any knowledge of our standing at this present time, I feel that I cannot avoid going into the question in this place. And having already more than once shewn the identity of the little time of the fifth seal with the period of time, times, and half a time of the xith and xiiith chapters, the matter is the better prepared for full examination; and that we may have all the materials for so important a question fully before us, I would point out the identity of this last vision with the vision of the little horn of the viith chapter of Daniel. The proofs of this identity are so many, that they need only to be enumerated and pointed out:-(1) The same time or period, Dan. vii. 25 ; Rev. xiii. 5: (2) The same beast with ten horns; and although the heads be not mentioned in Daniel, for the reason that he was given to see only this one period and not the seven periods of it, yet do the ten horns mark them to be the same: (3) The mouth of blasphemy belonging to each beast, which also is found in no other case in all the Scripture: (4) The object of their enmity in both cases, the saints of the Most High: (5) The twofold character of the rule in Daniel, a beast and a little horn overruling it; in the Revelations, a beast and another beast like a lamb working to its hand. There are many other points of coincidence between the two visions, which have ever put it beyond a doubt that the viith of Daniel and the xiiith of the Apocalypse are identical with one another, and both of

them with the new enemy and destroyer of God's witnesses who fulfil the action of the fifth seal. Taking the viith of Daniel for our basis, we now undertake the proof that this second enemy of the church is as surely the Papacy as the former was Paganism. This whole argument we have already digested with so much care in our discourses on the viith chapter of Daniel, that with a few slight additions and alterations, we will introduce it here. And this I feel to be the more necessary, in order to exhibit the progress of the history of the church, embosomed in the empire, which I have brought down to the time of Justinian; when the church began to be oppressed by the pope, and the empire fell asunder into ten several parts. The order both of our narrative and of our argument requireth of us now to shew these subdivisions of the Western or European part of the empire, which, under the name of the ten horns, and the ten parts of the city, and the ten kings, occupy so prominent a place in the future visions of this book: to which this vision of seals answers very much the end of a graduated scale of the whole action, containing the great subdivisions of Paganism, Papacy, and the day of wrath or judgment. The ground of our observations will be the viith chapter of Daniel, which, while it is the germ of every thing in the Revelations (chaps. xi, xii, xiii, xvii,) concerning the ten horned beast, or Papal Roman Empire, and the little horn, or the Pope, doth likewise contain the most exact and well-defined marks by which to determine their identity with existing kingdoms. For the first parts of the vision concerning the three empires, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, and the Greek, I must refer to the work which I have written expressly upon this subject, and from which I shall now extract so much as is necessary to the exposition of the action of this fifth seal, and to the preparation of the way for the xi th, xiith, xiiith, and xviith chapters of the Apocalypse.

THE POPE SACRIFICES THE MARTYRS.

One great characteristic of the fourth beast given in the vii th of Daniel, is, that it was "diverse from all the beasts that were before it." This I think hath respect unto its shape, which is not given by Daniel otherwise than in these words, "It was diverse from those which were before it ;"

and therefore we are not called to interpret particularly wherein this diversity consisted. This would properly come before us, if we were treating of its threefold aspects presented in the Apocalypse (chaps. xii. 3, 4; xiii. 1, 2; xvii. 3), where this, its shape, which was hidden by Daniel, is revealed at large. But any one, who reflects upon the constitution of Rome-for more than seven hundred years a republic; and after it became an empire, not hereditary, but elective; then broken into ten kingdoms, and subsisting in unity and integrity only by the spiritual supremacy of the pope-any one who will look at Rome, in all its conditions, from first to last, must pronounce that it was diverse from all the kingdoms that were before it.

The next characteristic given of it, and the most remarkable, is, that it had "ten horns." The horn, in all Scripture, and by direct interpretation (Dan. viii), is the symbol of a king. Alexander was the notable horn between the eyes of the rough he-goat of Grecia; after which, when it was broken, there came up four other horns, which are the four kingdoms into which the kingdom of Alexander fell asunder. And, indeed, in the interpretation given of this fourth beast, these ten horns are declared (verse 24) to be ten kings: "And the ten horns out of this beast are ten kings which shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings." These words of interpretation do convey unto us another important piece of information-to wit, that the ten horns were not in the fourth beast from the beginning, but arose out of it afterwards: "The ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise." And from the sequence of events in the interpretation (Dan. vii. 23, 24) we might infer likewise, that they did not arise till after that fourth kingdom had devoured the whole earth, and trodden it down, and broken it in pieces. And to this agrees the interpretation. given of them in the xviith chapter of the Apocalypse, where it is said, that "the ten horns are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet;" that is, which had received no kingdom in the days of John's exile to Patmos, by the best church historians, placed under Domitian, the last of the Cæsars: and if they had not arisen then, they cannot even be supposed to have arisen until the unity of the empire was

broken up, in the time of Augustulus, about the year four hundred and eighty; after which time the western division of the Roman empire fell into those kingdoms which have continued from that time even until now. Against this, which is the plain and simple account of the matter, it is no objection to say that Daniel saw these ten horns on the beast in his vision: for, besides what hath been already said with respect to the sequence both of description and of interpretation, we have in the four heads given to the leopard an instance of the like kind. These four heads were posterior to the rise and principal action of the Greek kingdom: not until the notable horn fell id the other four come up; and yet they are represented as on the leopard from the beginning: and so likewise are the ten horns represented on the fourth beast. Daniel, having the distant future open to him under these several empires, sees them with those figures which characterize them best, and in those actions by which they best fulfilled the purpose of God in raising them up. And because the actings of this beast in its divided state, under the blasphemous influence of that little horn, was the thing for which the vision was given to Daniel, these parts of his form and figure are placed prominently before the seer, and the unfolding of the rest is left until the time of the beloved Apostle. Yet a diligent and critical observer can discern the same threefold action in the beast of Daniel as in the beast of John, though not with the same distinctness expressed whereof the first is, his "devouring, breaking in pieces, and stamping the residue with his feet;" which describeth the strength of Rome, its aggrandisement of territory, and its irresistible might, from the time of the Scipios, when, having broken Carthage, it measured swords with Antiochus the Great, and ceased not thereafter, by its Pompeys and Antonies and Cæsars, until it had subjugated the world; reducing Macedon into a province one hundred and sixty years before Christ, Syria sixty-five, and Egypt about thirty years before Christ; Gaul, and Britain, and Spain, and Noricum, and Pannonia, following rapidly in the same train of conquests. This I conceive to be the action described in these words, "It shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces." In this its first state of grandeur and of glory,

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