that would probably never see the answer to it. Formerly infidelity was conveyed in the shape of a professed treatise; and they, who chose to peruse it, were at least aware of what they might expect.Hence a careful Christian parent knew how to secure his inexperienced offspring from the effects of its poison. But now, there is scarcely a book which he dares to trust in the hands of his children, without first thoroughly examining it himself: and, even after all his precautions, his son may accidentally take up a treatise on botany or geology, and rise from the perusal of it, if not an infidel, yet a sceptic. In short, the lurking poison of unbelief has of late years been "served up in every shape, that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination; in a fable, a tale, a novel, a poem; in interspersed and broken hints; remote and oblique surmises; in books of travels, of philosophy, of natural history; in a word, in any form rather than that of a professed and regular disquisition."

"The sure word of prophecy has taught us where to look for the real origin of these infernal productions. "Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time." It has done more. It has explicitly described to us the character of those abandoned men, those hardened scoffers, whom Satan was about to employ as his wretched tools in the last days. The existence of such men we have witnessed with our own eyes: but, till lately, we were not aware of their existence in any other than their mere individual capacity. We have at present however upon record the confession of an arch-atheist, that there has long been in Europe, particularly in papal Europe, a systematic combination of the scoffers of the last days, for the purpose of at once overturning the throne and the altar, of letting loose at once those two dogs of hell, anarchy and atheism."

"I am weary," says Voltaire, "of hearing people repeat that twelve men have been sufficient to establish Christianity, and I will prove, that one may suffice to overthrow it. Strike, but conceal your hand.The mysteries of Mithras must not be divulged-the monster must fall pierced by a thousand invisible hands: yes, let it fall beneath a thousand repeated blows. I fear you are not sufficiently zealous; you seem only to contemn, while you should abhor and destroy the monster. Crush the wretch!"

" In this manner it was (says Mr. Faber) that the dragon, quitting heaven for earth, and "having great wrath because he knoweth that he hath but a short time," prepared to vomit against the symbolical woman a noisome flood of mock philosophers, German and French, illuminated and masonic, with all their trumpery;" of philanthropic cut-throats, civic thieves, humane anarchists, and candid atheists; of high born Catalines, and low-born buffoons; of enlightened prostitutes, and revolutionary politicians; of popish priests, and protestant ecclesiastics, united only by the common bonds of apostate profligacy; of Jews, Turks, infidels and heretics; of the catharmata of the prisons of Lyons and Paris, wretches who, escaping the just sentence of the law, commenced the reformers of the world; in short, of all the filth and off-scouring of all the kennels of all the streets of the great mystical city Babylon. At the sounding of the third woe-trumpet, the flood was at its height; and threatened to carry away in wild indiscriminate confusion every thing sacred and venerable, every thing salutary and dignified, every thing wise, every thing lovely, every thing that adorns this life, every thing that fits us for a better life. Woe to the inhabiters of the Roman earth; for the scourge of an unheard of war impends over their devoted heads! Woe to those that flounder in the miry waves of "the vasty deep," the turbid sea of republican uproar "foaming out its own shame;" for the darkened sky portends a tempest of strange miseries hitherto unthought of! Short was the time that elapsed between the great earthquake and the blast of the seventh angel, when revolutionary France, in the phrenzy of democratic enthusiasm, established atheism and anarchy by law; held out the right hand of fellowship to the insurgents of every nation; commenced a tremendous massacre of her enslaved citizens; proclaimed the Son of God to be an impostor, and his gospel a forgery; swore to exterminate Christianity and royalty from off the face of the earth, as she had blotted them both out of her own dominions; and madly unsheathed the sword against every regularly established government. But the church of the Lord is founded upon a rock; and he hath promised, that "the gates of hell shall never prevail against it." Although "the heathen rage, and the people imagine a lie;" although the destroyers of the earth "set themselves in array, and the rulers take counsel together against Jehovah, and against his anointed; Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us:" yet "he, that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision." Congregated Europe, so God willed, met the infidels in arms. Long and bloody was the contest; for the whole "earth helped the woman." Yet, notwithstanding the various successes of the atheistical republic, when the general pacification took place in the year 1801, the earth had swallowed up the flood, which the dragon cast out of his mouth. A trial had been made of modern philosophy; and even French vanity was compelled to own, that this its favourite child, however beautiful in theory, was but ill calculated for practice. Atheism was displaced from his throne, and Christianity, the apostate Christianity indeed of the church of Rome, was nominally at least restored."

Mr. Faber has other remarks respecting the earth's helping the woman, and of the woman's being nourished in her place "prepared of God," secure from the face of the serpent, &c. which appear to me to

be so far tinged with national partiality, that they will not bear the test of unprejudiced criticism-his remarks also on the 19th and last verse I think not satisfactory, and I have therefore thought fit to conclude this head by just saying that I conceive the war with the dragon will conclude with the 1260 days, instead of holding to the inconsistent idea that a part of it is to be fought subsequently to this period.

3. Concerning the ten-horned beast of the sea.

"THE prophet after having conducted us as it were behind the scenes, and shewn us that every string both of the great Apostacy, and of the tyranny of antichrist, is in reality worked by the infernal serpent, next proceeds to bring us acquainted with the characters of the ostensible agents, by whose instrumentality and through whose instigation the church was to be in a persecuted state through the long period of 1260 years.

"And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast, which I saw, was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshipped the dragon, which gave great power unto the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. If any man have an ear, let him hear. He, that leadeth into captivity, shall go into captivity; he, that killeth with the sword, must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints."

"According to Mr. Kett, "the first beast of the Revelation, and the little horn of Daniel, are generally allowed to mean the same power, whatever that power may be," and he afterwards asserts, that this ten-horned beast is the Papacy, or, as he terms it, the Papal anti-christ.

"Nearly the same opinion is maintained by Mr. Galloway. He does not indeed allow, that the first beast of the Revelation is the same as the little horn of Daniel's fourth beast, for he asserts that that little horn is the revolutionary power of France; but he has written a whole dissertation for the express purpose of shewing, that the ten-horned apocalyptic beast is the Papacy.

"Bishop Newton, with much more propriety than either of these two authors, observes, that" no doubt is to be made, that this beast was designed to represent the Roman empire; for thus far both ancients and moderns, papists and protestants, are agreed." Had his Lordship steadily adhered to this simple, and indeed undeniable proposition, I should have had the happiness of being able to sanction my own views of the subject with the authority of one of our ablest commentators upon prophecy: but, quitting the assertion with which he originally set out, he soon entirely diverts the attention of his reader from the great secular Roman beast (as the Bishop himself styles it) to that spiritual power which Daniel symbolizes by the little horn of the beast. ces his discussion with saying very truly, that the beast is the Roman empire; and this beast he afterwards pronounces no less truly to be a secular beast:

He commen