conform to its unscriptural tenets, to be killed." Wherever the humble followers of the Saviour have been found, there has the faggot, and the sword, and every instrument of torture and of death that bigotry and cruelty could devise, been employed, to induce them to renounce their faith and join this apostate church.

Though a veil as thick as midnight has been attempted to be thrown over the atrocities of the Inquisition; though but a solitary echo of the unnumbered groans that have almost pierced its gloomy walls, has now and then reached the public ear, and escaped the vigilance of those vile murderers the Inquisitors; yet enough has transpired to give some idea of the dreadful scenes of suffering transacted within their dark abodes. And if we turn our attention once more to the murders and tortures that Popery has unblushingly committed in the face of day; how, in addition to these, Protestants have been hunted like wild beasts, and treated worse than dogs, we may draw some kind of inference what must have been the nature of those persecutions and those tortures which those who perpetrated them dare not have to meet the public eye.

Thus has Popery "made war with the saints, and prevailed against them, and killed them: and thus, even in an essential part of the British Protestant empire, at the present moment, is this blood-stained power adding to its murders

and its persecutions. "Popery is the curse and bane of Ireland, as it is of all countries where it has thoroughly entwined itself with the population. The low Portuguese or Italian is not more debased by this poison, than is the poor priest-ridden peasant of Ireland. But are the lower orders of Protestant Irish of this stamp ? Not at all. No country in Europe is more prosperous than that part of Ireland which is delivered from this scourge. Leave the Protestant part, enter the Popish region; be astonished at the change!—a change relieved only as you proceed in those spots where Protestantism has set down its towns, villages, and hamlets there anew the desert begins to blosLeave them, and the wide waste spreads itself around in hopeless desolation." (The Record, Feb. 18, 1833.)

som.

The prophecy, after thus giving the description of Popery, then goes on to name the length of time which it was to continue and the saints "shall be given into his hands until a time and times and the dividing of time;" that is, until twelve hundred and sixty years.

In perusing this part of the subject, the vital point of inquiry is, in this, as in the former Periods that have been considered, from what year is the commencement to be dated? It is acknowledged on all hands that the rise of Popery was most gradual: even in the Apostles' days it

had began to work; and very soon after the simplicity of Gospel truth began to be darkened, first by one unscriptural yoke being imposed upon the church, and then another-by corruption appearing upon corruption, and heresy upon heresy. Nevertheless, though such was the state of things even from the very first rise of Christianity; though some superstitious ceremonies did from the most early period thus begin to shew themselves, and, as but too surely appears both from the Epistles and the addresses of Christ to the seven churches, heresies to creep in; although pilgrimages, reverence for relics, and monastic austerities, the invocation of departed saints, the worship of images, and other absurdities, had at the commencement of the fourth century made fearful and melancholy progress; yet up to this time therewere verymany who were holding the faith in its simplicity and with a pure conscience. The ten severe Pagan persecutions under the Roman emperors, which had made the very name of Christian a source of hazard, plunder, and death, had been a powerful means of keeping under, until this time, those rising corruptions, and of preserving the church in a greater state of purity than it probably could have continued in a state of outward prosperity.

Of the truth of this observation there was the most distressing proof, when, in the days of

Y

Constantine, Christianity at length triumphed over Paganism, and was seated on the throne. Though this great and glorious change, which had brought to the ground a religion "guarded and fought for by the armed strength of the most powerful government of all empires to their connection with which thousands and tens of thousands owed their daily bread-to which many noble families owed their rank and influence-and of which even the Emperor himself was high-priest; " yet, in transferring these honours and emoluments to the church of the living God, it associated those things with it which are so completely at variance with its real glory and true prosperity, that from this splendid period its first ostensible step into that vortex of corruption and sinful conformity to the world, into which it subsequently fell, may be dated.

The church continued in this state of outward prosperity, with little to interrupt its progress except the determined but short-lived hostility of Julian the Apostate, until the time of Theodosius the Great, whose influence in its affairs was of too marked a character not to be attended with remarkable effects. He exerted himself in the most vigorous and effectual manner in the extirpation of Paganism throughout all the empire, and enacted severe laws and penalties to such as adhered to that religion.

The next great advance made by Popery was when the Emperor Valentinian III. increased the power and authority of the Pope to a most amazing degree, by giving Leo, surnamed the Great, almost a total supremacy over all the churches. From this time the declining power and the supine indolence of the emperors, whose reigns from Valentinian to Augustulus were peculiarly short and unfortunate, left the Pope, or Bishop of Rome, almost without controul: and the barbarian conquerors, after the extinction of the Western empire, found their advantage in reconciling him to their interests: so that the occurrences of the times were in all respects favourable to his ambitious views, and to the rise of Popery, however unfortunate and calamitous they were to others.

At length Justinian appeared, the last of the four emperors who in a marked and special manner contributed towards the full establishment of this awful apostasy. His contemporary, Procopius, hath likened him to a demon sent by God to destroy men; and the various events of his memorable reign, of an ecclesiastical, civil, and military nature, are of so remarkable a character and complexion, that Echard speaks of him " as if he had been raised by some chance, which forced him to act for some time contrary to the law of nature, and then disappeared again on a sudden, and vanished into nothing."