and demolish all the social regulations and laws which it shall find in existence; and which shall continue for some time to press down beneath its weight of rock and stone, all true religion, social order and happiness. There is a monstrous fiend of this description, which presents itself in various profiles on the field of prophecy; a horrific monster which no commentator has ever got a glance of, without feeling his heart die within him. We shall meet it again when we come to hear of the slaying of Christ's witnesses; for this I take to be the fiend, which alone is competent to that bloody work.

Having thus given you my idea of the meaning of this prophecy; having mentioned the dreadful calamity which must come, and the means by which it is to be effected; I shall now proceed to examine the signs of the times, in order to show, that the stone has actually smitten the image on the feet; and that the work of destruction is going on before our eyes. I need not apologize to my present audience, for entering upon a discussion of the present political condition of Europe; because they know that that portion of the globe was for a long time the chief territory of the christian Church; they know that there it was, that the Redeemer had pitched his pavilion, and displayed his banner of grace, authority, and love; that there it was that the grand apostacy took place; and that not a nation in it but has been drenched with the blood of the saints: and, that there it is that the Son of God will inflict signal vengeance, on his corrupted church, and on the governments which have corrupted her. The only apology which I ought to make, is for

the imperfection of the sketch which I am to lay before you.

In order to judge of the signs of the times,. we must go back a few centuries, for the causes which have produced the present disastrous circumstances. When we analyse the reformation which commenced about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we find that the spirit which produced it was the spirit of the Bible; it was a lofty intellectual spirit, under the guidance of faith in the Son of God. At that period every intellectual man panted for the Bible, and poured out his whole soul upon the sacred page. At that time, the idea of the present age was unknown among the reformers, namely that the study of the Bible is the business only of clergymen. Kings on their thrones, the commanders of fleets and armies, judges on the bench, lawyers at the bar, physicians, poets, and all literary men were students of the Bible. Had matters been allowed to move on in this channel, Europe had been regenerated, and the gospel would already have been preached to the ends of the earth. But ecclesiastical authority first, and next the civil power, threw an artificial dam across the majectic current of human thought, and forced the public intellect to find new channels where it might flow, detached from faith. This produced the spirit of the present age.

The first attempt to resist the spirit of the reformation, was made by the ecclesiastical authority. This was a matter of course; and could the civil powers have been induced to co-operate heartily with the ecclesiastical, God only knows what a state of society might have been produced. But many sovereigns were politicians enough, to have no objection

to see ecclesiastical tyranny curbed and limited. They had no objection to see an authority questioned, which assumed the right of laying their kingdoms under an interdict, of loosing their subjects from their oath of allegiance, and consecrating the murder of kings, into a meritorious act of religious duty. They were not averse to retain the property of their states at home, for public purposes; instead of seeing it annually drained away, by all possible methods, in order to swell the pomp, and pamper the lusts, of priestly domination. They, therefore, took the church under their own protection; determined, it would seem, that if any one tyranized over her, it should be themselves. They became the next tyrants as a matter of course.

The idea that religion should be left free and unshackled, was unknown at the time of the reformation. The union between church and state effected by Constantine, had produced the most extraordinary corruption in both. Mankind had entirely lost the idea of the nature of civil government and true religion; they had lost the use of their understanding on the subject of religious establishments. The universal

idea was, that civil authority should propagate christianity by compulsory means. No prince imagined that his subjects had a right to adopt any creed or profession of religion without his sanction; hence ecclesiastical formularies were drawn up with the formality of civil laws, and established by legislative authority with all civil pains and penalties; thus, under catholic governments, the protestant religion was proscribed, and under protestant governments the catholic religion was proscribed; all princes adopting the same false maxim of propagating christianity by force, became

tyrants and prosecutors. Europe was stained with blood unrighteously shed from one end to the other. Even the church itself had but very dark and erroneous conceptions of the freedom of conscience. No party felt the least scruple, when invested with civil power, to denounce the religious profession of all other parties, to prohibit their worship, and persecute them by fines, imprisonment, banishment, and death itself. The idea of liberty of conscience was in those days unknown; it crept gradually into the knowledge and approbation of mankind, by means of the doctrine of toleration; a doctrine which avows the principle of persecution, but proposes to limit its indiscriminate ravages. Out of that limitation, however, the modern doctrine of religious liberty has sprung.

It does not appear to me, that any government in Europe has ever been well disposed to the christian religion; professedly zealous for its protection and promotion, civil rulers have in all their plans and operations, betrayed a marked jealousy of the influence of that religion; they have never aimed at any thing else than to strip it of its independence, and to model it into such a form, as might suit it to become a wheel in the general mechanism of their respective governments. The civil and ecclesiastical rulers of mankind, have in all ages been hostile to civil and ecclesiastical liberty. They joined hand in hand to corrupt the reformation in the sixteenth century; and it is hard to say whether they have done more injury in catholic or in protestant countries. With a view of giving a visible and tangible body to my ideas, I shall just notice a few historical facts.

It was taken for granted when the reformation broke out, that all kings whose policy led them to remain in alliance with the ecclesiastical tyranny of Rome, should exert their whole energy to crush and annihilate the great schism, for such was the name then given to that which we call the reformation. Mark the consequences in Italy and Spain; these nations were, at the commencement of the reformation, the most learned, ingenious and polished in Europe; in fact, if we except the French, the other countries in Europe were, at that period, little better than barbarians. But, by putting an extinguisher upon the human mind; by prohibiting the printing and reading of books, except such as suited the puling conceits of the most stupid reviewers that ever existed; by banishing all liberty of speech, and of consequence all originality of thought; the rulers of these nations have brought them to rank with the very refuse of the European population. They, no doubt, felicitate themselves on their success in maintaining the purity of the faith; but I believe the world are generally coming over to the opinion, that the faith which does not enlighten, polish, and elevate man in this world, is not likely to be of much importance to him in any other world.

The next country I look to is France. France was in fact, the glory of the reformation. In respect to intellect, learning, and refinement, she ranked next to Spain and Italy; perhaps we might place the three on the same level. They were certainly far ahead of the rest of Europe. In such a soil, every thing that merits the name of reformation, will strike its roots deeply, and lift up its foliage, fruits, and flowers towards the sky.