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DISCOURSE II.

REV. XVIII. 21-24.

And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of harpers and musicians, and of pipers and trumpeters, shall be found no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee: And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived. And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

THE reign of the Antichristian power is, unquestionably, the most awful and mysterious visitation wherewith the Church of Christ has been exercised. In the course of her Old-Testament history, she had many a melancholy season; and, in particular, she experienced a long and dismal captivity, during which her magnificent temple was in ruins, her divinely-instituted worship interdicted, and her goodly land a scene of desolation. In the early part of her NewTestament history, too, she was for ages oppressed, and afflicted, and persecuted by Paganism, under the

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influence of the heathen priesthood, and through the instrumentality of the secular authorities of heathen Rome. But far more melancholy than any of these visitations was the reign of the Papacy. For,

I. It commenced just at the time when a long and blissful season of rest and prosperity seemed about to be enjoyed by the followers of Christ. They had been wading through the fires of ten dreadful persecutions inflicted by their Pagan adversaries. Under these tremendous visitations they had often anxiously and with sorrow proposed the question-" Watchman, what of the night?" And the souls of the martyrs slain "for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ," had often urged the expostulation-" How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?" But on the conversion of Constantine, and his accession to the imperial throne, the morn of a blissful day seemed to dawn upon the Church-Satan's kingdom fell like lightning to the ground-idolatry was overturned-and under the shade of a Christian establishment the disciples of Christ had rest, were edified, and, walking in the fear of God and the comfort of the Holy Ghost, remembered their sorrows no more.Alas! this season of prosperity was short. It was a brief period of sunshine and calm-the presage of a terrible and wasting storm. After little more than twenty years of peace and joy, during which minister

ing angels restrained the winds of error and persecution from raging, that the servants of God might be sealed, and prepared for bearing testimony to the cause of Christ in the ensuing days of apostacy and tribulation-the Church had again to pass into a suffering condition, and to dwell in the wilderness, where the hostility of apostate Christians fiercely assailed her, while the winds of error and delusion swept furiously over every district of the Roman earth.

II. The reign of the Papacy was a period of awful spiritual darkness. Ignorance is the basis of spiritual úsurpation. It was well known to the ambitious priesthood, who sought to obtain lordship over God's heritage, that it would be when knowledge was taken away from the people, when the intellectual eye was closed in deepest darkness, and the valley of vision converted into "the valley of the shadow of death," that they could bend the human mind as they wished, and establish the proud usurpation over the secular and spiritual concerns of men to which they aspired. Every mean, therefore, was employed to induce intellectual darkness, and especially the records of divine truth were shut up in an unknown tongue, and utterly withdrawn from the reading of the people. In process of time, many even of those who professed to be the spiritual guides of their fellow-men, hardly knew that there was such a book as the Bible—useful learning was banished away from them

and the extent of their knowledge was an acquaintance with the mere letter of the worthless formulary of devotion, which they read daily in an unknown tongue to the beguiled multitude.-The multitude! what must have been their condition when such was the character of their instructors! With what awful emphasis were these words of God fulfilled in them"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge!" Deluded with the notion that their penances, and pilgrimages, and manifold bodily mortifications, were the assured path to everlasting life, they were sunk in the slumbers of spiritual death-the prey of the power of darkness"-" without Christ," " having no hope," and "without God in the world."

III. It was consequent on this, that the reign of the Papacy was a period of awful error. Christian truth was utterly buried under a mass of debasing superstitions; and, in the room of the sublime doctrines of the oracles of the living God, the creed of the Church and the minds of her disciples were conversant with dogmas dishonouring to God, and debasing and raining to the souls of mankind,

IV. Persecution-fierce, unrelenting persecution, was the characteristic of the Papal reign-persecution carried on so extensively as to reach the disciples of Christ in every region of the Roman earth, and so perseveringly as to wear out the saints of the Most High

and aggravated in its bitterness beyond expression by the melancholy consideration that it was inflicted--not by heathens-but by a Church which still continued to be called Christian, and claimed to be the only true Church of the Saviour of men!

V. Add to all this, that the reign of the Papacy has been of long duration. In Old-Testament Scripture we find the Church mourning over her woes under the character of "long desolations ;"* and, regarded abstractly, they were both sad and long perpetuated. It was sad to think of the holy land lying desolate the temple of Jehovah demolished, and its glorious furniture given up to the power of heathen spoilers-his worship at a stand in the world, and his worshippers scattered among the nations, the sport and the song of those who carried them captive-and that this dismal state of matters was permitted to continue during the long space of seventy years! But, compared with the reign of Antichrist, this period of Zion's captivity was short. His reign extends not to years merely, but to ages. Eight centuries of Antichristian darkness, error, and persecution, passed over degraded and perishing mankind, ere ever the dawn of the morning appeared; and even now, after reigning more than a thousand years, Mystical is Babylon still exercising a destructive and debasing sway over the greater part of the nations in the western world.

Ps. lxxiv. 3.

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