Revolution standing as the last great event before it; with but a brief intervening period, occupied by Providence in preparing and securing the Church; in spreading the Scriptures, and in giving a last opportunity to the unbeliever and the idolater to accept the truth of God.

The Apocalypse thus assumes the rank of not merely an elucidation of the Divine will in the past, nor an evidence of the general truth of Christianity, but of a WARNING, of the highest and most pressing nature, to all men, in the entire range of human society. It is not the mere abstract study of the theologian, nor the solitary contemplation of the man of piety. But a great document addressed to the mighty of the earth; Wisdom calling out trumpet-tongued to the leaders of national council; the descended Minister of Heaven, summoning for the last time the nations to awake to the peril already darkening over their heads, and cut themselves loose from those unscriptural and idolatrous faiths, with which they must otherwise go down; the Spirit of God, commanding the teachers and holders of the true faith to prepare themselves by the cultivation of their powers, by a vigilant purity, by a generous and hallowed courage, for that high service of God and man in which

they may so soon be called on to act, and perhaps to suffer; and proclaiming to all men alike the infinite urgency of redeeming the time before the arrival of a period, that to the whole world of idolatry, European and barbarian, shall come with a civil ruin, of which the subversion of Jerusalem was but a type; and with a physical destruction, that can find no parallel but in the inevitable fury of the Deluge.

Yet, vague as those combinations of all the forms of public calamity may appear, we are not left without the means of approaching a more distinct conception. It will be shown in the course of the volume, that this final infliction bears a very singular resemblance to the procedure of the French Revolution; the difference being chiefly in magnitude. The commencement of the French Revolution in Atheism and anarchy, the spirit of hostility to all nations, the sudden change of the whole people into a soldiery, the indignities offered to the popedom, the captivity of sovereigns, the suspension or change of laws and establishments, and even the means by which those horrors were partially combated and restrained-all find their counterparts in the final plague. The chief distinctions are, that the latter, instead of being limited to Europe, incomplete, and apparently under the

sole influence of human means, will be universal, complete, and, at least towards the close, palpably influenced by the action or presence of the Deity.

CAUSES OF THE FAILURE OF INTERPRETATION.

Of all the Books of Scripture the Apocalypse has most consumed the labour of Commentators, and with the least valuable results. To this day there is no satisfactory interpretation; and though parts have been cleared, yet they have been so remote from each other, so frequently conjectural, and so little capable of throwing light on the general prophecy, that the Apocalypse has hitherto remained, in the strongest sense, debateable ground; an unfertile and undefined district, in which every new comer may set up his claim, but no one establish his possession.

Of the acquirement and vigorous understanding of many among the interpreters, there can be no doubt; but so obvious has been their failure, that at length the attempt has been looked on as exhibiting little more than a strong determination in the experimentalists, a love of tasking themselves with insuperable difficulties, something of a theological hardihood, pardonable for

its waste of time only in the honesty of its motives. With the world, the Apocalypse has, in consequence, become nearly a dead letter. The more pious, who believe in its divine inspiration, place it apart from the general study of Scripture, as a book for whose use they must wait until some happier age. The multitude, who, like Gallio, "care for none of these things," lay it by, as an old matter of dispute with which they have no concern, or forget its existence. The scoffers and half-learned taunt religious men with the acknowledgment of a "sacred document," of which the meaning cannot be ascertained after the labours of eighteen hundred years; or indulge themselves with making mirth of its strong Orientalisms and mysterious symbols. Thus, in the present state of our knowledge, the book is practically valueless; it makes no impression on the Christian world, none is so seldom quoted even in the pulpit, and the man who quoted its authority on any public question would probably be looked on as doing no very distinguished honour to his own understanding. Yet, with all this, the Christian, in the possession of the Apocalypse, holds in his hand the most distinct, complete, and wonderworking instrument of Divine knowledge that was ever communicated to earth; the clearest elucidation

of Providence, and, not less, the most convincing and vivid evidence of the truth of Christianity.

Sufficient reasons may be found for this failure of the commentators. They have in general, and I am sure I make the observation in perfect respect for their learned and pious labours,-been too much influenced by the great names of Sir Isaac Newton and Joseph Mede. The system of almost all among the multitude of commentators whom I have consulted, has been formed on that of those distinguished men. Yet Newton's treatise was but a sketch, and apparently a hasty one, appended to his "Observations on Daniel." Mede's more diligently laboured work is yet singularly strained, obscure, and gratuitous. Both have the grand disqualification, that they wrote at a time when those events which are the absolute key of the whole prophecy, had not yet occurred. The natural result of determining, under such circumstances, to find a meaning for every part, was error; and to adopt their authority was but to propagate their error. In the arrangement of the prophetic visions, and their mutual dependance, both were wrong; and a misconception of this rank must be fatal to the formation of any true system. Yet, in an important portion of the past, the predictions immediately