THER. WICKLIFF paved the way before him, but Luther was the great instrument of Providence in effecting the first fall of Rome, by the GENERAL REFORMATION which ensued upon his powerful (and for that age) luminous detection of the MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. His "great power" alludes to the powerful effect of Luther's writings, and "bis glory" represents the great light he threw upon the sacred writings, and on the benighted world, by refuting the errors of popery, and bringing forward the long lost doctrines of life and salvation to the apprehension of the poor and unlearned, as well as of the higher ranks of society. "And he cried mightily with a strong voice."-This is wonderfully characteristic of the stile and tone of this bold reprover of the POPE; and these marks taken all together, I think, must decidedly give honest MARTIN the distinguished honor of being the angel employed in this great and good work, for which he now hath his reward.*

The word angel signifies messenger, and the angels employed by Providence on many occasions, are not always celes

cry

much

of this mighty angel is very The in the unpolite stile of Luther's bitter invec tives against Rome and its modern masters. "Babylon the great is fallen-is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the of hold of every foul spirit, and a cage every unclean and hateful bird,

For all nations

have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies."-These allusions to her universal or catholic supremacy, her CUP of dementating wine &c. or false doctrines, with which she has seduced the nations of her communion to rank idolatry, and undeniable apostacy from the gospel of Christ; are plainly repeated from the preceding pro phets. Thus Jeremiah* describes her domin

tial beings, nor even good and holy persons, but are figuratively called angels, or messengers, or instruments of Providence, in respect of the work to which God hath appointed them."The Lord hath made all things for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil." (Prov. xvi. 4.) The messenger of God, in Isai. x. 6, was one of this latter description.

* Jeremiah li. 13.

ion over the nations by the same figure as St John:"O thou that dwellest upon many waters, abundant in treasures, thine end is come, and the (utmost) measure of thy covetousness."—Verse 7, "Babylon hath been A GOLDEN CUP in the Lord's hand, that made all the earth drunken: the nations have drunken of her wine, therefore the nations are mad." -And under the same idea of ingredients infused into her cup, of a dementating and infatu-` ating quality, the prophet Isaiah says,-"The Lord hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof," and they who are under the influence of it "have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit. Neither shall there be any work for Egypt, which the head or tail, branch or rush may do, &c." The meaning of which passage taken altogether is, that a spirit of unaccountable perverseness, and infatuated restlessness, tending to their own overthrow, should in the day of their judgment, possess the people of that devoted confederacy, in every country where they should be found.

Our Saviour remarked the same thing of the jews, as beginning to appear in his time, and which soon arrived afterwards to such an height as to be the punishment of their infidelity, and to occasion their destruction.*. "And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, come out of her my people,—that ye be not partakers of her sins,

and that

ye re-. ceive not of her plagues." Both of which, after this warning given publicly by these messengers of heaven, will happen to as many as abide in that communion.-" For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities."-This is all taken from denunciations of the prophets, in nearly the same words, against old Babylon; but ultimately intended of Rome, as this ap"Reward ber plication of them shews.† even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double," &c. The retaliation of her cruelties and treachery upon herself, is the subject of very numerous prophecies before quoted;

* Matt. xv. 14; John ix. 40; Isai. vi. 10.

Jer. 1. 15, 29.

particularly that of Isaiah, (li. 21,) which expresses that God would take the cup of tremb ling and of affliction out of the hand of the suf fering church, on which she had so long trampled, and put it into her hand: or as the sense of it is here concisely expressed by St John,"in the cup which she bath filled, fill to her double."

In Isaiah (chap. xlvii.) there is a very remarkable prophecy of the fall of Babylon of Chaldea, as the first sense of it imported, but which, as being one of the double prophecies, deserves to be very attentively considered, and compared with St John's prophetic description of the pride, self security, corruption and universal profligacy of ROME; and the punishment of them by an overthrow distinguished by circumstances the same, or very little different, in both the type and the antitype. St John (in his concise manner) has quoted enough of it in the general idea he gives, and by the adoption of the very phrases there used, to indicate that it was his design to refer us to the original in Isaiah, for a fuller