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of terror, as it was emphatically termed, "the revolutionary tribunal added daily, for a long time, new victims to the thousands who had fallen on the fatal days of August and September. Here the mockery of justice was complete; for, in the condemnation of the accused, the conviction of the jury, without the examination of witnesses or even the confession of the prisoner, was declared sufficient to establish guilt." As for the privilege of extending mercy to the condemned, it was contemptuously disclaimed and all applications for pardon were rejected with the declaration, that the enlightened government of republican France possessed no such power.* It was esteemed indeed a sufficient crime to be suspected of being a suspicious person. "In such a state of society, when fortune, honour, and life, depended upon the caprice of sanguinary individuals, it is not surprising that private assassinations were frequently perpetrated with impunity; and, from the torpor and insensibility that prevailed,† were regarded as trivial acts. Suicide likewise became the resource of the unfortunate, especially of those who had renounced every idea of religion, of the superintendance of a Providence, and of a future existence. Thus those, who escaped from the tribunal of the ruling faction, perished by their own. hands. Valazé stabbed himself; Echelle and Condorcet preferred poison; L'Huillier killed himself in prison; Rebecqui drowned himself: they were both agents in the atrocities of Avignon, and the second of September. Hidon, and the academician Champfort, fell by their own hands. Such also was the end of Roland, who was one of the principal actors in the revolution of the tenth of August-In the short space of two years, almost every individual of the principal actors in that revolution was brought to a violent end. Danton and Westerman, the

"I fly far off," said the poet Klopstock, "from the cries of that execrable tribunal, which murders, not only the victim, but which murders also the mercy of the people." Well then might Dumourier observe in his address to his own countrymen, “If the despotism of a single individual be dangerous to liberty, how much more odious must be that of seven hundred men, many of whom are void of principles, without morals, and who have been able to reach that supremacy by cabals or crimes alone."

t-" it became as the blood of a dead man.”

one who directed, and the other who executed, the counsels of the insurgents, perished on the same day, and on the same scaffold. A similar fate befell many of those, who decreed the death or imprisonment of the king. Of the 693 members of the Convention, who voted that the king was guilty, seven were assassinated, eight were suicides, thirty-four were proscribed, ninety-two were imprisoned, and sixty-five were guillotined. The addition of those, who have since suffered in various ways, will swell this account to a far greater number. Thus, for a considerable time, in the interior of France each recent event surpassed in horror that which preceded it ; and the metropolis was the centre of massacre, atheism, and anarchy. The conduct of the governors and the gov erned was equally an outrage to all decorum, humanity, and consistency of conduct-In short, it appears, that there have been two millions of persons murdered in France, since it has called itself a republic."* After the downfall of Robespierre, the effusion of blood began to abate for the vial of the second angel was then exhausted. France, however, was previously converted into a vast Aceldama; or, to use the strong language of prophecy, its revolutionary sea "became as the blood of a dead man, and every living soul died in the sea."†

"And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters, and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast give.: them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments."

As the sea signifies a nation in a violent state of revo

*Kett's Hist. the Inter. Vol. ii. p. 243-252.

Mr. Bicheno supposes this second vial to have begun to be poured out on the sea in the year 1793, when, as he thinks proper to express it," the maritime countries joined the Antichristian tyrants in their crusade against the liberties of France, and when the naval power of Europe was put into motion." (Signs of the times, Part iii. p. 168.) He has no warrant for explaining a symbolical prophecy literally i more especially since he hintself had explained the effusion of the first vial not literally but symbolically.

lutionary tumult, so rivers and fountains symbolize kingdoms and their heads existing in the opposite state of a regular and settled government. These mystic streams are the different powers of the papal Latin empire; which were now to receive, by the unheard of inroads of a barbarous republican enemy, the due reward of their former persecutions of the saints. By a long and bloody war, the whole constitution of the Germanic body has been shaken to its very centre; and its emperor, the successor and representative of Charles the fifth that great enemy of the witnesses, and of the perjured Sigismund that wretched tool of papal malice, trembling for the safety of his capital, has been compelled to sue for an ignominious peace with the republic of France. In the course of the same war, papal Italy has been overrun and pillaged of every thing valuable: Savoy, the ancient parent and persecutor of the Waldenses, has been wrested from its sovereign, nothing in a manner being left to him but the empty title of a king: Spain, after suffering for a time the horrors of war, has been reduced in effect to the state of a mere vassal province of France: the renegado inhabitants of the united provinces, who preferred their pelf to their God, and whose polluted presses had long teemed with the blasphemous productions of Voltaire and his associates, have been first duped into a revolu tion, and have ever since been plundered and harassed by their unrelenting tyrants: and the Helvetic confederacy, in name partly papal and partly protestant, but in reality tainted with atheism to its very core, has been dissolved; its citizens have been massacred; and its territory has been plundered, by the infernal cruelty and harpy rapacity of republican banditti. Future historians will speak of this unparalleled war with astonishment. They will describe Europe as bleeding at every pore, and trembling for the fate of every civilized government. They will detail battle after battle, massacre after massacre, campaign after campaign. They will represent fer

*

• "Holland was the grand asylum of infidelity in the North, the nursery and chief propagator of its works by the licentious liberty allowed to the press"--and, as for Switzerland, D'Alembert and Voltaire boasted, that "in Calvin's own town there were but a few beggarly fellows who believed in Christ, and that from Geneva to Berne not a Christian was to be found."

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tile provinces wasted with fire and sword: and they will speak with horror of rapes, and murders, of pillage and extortion, of prisoners deliberately put to death in cold blood, and of wounded soldiers systematically poisoned by their apostate commander. But, while they present this dreadful scroll of human calamities to the sickening attention of posterity, they will not fail to attest, that these heavy judgments of the Lord have principally fallen upon the rivers and fountains of the papal Roman empire. Protestant states, that have in any measure preserved the faith of their ancestors, have in a manner been exempt. Self-defence and wanton provocations compelled England to enter into the contest. Her firmness, under Providence, blasted all the designs of her malicious enemy against herself; and drove him back to his own shores disgraced and vanquished, with his navy shattered and with his mariners disheartened. But her hapless allies, already devoted by the just judgment of God to drink in their turn torrents of blood, inasmuch as they have heretofore profusely shed the blood of saints and prophets, it exceeded her power to save. The mighty arm of the Lord snatched her from impending destruction, and withered the boasted strength of her foe when directed against herself: but the angel of the waters, while she was preserved in the midst of wide-extending havock and desolation, sternly denounced the vengeance of heaven against her popish confederates. "They have

Such was the rapacity of the republican tyrants, that "two years had been sufficient to place the countries conquered by France," the Netherlands, Holland, and the states situated between the Meuse and the Rhine, "on a level with herself, and to reduce them to one common equality of death and misery-These countries, but a short time before so rich and so abundant, were exhausted" by bearing the whole burden of maintaining the French army; "their whole specie was absorbed by contributions, their manufactures were suspended, and their produce consumed." (Hist. of the Campaign of 1796. p. 4.) The same work contains a very full account of the various robberies systematically committed by the French in Germany and Italy. (See p. 44, 70, 241, 247, 249, 250, 254, 256, 364, 365, 366.) In short, the order given by the Directory to their generals was, that "they should maintain their troops by victory ;" an order so faithfully obeyed by Buonaparte, that he “had no hesitation to say, in the proclamation which he made to his soldiers in entering inte Carynthia, that all the expences of the army of Italy, during eleven months, had been paid by the conquered countries, and that he had besides sent 30 millions of livres to France." (Ibid. p. 5, 366.) These were some of the blessings of republican fraternity!

shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy.'

From what has been said it appears, that the three first vials relate to the French Revolution, describing at once the principles upon which it was founded, and the miseries both internal and external which it has produced. This tremendous revolution, which more or less has affected the whole Roman Empire, I conceive to be the first period of the third woe-trumpet, which St. John figuratively describes under the image of a harvest; a harvest not of mercy, but of God's wrath against the nations. After this figurative harvest has been gathered in, there is to be a sort of pause between it and the commencement of the vintage. The affairs of the world are in some measure to return to their old channel: yet they are not to roll on so smoothly, but that the interval between the harvest and the vintage will be marked by certain important events. These events are predicted under the

three following vials.

SECTION II.

Concerning the three intermediate vials.

The reader must decide for himself how far it is probable, that three out of the seven vials have already been poured out at the commencement of the last woe-trumpet, constituting jointly that grand period of it, which by St. John is styled the harvest, and by which I understand the French Revolution. The concluding vial is reserved

Mr. Galloway whimsically supposes, that the angel of the waters is the maritime sovereign of Great Britain. In the well-deserved encomiums, which he bestows upon our revered monarch, I heartily concur, though I cannot think that he is meant by the angel of the waters. This angel is manifestly no other than the angel, who had just poured out bis vial upon the waters of the rivers and fountains; whence he is naturally styled the angel of the waters, or the angel whose influence affected the waters. Mr. Galloway appears to me to have been by no means successful in his interpretation of any of the vials, excepting the sixth, which he rightly applies to Turkey. In his elucidation of the third he has been peculiarly unhappy. Entirely quitting the language of symbols, he fancies that the rivers and fountains mean Germany, for no other reason but because that country is well watered with abundance of large streams. In a sermon, which I published some years ago upon the pouring out of the vials, I was right in my general idea respecting them, but in more than one instance wrong in my particular application of them.