beast from the sea worship him directly without intervention of an image—we ask how a race of sovereigns purely German, ruling only over German people, can be deemed Latin Men.* From the death of Domitian till now, can any emperor, save Aurelian alone, or any pontiff, be pointed out as a Latin man? Even if we take Napoleon Bonaparte to have been head of the Roman empire, we are not helped, for he, as his features shewed, was of noble or Norman-Lombard, not of Italian or Latin descent, and was wont to pride himself on his nobility; and Louis Bonaparte, as every one knows, is a perfect Jew, and son of the Hebrew admiral Verhieul, to whom he owes, as is often the case with illegimate children, his peculiar intellect. How can these sovereigns, none of whom were Latin by descent, and few of whom could have understood a Latin sentence, and who valued themselves above all things on their northern origin, be typified as Latin men? We should as soon think of painting the visage of a negro from the Bight of Benin as the portrait of a Circassian beauty. We must do the Pope justice. He is not in the habit of impressing upon his agents indelible marks which would lead to their identification, still less is he, in any sense of the word, inclined to make them worship the German emperor, whom, as an Italian, he hates, as the powerless slave who writhes under the scourge of a stern master, yet feels that he well deserves that scourge, even were it applied more sternly, and that to his master he must look for food; so far from making men worship the German empire, the history of Europe from A. D. 800 to 1848 represents one incessant struggle between the Italian Pope and the German empire. Who has not heard of the Guelphs and Ghibelines, of Hildebrand, and Henry of Saxony, and of Frederick Barbarossa, of Clement and Alva, of Rome sacked by the fierce soldiery of Bourbon, of the Papal residence at Avignon, of the pontiff waiting in the imperial chamber of Joseph II. like a valet, of the intrigues of Mastai Ferretti in 1848 to expel the Croats from Italy-intrigues as vain as the struggles of a helpless girl in the grasp of a giant? If anything be more certain or distinct than another, it is the deadly hatred which has always existed between the German emperors and the Italian Pope.† The hatred of the Welsh to the English is nothing to

* If the Germano-Norman emperor be the beast from the sea, his number must be in Greek 666. No one has pretended to prove this. O Aaruvos and 'O ATσTarns are equally inapplicable to the Pope, since both are masculine. The Papacy is described in the Scriptures as feminine.

+ If the Pope allows none to buy or sell who do not take the mark of the German emperor, how is it that the vast Jewish population of Rome have never heard of the fact?

it, for the result of battles between those two races has been so proverbially uncertain, that no feeling of contempt or revenge mixes with the aversion. But between the German and Italian powers the rivalry is that between the Brahmin and the Pariah, who, professing the same religion, hate each other with deadly hate that the hangman and the victim alone feel beside. France, not Germany, is the eldest son of the Roman Church; Spain her most beloved offspring; Italy her spoilt daughter; Germany but a rebellious step-son, deriding his mother's wrinkles whilst partaking of her cups.

The beast of the earth makes fire come down from heaven in the sight of men. Can this mean that he caused certain holy men to be burned by a fire lighted on the earth? Did the fire that consumed Wishart or Latimer come down from heaven? Does the Pope do this? If it be said again that the symbols mean only that the Pope instigates war, and that war is now carried on by throwing shells and rockets at an elevation, we would reply that this answer might suit Jerome, or Origen, or Clement of Alexandria, but will not suit us. In what respect do Romanists use shells, shrapnels, or rockets, more than Protestants or Greeks? The English fire of shells in the Peninsula and at Waterloo was reckoned fourfold more lethal than the French. As to Spanish or Portuguese shelling, the effect is simply ludicrous. The proportion of batteries to battalions is, we believe, greater in the Russian than any other army; least of all in the Papal, which has not a well-horsed brigade of guns. The most terrific artillery fire on record was that of the Royal Artillery, then the most Protestant corps in the service, at Barossa. But is there any man in his senses who thinks the projection of a shell to a height of a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards before it falls fitly described by the calling down of fire from heaven? Mark, it is the calling down fire, not the pouring down fire. With as much reason, or with more, might it be called the discharge of fire up to heaven. Nothing can be more illogical than this whole theory, whether applied to Napoleon Bonaparte, who was not remarkably partial to howitzers, or to the Pope. Let it be shewn that the Popes, or any one Pope, have at any given time called down fire from heaven, or pretended to do so. If they have not done this, then they have not yet afforded sign by which we are to know them as the beast of the earth or the false prophet.

We know that Saint Anthony of Padua is said to have once called down fire from heaven to scorch an irreverend magpie which mocked the holy man's preaching, and perhaps, by preach

ing less nonsense, made him jealous. We believe this fact as firmly as we do the veracity of St Jerome, the grace of St Gregory the Great, or the Christianity of St Cyril. As, however, St Anthony never became Pope, and even if made Pope could not have ruled the Church, seeing that the extreme warmth of his temperament compelled him with few and rare intervals to sit all day long up to the neck in the midst of a running stream to cool himself, and therefore left him no time for general service, we do not see how this one reported approximation to a miracle, even if we believed it, can help the Papacy. Have the Popes ever once called down fire from heaven, or have they not? If not, they are not the beast from the earth, and that beast has yet to arise and discover himself.

Hence we conclude, that whilst the beast from the sea may represent the last or fourth empire of Daniel, which bears rule over the whole earth; whilst all men wonder after the beast from the sea, and ask who is worthy to make war with him, and crushes or coerces into submission to itself and its allied kings Rome, Greece, and Persia; the beast from the bottomless pit animates the Roman or third empire, by which, bloody as a leopard, almost the entire work of persecution against God's people for His sake has been stirred up and carried on, and continues to oppose truth till Satan, taking to himself his great power, dispenses with the pontificate of the Virgin, and gives to his embodied earthly representative, the beast from the sea, his power, his seat, and great authority. All who know modern history, or have studied magic or the cabala, well know that the leopard was the peculiar armorial badge of the pontiff kings, just as the red dragon, the scarlet-coloured beast of the later western emperors, or the crescent of the Moslem Sultans of Constantinople.

The beast from the sea sets up the Antichrist, but the Roman pontiff, having denied the personal reign of Christ on earth and claimed to be Christ's vice-regent, will be compelled in stern necessity to resist the false Messiah equally with the true, and will receive from him that vengeance which Rome has drawn upon itself by apostasy from its rightful Lord. The beast from the sea, the beast from the earth, and the beast from the bottomless pit, are all three distinct enemies, equally hostile, equally hateful, equally doomed to perish beneath the wrath of the Lamb. Let us bear in mind that the Roman Catholic Church is not represented as the spouse of the one Antichrist, but as originally the spouse of Christ; and having gone astray with many lovers, as having seduced other nations,

not like those kings of the earth who fall with the last Antichrist as seduced by him. Hence her judgment appears more terrible. She perishes by fire, the fire with which she would consume the saints. They-the kings-fall by the sword, and how far this may infer any distinction in the economy of future vengeance we know not, nor dare to inquire.

The beast from the sea was not in existence in the apostles' days. Hence it cannot be the Roman empire, which had already begun to decay. Its rise follows the casting down of Satan to the earth. But Satan does not appear to have been yet cast down. The dragon gives him his power, his seat of great authority. Did he ever give this to the German emperors? Were they not conjoinedly weaker than the kings of England, Turkey, Sweden, or France? Was the German empire so very formidable when saved by Sobieski from Turkish conquest, by Marlborough from French invasion, or when foiled by Frederick the Great, the lord but of one small province? Has not Austria been proverbially unsuccessful in war, and can we speak of her as conquering the earth? However, the beast from the sea cannot in all respects be harmonized with Daniel's fourth beast, although they are closely and indissolubly connected, and in fact are the same, taken from different points of view. The latter, we are distinctly told, is the fourth kingdom upon earth, out of, not within which, a little horn is to arise, differing from ten other dependent or allied monarchies, which also spring out of it. Now, this must represent the empire, not the individual emperor who rules at its overthrow. On the other hand, the beast from the sea is clearly the individual ruler to whom the beast from the earth of St John, and the little horn of Daniel, acts as false prophet, for he is taken alive, and with the beast from the earth cast into the lake of fire, whilst his army is killed with the sword, and the fowls filled with their flesh. But an empire cannot be taken alive, therefore it must be an individual emperor. No such emperor has yet arisen, nor any empire of 1260 years' duration, except those of Persia, Greece, and Rome, all which have lasted two thousand years or more. Ergo, the rise of this Antichristian emperor is yet to come. But the beast from the earth arises after the beast from the sea. If, then, we do not yet behold the beast from the sea, we cannot discover the beast from the earth amongst existing monarchs, and both beasts must be equally distinet from that of the bottomless pit, which represents an empire already existing in the apostle's days, not as the other two, the individual who heads, develops, and works up the system into full activity-as it were, embodies it in himself. We say

that Napoleon became captive to Sir Thomas Maitland. We cannot say that the French empire became captive. We may hold that the beast from the bottomless pit now exists in full and murderous activity, without also holding that her last ruler has already appeared; that the Russian eagles can never hover over the ruins of the Vatican, or that the Pope has already conquered the earth, in defiance of those historical facts which prove that all his attempts to pass spiritually the Danube, the Tigris, or the Severn, result in defeat, as did the carnal invasions of the Pagan emperors.

Again, the vials are poured out apparently upon the entire earth, not merely on the Roman world, and the earlier affect the beast from the sea, the latter Babylon. Hence, the two must co-exist, along with the beast of the earth as well. Have those vials yet been poured out, or have any of them? Let us ask the excellent and venerable Dr Keith, whose slightest word deserves deep consideration.

According to that great and estimable writer, the third vial poured out upon the rivers and fountains of waters which became blood signifies the battles fought upon the Italian rivers by Napoleon Bonaparte, between 1794 and 1799. Now, with all possible deference, we would ask Dr Keith to point out any series of continued military operations that were not carried on upon rivers and fountains of waters, or their vicinity. To march an army of eighty thousand men even one day's journey from water, were to destroy it, setting aside the fact, that the river-courses generally mark the strategic features of a kingdom. Besides, too, it happens that these campaigns were singularly bloodless, although brilliant as to scientific manoeuvring. Even Sir Archibald Alison, for once, has stumbled upon a reflection both true and new, as to the infinitesimal character of the losses sustained by both sides, till the Russians, after the supposed close of this vial, came into the field. The early battles of Bonaparte were beautiful chess-playing. The instant the Austrians found themselves turned by the superior rate of French marching, they fell back, leaving a rear-guard to gain time, and surrender. Battles were gained by bravado, not by bullets. In the whole of Napoleon's Italian campaigns, the effusion of human blood was less than in the single battle of Borodino, in 1812, and not one-fourth of that sustained in a year of Russian war. Any battles fought any time would apply as well, most battles much better, to the prophecy at issue. Yet Dr Keith forgets that the prophecy does not say that the rivers and fountains were filled with blood, but that they became

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