10. The Kingdom or Popedom of Rome, Damasus, 378. 11. The Kingdom of Sardinia, 1040.

These divisions of the Roman Empire, we perceive, originated since the Bishop of Rome became Imperial Pontiff, and have continued distinct from each other from their first rise till now. Each, the States of the Church excepted, has been formed by swallowing up smaller States formerly independent, and still unreconciled-such as Venice, Brittany, Wales, Austrasia, Catalonia, Neustria, Aquitaine, Burgundy, Lorraine, Navarre, Genoa, Sicily. We have not reckoned Saxe-Coburg, the Grand-Duchy of Baden, Hesse-Homburg, or any of the petty States that still remain on the German map, any more than Modina, Lucca, Parma, in the Italian territory; nor have we included Hanover, which was never defiled by Roman tread.

If Mr Elliott refuse to take the existing monarchies, and wishes to go farther back to, say A,D. 500, thirty-three years before his favourite era, he will only treble their number, and find at least thirty sovereignties all equally prominent, instead of ten. How many were in existence, then, in the year A.D. 500?

Mr Elliott would thus have thirty sovereignties, exclusive of

the Popedom, to account for, none of which has been subdued by, plucked up before, or supplanted through, the Pope; but all which co-existed with mutual rivalry alike in A.D. 500 and A.D. 533, none recognising any chief centre, and all originating subsequent to A.D. 476, at which period even Mede allowed Antichrist to have been set up as superior upon earth. Let him point out which of the ten the prophet designated as horns, and which three of these ten the Pope plucked up.

We cannot allow any one-Mr Elliott is himself far too highminded to escape by putting down a list of ten kings, and then a separate list of three, forming no part of, and not included in, the former ten. This may be a skilful ruse, but it is a wretched one, and brings discredit on the cause of prophetic study. The Jortins and Newtons of the last century have much to answer for.

Here, then, are thirty States existing together, all in a row, within the limits of the old Roman Empire; twenty-three at least of which were formed by Gothic conquerors, and ruled by Gothic blood. Only seven, however, are admissible. Which are to be refused? We have set down none in malice. Let it be shewn where lies our mistake, and which are the three supplanted by the Pope of Rome.

Mr Elliott may object to Mauritania and Wallachia, in our first list, which he will probably prefer to the second, and certainly will to the last. Unluckily, Wallachia happens to have retained its original Roman population, and is the only part of the world thoroughly Roman in language, laws, and even in dress, as well as blood. Its people are still called, and call themselves, "the Romans;" the nobles, or boyars alone, are of Gothic or gentle descent, and capable of civilisation in its proper sense. With regard to Mauritania, if he will inspect its forces, he will find them still governed* and garrisoned by the fierce sons of the North; and he will scarcely deny that the country of those great Romans-Augustine, Cyprian, Tertulian-formed part of the Roman Empire, or that the leading men still retain traces, like Abdool Khader, of their northern ancestry.t

I last week interrogated a relative, who, having been much on service at Gibraltar, and having repeatedly visited Mauritania, was quite able to speak on this subject. His reply was this: the Moors proper were fairer than either him or myself, or any individuals of the Cymro-Semitic type. They must be carefully distinguished from the negro slaves, who, of course, live within the same limits, and from the Arab, who is only an invader.

Surely, if the States of the Church were a horn, the Doge of Venice and Genoa, and the Landamman of Switzerland, and the Hereditary Podestas of Florence and Milan, were horns too.

I am not disposed to give these up at any price, except, indeed, Mr Elliott's personal friendship; but even if they are quietly set aside, and not looked at, there still remain twentyone kings, when there ought to be but seven; and by no possible legerdemain can these be refined down to a group of seven and the Pope. Besides, Mr Elliott and his friends make Holland also a part of the Babylonian beast; if so, the King of Holland, with 120,000 good troops and militia, is surely as important a horn as the King of Naples with 60,000 bad ones, or the Pope of Rome with his 6000 rapparees, who are said to mount guard with umbrellas! I do not, however, consider the Dutch as a Romanised people at any time; but, if they were, so much the worse for Mr Elliott, who must deliver a sharp stroke to sever this horn, which he has taken so much pains to rivet on the thick skull of the Roman beast.

We know the reply. It will be said by the partisans * of the common interpretation, that, by kings, the prophet means races. Be it so, for the sake of argument. We will consider this, but let us first settle irreversibly the question at issue.

What becomes of Mr Elliott's theory, if the third question be asked, at the same time, as to which were the horns, kings, or races, which were plucked up by the Pope?

According to him, they were the kings of the Heruli, Turingi, and Lombards. Antichrist, be it recollected, he thinks to have begun his reign in A.D. 533. Yet it appears that the Turingi were, a century before this, extirpated from the face of the earth by the Heruli, without ever having constituted a kingdom, or been anything but a division of invaders; and the Heruli themselves by the Lombards in A.D. 476; whilst the Lombards, again, were subdued about A.D. 490 by the Ostrogoths; and that neither Heruli nor Turingi ever formed sovereignties independent of the Emperor and Pontiff. Hence, then, it follows that, if Mr Elliott be right, and that the rise of Antichrist began in A.D. 533, he plucked up the Turingi upwards of a hundred, and the Heruli fifty-seven years, and the Lombards forty-three years, before he was born! We must, therefore, conclude, either that the Pope became Antichrist a century sooner than Mr Elliott will allow-in which case the 1260 years' reign must be given up, and, as the present writer believes, the Papal reign left to occupy the undefined space from the close of the first to the end of the sixth seal- -or that he has never yet subdued three kings, and cannot be the last Anti

* The author does not pretend certainty that the whole of St Cyprian's alleged writings are not forgeries. His own impression is, that they resemble the original, as Macpherson's Poems of Ossian do the native Highland ballads.

christ, since Mr Elliott allows that none others than those he has specified have ever existed in or near the territories of the Pope of Rome, or can be said to have disappeared before him.

There is another difficulty. If the Turingi were plucked up by the Heruli, the Heruli by the Lombards, and the Lombards by Theodoric the Ostrogoth, King of Rome-if these kingdoms, differing only as the Plantaganets, Tudors, Stuarts, and German governments of Britain, are yet to be spoken of as distinct kingdoms the Pontiff, as heir to a part of the estate of Theodoric, must have plucked up four kingdoms instead of three. Were a successful rebel to seize the throne of Queen Victoria, could he be said thereby to have plucked up three kings? The Ostrogothic was a real, definite, established kingdom, not like that of the Heruli or Turingi. It was the plunder of the Ostrogoths, not of the Heruli, that the Pope secured. The Heruli were but a mere migration of a wandering tribe. Can even Mr Elliott fix the extent of their supposed kingdom, or analyse their acts?

Why is it that all our commentators so conveniently find four kingdoms make but three, suppressing all mention of the Ostrogoths? The reason is plain: we know all particulars of the overthrow of the Ostrogoths, and that the Pope had nought to do with it, any more than the Archbishop of Canterbury with the battle of Waterloo. We know nothing of the defeat of the Heruli or Turingi, and therefore it is conjectured he may have had a hand in them. But if so, he must have been in existence before them; and if he was in existence in A.D. 383, as the chief minister of Satan upon earth, as we believe, and have endeavoured to shew, the whole of Mr Elliott's calculations, based on the fact, that the Apostasy did not commence till 533, have to be resettled. It is Antichrist who plucks up the kings; but these kings were all plucked up before A.D. 533, Mr Elliott's date for the rise of Antichrist. Let Mr Elliott choose which horn of the dilemma he prefers to sit upon. Either the Papacy has reigned 1450 years, in which case it has overstepped the period allowed the churches, or it has not yet supplanted any single king upon earth, and cannot, therefore, be the Antichrist.

*

Let us again look at the fallacy involved in the vulgar view. The Turingi are said to have conquered and colonised that

* If we are right in our opinions, the immense value of Mede's researches will be apparent. It is clear that he approximated nearer to truth than any subsequent commentator, and that their amendments have been, like the alterations in the form of cannon, as fixed by Gustavus Adolphus, which the French have introduced, all for the worse.

part of Italy now called the States of the Church, without, however, interfering with the civil and ecclesiastical powers of the Pontiff, any more than the French garrison does now in Rome, or the 6th Carbineers, now at Canterbury, with that of the archbishop. On the contrary, they seem to have been very quiet and obedient subjects, quite as amenable as the Chasseurs de Vincennes to ecclesiastical and Roman law.

The Heruli drove out the Turingi, just as the English and the Turks, under Trowbridge, drove out the troops of Massena in 1799, or as the French drove out Mazzini in 1848, without affecting the Pontifical authorities. These changes were a mere exchange of garrisons, like the relief of an Irish by a Highland regiment.

The military chief of Lombardy, in A.D. 476, conquered and annexed the Romagna to his dominions, still respecting the civil and ecclesiastical rights of the Pontiff, as the Austrian garrison will when its brave cavalry may replace the French chasseurs. In 490, Theodoric the Ostrogoth succeeded the Lombard kings, and founded a military government, leaving the civil and ecclesiastical functions and income of the Imperial Pontiff uninterfered with, and the Roman power untouched.

In 787, King Pepin, having conquered the King of the Ostrogoths, relieved the Romagna from all feudal duties to himself as conqueror, and vested its entire police administration in the Pontiff-adding to it the civil rule of a small portion of Lombardy, about the value of a very small English county, over which, however, he, and all German sovereigns since, have claimed military control-and which is actually now held by Austrian bayonets. It was this very question which gave rise to the troubles of 1848. They began by conflict of the Papal with the Austrian military authorities-both equally legitimate -as to government of Ferrara. The Pope wanted to command the garrison as well, and to supplant the stout soldiers of Sclavonia with his Roman rabble rout. William the Conqueror, in like manner, granted to the Bishop of Durham certain lands to be held by military tenure, as being on the frontier exposed to the Scots. This grant, as in the case of Pepin, had nothing to do with, and made no alteration in, the Bishop's ecclesiastical privileges, which remain still: the military authority has been resumed by the queen. Now, the three horns plucked up by the little horn not only all existed before him in the vision, but are co-existent with each other. According to Mr Elliott's theory, however, only one of them existed for a short time, then gave place to a second, and that to a third similar horn, occupying precisely the same spot on the beast's head!