influences leagued against Protestant truth. Neology fights against it with specious abstract criticisms, or reasonings; and Catholic superstition, amidst its own sentimental fancies, rejects it with bitter scorn. There are some who, in sacred criticism, confound names with things; and think that a few learned phrases, borrowed from the Germans, give them a right to despise the sound and solid thought of elder divines as antiquated and worthless. Follies, and even heresies, become sacred in their eyes, when they are embalmed in the long winding sheet of "hermeneutical canons," the "usus loquendi," and "biblical exegesis." But there are others in whom the infection has a more specious form. The definite warnings of prophecy, in their hands, are diluted into vague presentiments of the triumph of good over evil; and they can thus look down on expositions like this of Mede, as by-gone follies, and tokens of the absence of deep and philosophic thought. Others, again, delight to lose themselves amidst the gorgeous architecture of the middle ages, the dreams of chivalry, and legends of monks, and saints, and holy virgins, and thus to nurse a mysterious and sentimental devotion. The stubborn witness of God's Spirit against Christian idolatry is then rejected with scorn and loathing. It is deemed the fruit of Protestant heresy, the mark of a narrow soul, which has no eye to discern the mysteries, and no ear to drink in the noble harmonies, of Catholic tradition.

It will be my object, in the rest of this Intro

duction, to meet and expose these two evils. Reason and analogy, and the lessons of the whole inspired context, will first be brought to illustrate the prophecy, to silence the cavils of a superficial philosophy, and reveal the true nature of the warning in the clearest and fullest light. And lastly, I shall seek, if possible, to strip the idols of the visible Church of the deceitful hues which a spurious sentiment has thrown over them, and to open a glimpse of that wider and nobler field, which these warnings themselves, taken in their true. and Protestant sense, open as an endless vista before the renewed imagination.

And first, let us inquire what view of this and similar warnings is most in harmony with the lessons of the spiritual reason. Is it that which refers them to a shortlived heresy of the second century alone? Or that which sees in them a grotesque form of infidelity in a few short year S still to come? Or, finally, the view of our author, which refers them to wide-wasting evils, through every region of Christendom, and for more than twelve hundred years of the Church's history? Such an abstract inquiry needs to be pursued with caution. But the presumption of shallow theories may render it needful to meet them on their own ground; and if we enter on the inquiry in a reverent spirit, there is firm and safe footing, and we shall be able to reach a certain and well-founded conclusion.

Have we reason, first of all, to expect on abstract grounds that wide-spread evils would prevail in the visible Church, assuming that it

was to continue for eighteen hundred years? The answer is plain. The whole history of the world is one ceaseless conflict of good and evil. The Gospel came to supply a Divine remedy for enormous and abounding sin. But that Gospel itself declares that the triumph over evil will not be until the coming of the Lord, and a solemn judgment and separation. It even reveals a powerful enemy who is ever at work to deceive, and prevailing unbelief in the latest hour of the Church's pilgrimage. At its first rise, the heathen world was covered with gross darkness; and at its close, God will have concluded all in unbelief, that he may have mercy upon all. The Gospel does not profess to set aside the laws of moral influence, or the reality of conflict, though it arms the truth with a new and Divine power. It is only at the last that the tares and wheat are separated; and, of those who are within the net, the good are gathered into vessels, and the bad cast away. We must choose, therefore, between two theories. On the first view, the Gospel completely triumphs and prevails for many centuries, except in small offshoots that break off from the main body of the Church. But, just before the end, there is a sudden and total lapse from the long triumph of truth to an almost entire extinction, and a shortlived triumph of evil, no less unaccountable than awful. On the second view, the evil has worked uniformly and mightily from the rise of the faith; first, as a mystery of iniquity, and then as foul and open corruption, infecting and leavening

Sometimes it

the great mass of the Church. may hide itself a little deeper; sometimes appear with more unblushing face, in open profligacy and heresy; sometimes there may be a partial revival of truth, at others a new relapse; but the evil throughout is massive, deep, and strong, till the apostasy completes itself in open warfare against the true followers of the Lamb.

The former view must be maintained by those who confine all such warnings as the present, to the two first centuries, or to days still future. How shocking, they exclaim, to suppose the visible Church at large, the object of this prediction, and chargeable through long ages with idolatrous corruptions of the faith; that holy mother from whose pale, as they fondly assert, all idols are by a Divine promise utterly abolished!

But this view, on every ground of pure reason, is most unnatural, and even absurd. It would imply that the powers of evil act only by short and fitful spasms, and at other times are buried in almost total slumber. It changes the fixed and eternal laws of moral good and evil, their awful energy, their unceasing conflict, their steady and unfailing power until the final victory, into a blind lottery, where no law can be traced, and where the humble heart finds no response to its own experience. It annuls the force of the exhortation to watch always, by proclaiming the immunity of the Church, or at least of its teachers and guides, for long ages, from all dangerous errors. It uproots all confidence in the stedfast course of Providence towards the final

victory of truth, by so full and fatal a relapse after so complete and long-continued a triumph. And hence the spiritual reason must reject it at once, as a crude notion, bred in the dark caverns of a wayward fancy, and which can never endure the clear daylight of Divine truth. The mystery of godliness, from its very rise, had to struggle with a world's hatred; and the mystery of iniquity, as its dark shadow, rose at once into being. From the very first the Gospel has put forth a mighty energy, to Christianize and redeem an ungodly world; and from the very first that ungodly world has wrought with a fatal energy within the Church itself, to heathenize and pervert the Gospel.

It is certain, then, from the plainest maxims of Scripture, that as the Church was to continue near two thousand years at least, before the resurrection, the greater part of the time would be marked by sin and evil abounding within her pale. Else, from the very nature of her spiritual life, she would rapidly have overspread the earth, still abiding in her purity, and the regeneration of the world, ages since, would have been complete.

In the next place, since these wide-spread evils would certainly exist, and as certainly be foreseen, is it reasonable and likely that warnings of them would be given to the Church? And if warnings have been given, which of two expositions, supposing them equally consistent with its terms, is to be preferred-one which confines them to some corner of the Church, to some local heresy soon extinguished, and a few years of time; or