leads him to reveal expressly a great apostasy from the faith in the latter times. The message

is linked with the two last clauses of the previous description. The object of faith was Christ, the true God, received into the incommunicable glory, the sole Mediator, and, with his Father, the true and only object of Divine worship. This mystery, in itself so heavenly, was also believed on in the world. But the world and heavenly truth are apt soon to part company; and hence a foul apostasy would creep in, and a cloud of demon powers "darken the throne of the Almighty." The fact thus revealed is the true and scriptural basis of the Protestant faith. For the protest against separate errors and corruptions, however sustainable on its own grounds, is here summed up in one grand and central doctrine, no less positive and real than the mystery of godliness out of which it flows. The contrast of the two doctrines, in the aspect of the visible Church which they reveal, is real and important. But when we rise higher, and view them in their relation to the Son of God and his eternal counsels, their harmony is not less real and true. The conflict of good and evil which first revealed itself, in its highest form, in the person of our Lord, was to be renewed and continued in the history of the Gospel. Truth and error were once more to struggle and contend; and only by suffering and martyrdom was truth in the Church, as in the person of her Lord, to gain its final victory. The theorem is in the life of the Saviour; the corollary appears in the history

of His followers. One reveals to us that glorious conflict and triumph of Divine goodness, in the person of the Holy One of God, of which the visible Church is the appointed witness, and which forms the Catholic faith. The other sets forth the like conflict in the unholy children of men, of whom the Church itself is composed; till the faithful and protesting witnesses for Christ shall have their number complete, and the remainder of Christ's sufferings shall have been fulfilled in the experience of His chosen people.

Seen in this light, the Protestant faith is only a riper and fuller form of belief in the Gospel. He who has drunk deepest from the waters of salvation, in the mystery of godliness, will recoil with shuddering from the error which turns the visible Church into an idol for our blind worship. He will see in it rather the battle-field of a long conflict, where the light and truth of God have been struggling under the oppression of the powers of darkness. Every step of advance in spiritual discernment will loosen his attachment to the outward forms, while it strengthens his grasp on those inward truths they were designed to convey. In the Epistles of St. John we have a pattern of this law of spiritual experience. The aged apostle, survivor of all the rest, and mature in heavenly wisdom, is made the messenger of no fresh external ordinances, and of no allusion to forms already in being. Standing on the confines of heaven, it is the heavenly truth itself, and not the earthen vessel of ordinances, human or Divine, that attract his gaze,

and which he unfolds to the churches. Neither baptism, nor the supper of the Lord, nor rules of outward worship, much less church architecture and robes of service, altars, or chancels, or crosses, form the subject of his message; but light and love, faith and holiness, the anointing of the Spirit, and the eternal life which is treasured in Christ for His people. Such a ripening faith in the mystery of godliness, when it turns to gaze on the annals, of the Church, cannot fail to discover in it a dark mystery of idolatrous corruption; and all the light it gathers from the history of the Old Testament and from the prophecies of the New, serves only to expand into practical and Protestant fidelity those deep instincts of the spiritual life, which the Catholic faith itself has awakened in the soul.

But this view of the prophetic warnings is not only the natural result of the Catholic faith, received in its true and living power over the heart; it is also the only true philosophy of history, the secret key to the mysterious providence of God. The changes of the world for the last eighteen hundred years are so great and various, the panorama is so diversified with strange and wonderful events, that serious and thoughtful men cannot fail to dwell upon them with intense and lively interest. There will, and must be, many attempts by philosophic minds, to decipher the hieroglyphics and read the inscription. There never, perhaps, was an age when this yearning after an historical philosophy was so deep and powerful as it is now. But without some first

principles to guide us, and some main outline already provided, these attempts will fail. The complexity of events is so great, the mystery of God's counsels lies so deep, and the hindrances to a full and perfect judgment are so various, that those who start, relying simply on their own wisdom, will soon be lost and confounded in so wide a desert. The general maxims of Divine truth are not enough to guide us in such an inquiry. Some further light is needful; or prejudice will taint our deductions, obscure the very maxims on which we rely, and darken our eyes to the true meaning of the events under our view. We shall oscillate, probably, between a servile adulation of primitive antiquity, and a passive adoption of the prejudices of our own day; and in either case the true philosophy of history must be veiled from our eyes.

A simple faith, however, in these sacred warnings, and their true reference to idolatry and other evils within the Church, drives away the thick cloud which else must have rested over the face of Providence. A true and solid philosophy of history will then dawn gradually upon our eyes. The history of the Gospel and the Church now appears in its true light, and becomes a mighty act in that great drama, where good and evil contend together, till the eternal triumph of righteousness and peace at the coming of the Lord.

The first theory which is thus set aside, and one of the most seducing, is the Infidel theory of progress. Man is here viewed as the agent

and source of his own regeneration. The light of science and the growth of intellect are to drain off the miseries and stanch the bleeding wounds of humanity; and without the need of Christian faith, or of Divine interference, an era of light and wisdom is to dawn gradually on the world.

But these warnings teach a different lesson. They remind us that man in his best estate is altogether vanity. They reveal a stubbornness of evil, which no light of grace has hitherto availed to extinguish, and which corrupts the very medicine designed for its cure. They shew us, with the clearest evidence, that evil, and not good, proceeds from the heart of man as its habitual fountain, and that every good and perfect gift must descend from above. They set before us no gradual advance, by quiet steps, of peace and human virtue, but "supernal grace contending with sinfulness of men," in а chequered and unceasing conflict, with many a relapse and many a partial recovery, the whole to issue at the last in a searching and fiery judgment. But while they reprove the falsehood of Infidel hopes, they also reveal a true progress of a different kind; a ceaseless unfolding of that eternal counsel of love, which, in spite of man's rebellion, will at length complete the redemption of our fallen world, and unite heaven and earth in one blessed family for ever.

The same truth is equally fatal to another school of historical thought-the school of sentiment and romance. History is here regarded in