During the appointed time, or till the indignation should be accomplished, popery was to prosper; and at the appointed time when the transgressors came to the full, when idolatry was introduced and sanctioned, and when repeated imperial edicts had been issued from Constantinople, constituting the pope universal bishop, or the head of the church, Mahometanism arose at the time of the end.

In the whole of this prophecy, the events are declared without a figure. It was not a vision, or symbols, which the prophet saw; but the THINGS written in the scripture of truth were shewn.

Hitherto, during the currency of the appointed time in which some of them of understanding were to fall and to be tried, the high and blasphemous pretensions, the assumed and exercised supremacy, the long continued prospering of the pope, and the idolatrous worship of the Romish church, of which he was the head, with some of its accompaniments and consequences, are described by the prophet, as if popery had reigned without any check or chastisement in any part of Christendom. But after he had been constituted universal bishop, while his supremacy over the whole nominal church of Christ was beginning to be consolidated, when idolatry prevailed, and the transgressors had come to the full, a rod in the hand of the Almighty, by reason of transgression, began to smite an apostate church. At the time of the end, as already described, Mahometanism arose; but the form it assumed, and the energies it displayed and exerted against Christendom, are here described in all the simplicity and truth of actual history.

The king of the south, and the king of the north, as denoting the successive sovereigns of Egypt and Syria, necessarily passed away when these kingdoms were broken, and engrossed, as all the prophecies imply, and as history attests, in the Roman empire.

And the same terms cannot denote the same powers, at a time when they no longer existed. But as their designation was derived from the local relation of their kingdoms to Judea, so also in the more recent things that are noted in the same scripture of truth, the same names must be held, in that respect, to retain the same general significancy. And not only is it so, in respect to the Saracenic and Turkish powersthat the one arose on the south, and the other on the north of Judea-but the Saracens became actually masters of Egypt, the original kingdom of the king of the south, and were the first to dispossess the Romans of that country, and long retained possession of it; while to this hour Syria, or the kingdom of the north, is also a province of the Turkish empire. And both, though in a larger sense, have occupied the stations of the former and original kings. With the exception of them, there is none in all past history to whom the appellation of the kings of the south and of the north, in reference to Judea, can, with any propriety, be adapted: While the califs of the Saracens, and the emperors of the Turks, have a clear as well as exclusive right to the name, and have sustained the characters, as they occupy the place, of the kings of the north and of the south, during the period of the time of the end, even as during that appointed time the pope bore all the marks of the king, who did according to his will, and magnified himself above all.

Over some of the kingdoms into which the western empire was divided, the pope, as the head of the church, held, in a great measure, an unchallenged sway. But in Africa, Asia, as well as in

of

Europe, the corruptions of Christianity yielded to the prevalence of an imposture; and a false prophet borrowed from Christ and from Moses the fundamental principle of all religion, the unity of God, and pro

fessed to establish the purity of his worship, freed from all idolatry. There would, indeed, be a chasm in the things noted in the Scripture of truth, and an essential part of the history would have been withheld by the angel, had the state of the east-of Judea, Egypt, and the many countries around, which occupied wholly the first large portion of the prediction,been left a blank for twelve hundred years, as if they had never been rescued from the Roman yoke, nor possessed any peculiar history of their own. there is no such chasm or blank in the prediction. All the things needful for connecting and completing the history to the present hour, are noted; and may be read, as if a Tacitus had been telling the past.

the east.

But

The king of the south shall push at him. The Saracens from the south, united under a king, and rising at once into a mighty kingdom, pushed at him. By them the Roman power was first overthrown in Before their eruption, idolatry prevailed; and a detail of the nature of their warfare, and extent of their conquests, instead of being communicated to any of the prophets of Israel, was reserved for an apostle of Christ to unfold, as will afterwards be seen, under the title of the first woe. It is here described in one word-so descriptive as to be enough to keep the line of prophetic history unbroken. The partial and predatory dominion of the Saracens was to pass away; and to be succeeded by a still more triumphant and overwhelming power, which was to maintain a permanent settlement over a large portion of the Roman empire, and to continue to the close of the appointed time.

Much is comprehended in the one word in which the Saracenic assaults on the territory, and even on the city of Rome, is summed up-and it might well admit of a copious illustration. Like every word spoken by the Lord, it was done. But reserving a

more full description, as most appropriately adapted to the more detailed prediction, we would here leave to Gibbon the unintentional task of illustrating the word. And it will hardly be a tax on the attention of the reader, to observe how the pages of the sceptic teem with responses to the prophet-how incidentally he shows that Christians then looked to the saints for protection-how they were honoured, and their altars enriched with gold and silver and precious things-how such transgressions had come to the full, and idolatry was established in Rome, under the authority of the Pope, when the king of the south pushed at him-how the false and apostate form of papal worship is associated in the same page of history, as well as of prophecy, with the invasion of the Saracens, and how, coming at the time, and executing their appointed work, they neither surpassed their commission, nor came short of their charge.

"The commodious harbour of Palermo was chosen for the seat of the naval and military power of the Saracens. Syracuse preserved, about fifty years, the faith which she had sworn to Christ and to Cæsar. In the last and fatal siege, her citizens displayed some remnant of the spirit which had formerly resisted the powers of Athens and Carthage. They stood above twenty days against the battering rams and catapulta, the mines and tortoises of the besiegers; and the place might have been relieved, if the mariners of the imperial fleet had not been detained at Constantinople, in building a church to the Virgin Mary. The relics were still precious: the plate of the cathedral weighed five thousand pounds of silver, &c. The Arabian squadrons issued from the harbours of Palermo, Bisorta, and Tunis; an hundred and fifty towns of Calabria, and Campania, were attacked and pillaged; nor could the suburbs of Rome be defended, by the name of Cæsars and apostles. Had the Mahometans been united, Italy must have fallen an easy, a glorious accession to the empire of the prophet. But the califs of Bagdad had lost their authority in the west; the Aglabites and Fatimites usurped the provinces of Africa; the emirs of Sicily aspired to independence; and the design of conquest and dominion was degraded to a repetition of predatory inroads.

5

"In the sufferings of prostrate Italy, the name of Rome awakens a solemn and mournful recollection. A fleet of Saracens from the African coast, presumed to enter the mouth of the Tyber, and to approach the city, which even yet in her fallen state, was revered as the metropolis of the Christian world. The gates and ramparts were guarded by a trembling people; but the tombs and temples of St. Peter and St. Paul were left exposed in the suburbs of the Vatican and the Ostian Way. Their invisible sanctity had protected them against the Goths, the Vandals, and the Lombards; but the Arabs disdained both the gospel and the legend; and their rapacious spirit was approved and animated by the precepts of the Koran. The Christian idols were stripped of their costly offerings; a silver altar was torn away from the shrine of St. Peter; and if the bodies or the buildings were left entire, their deliverance must be imputed to the haste rather than the scruples of the Saracens. In their course along the Appian Way, they pillaged Fundi and besieged Gayeta; but they had turned aside from the walls of Rome, and, by their division, the capitol was saved from the yoke of the prophet of Mecca.The siege of Gayeta was raised, and part of the enemy, with their sacrilegious plunder, perished in the waves. But the storm which had been delayed, soon burst upon them with redoubled violence. A fleet of Arabs and Moors, after a short refreshment in the harbours of Sardinia, cast anchor before the mouth of the Tyber, sixteen miles from the city; and their discipline and numbers appeared to threaten, not a transient inroad, but a serious design of conquest and dominion. But the vigilance of Leo had formed an alliance with the vassals of the Greek empire, the free and maritime states of Gayeta, Naples, and Amalis; and in the hour of danger their gallies appeared in the port of Ostia, under the command of Cæsarius.-With his principal companions he was invited to the Lateran palace, and the dexterous pontiff affected to inquire their errand, and to accept with joy and suprise their providential succour. The city bands, in arms, attended their father to Ostia, where he arrived and blessed his generous deliverers. They kissed his feet, and received the communion with martial devotion, &c. The victory inclined to the side of the allies, when it was less gloriously decided in their favour by a sudden tempest, which confounded the skill and courage of the stoutest mariners. The sword and the gibbet reduced the dangerous number of captives; and the remainder was more usefully employed to restore the sacred edifices, which they had attempted to