which he lost 50,000 men,* killed, wounded, or prisoners, decided the fate of Napoleon.

Meanwhile the time had passed in which British troops retired before the French in the swamps of Flanders, or the fields of Spain, or sickened and died amidst the marshes of Walcheren, or were pent up in the lines of Torres Vedras on the coast of Portugal. From that spot the British army now advanced triumphantly to the eastern borders of Spain; and France, not Britain, was invaded. On one side of that now fated kingdom the British descended the Pyrenees, and on the other the allies passed the Rhine. Within the space of eighteen months the French were in Moscow, and the Russians in Paris; the soldiers of the allies were quartered in the capital of France, and the Cossacks bivouacked in the Champs Elysées. Bonaparte abdicated; and, with the title of emperor, the island of Elba was assigned and occupied as the portion of the man whose ambition before was not bounded by Europe.

But the hero of a hundred battles had yet reserved for him the reign of a hundred days. That reign terminated, and his empire ceased, with the battle of Waterloo. And even in title, or in name, he was no longer an emperor. At first he came, a youth of unknown name, from an island in the Mediterranean; and, at last, transported like a felon, under the name of general, common to thousands, "he died a prisoner on a rock in the Atlantic." His his tory, of itself, is instructive-and how should it teem with wisdom, while, looking from the sources of the Bormida, where the first steps of his conquests were taken, to the tomb in St. Helena, where his body was interred, there is seen in all his history a palpable illustration of the word of God, who ruleth over the

By some accounts, 100,000.

kingdoms of the earth, and giveth them to whomsoever he will!

any

The third vial began with the first triumphs of Bonaparte; and the fourth closes with the close of his empire. A few verses sum up his history. And, united in his person, the third and fourth vials are not less intimately connected, or less clearly consecutive, even to contact, than of the antecedent prophecies that follow in their order. And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus: for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink, for they are worthy. And I heard another angel out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments. And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues :: and they repented not to give him glory.

He who loveth God loves his brother also; but while the fiercest passions were at work, men fearlessly blasphemed the name of God. To swear like a dragoon, a trooper, or a tar, became proverbial expressions. Such, at least, was not the spirit by which men were actuated on the former grand moral revolution in Europe,-even though the Reformation was followed by wars. And neither the civil wars and subsequent commonwealth" in Britain, nor our glorious Revolution, were marked by such a brand of blasphemy. But when religious restraints as well as superstitious fears were dissipated by the revolution of France, execrations, almost at every word, gave free

66

vent to the practical infidelity of the hardened hearts of men; devotional feelings gave way together with the softer affections of humanity; and none were ever more unmindful of the glory of the God of heaven, than those who executed those judgments or partook of those plagues. The general irreligious character or utter ungodliness of the time, is too manifest as well as too melancholy an illustration. It is not alone in such a death as that of Lasnes, duke of Montebello,-who falling in the battle of Asperne, replied with angry imprecations, when told that his wound was mortal, and “blasphemed heaven and earth that he should be denied to see the end of the campaign," that we may see exhibited the maddened spirit of the times: but blasphemy-the soldier's licence and the sufferer's resource-was rife on earth, as if Europe had been a province of pandemonium. And as touching the not repenting to give God glory, may it not be asked, even in our own land,-where the light of the gospel is so widely diffused, and where our forefathers, in days of peril, assembled in the dens and in the caves to worship, and would have sacrificed their lives rather than forfeit their religious liberty,-how many families, called Christian, are there still in which the worship of God is not, how many parishes in which, as a practice beyond a mere form of hearing on the sabbath, it is scarcely known; and though happily now less rare than at the close of the revolutionary and imperial wars of France, which began with the open renunciation of the belief of a God, do not illustrations yet abound, by thousands on thousands, from the want alike of true godliness and righteousness, that men repented not to give him glory?

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE FIFTH VIAL.

On the sounding of the fifth trumpet, (Rev. ix. 2.) the bottomless pit was opened; and there arose a smoke out of the pit as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. Mahometanism arose; and the world was darkened by its doctrines, as well as punished by the arms of the Saracens. But, while also noting the darkened state of the minds of men, the fifth vial limits the description of the gross darkness conjoined with bitter miseries, peculiarly characteristic of the specific period, to the kingdom of the beast, or the dominions over which the papacy, on its re-establishment, still held its sway. And the state of that kingdom is described as full of darkness, and marked also by misery, blasphemy, and impenitence, without the designation or intervention of any external cause.

And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds, Rev. xvi. 10, 11.

Looking to change after change, and marking the succeeding forms of the time, in almanack notoriety and manifest evidence, we thus read in the chronology of remarkable events, in the year 1814;-The allied grand armies cross the Rhine.-The French defeated at Toulouse; Bourdeaux entered by the British; the French evacuate Spain, and King Ferdinand restored. The allied armies enter Paris.Bonaparte deposed.-The Bourbons restored, and a

general peace concluded.-The French evacuate Italy, Germany, and Flanders, and return within their ancient territory. The king of Spain dissolves the Cortes, abrogates the new constitution, and all the laws favourable to the liberty of the subject: REVIVES THE INQUISITION and the order of the Jesuits. -THE POPE RE-ESTABLISHED IN HIS DOMINIONS. *

In the beginning of the year 1812, when the Emperor Napoleon had under his immediate command or "entire control," armies amounting to one million, one hundred and eighty-seven thousand men, and when the Bourbons were in exile, Ferdinand in captivity, and the pope a prisoner, the wildest speculatist could not have dreamt, that, in 1814, the Bourbons would be restored, Ferdinand reinstated in his kingdom, and the pope re-established in his dominions. Yet though, immediately before, it had no existence but in name, and the imperial power of Bonaparte domineered over all, no sooner had that power ceased, than the kingdom of the beast reassumed its place in history, as it was the very next word in prophecy. And the dark and miserable state of the papal kingdoms, or wherever the domination of the papacy prevailed, is the precise and limited theme of the predic

tion.

Previously to the downfall of Napoleon, the state of Europe was that of uniform subjection to the one unvaried "Continental system." But after his fall, a marked contrast may be drawn between Protestant and Catholic states. There was peace externally over both. The high hand of the Holy Alliance was stretched over Europe to check international wars, and insurrectionary movements. Over Roman Catholic kingdoms, popery was again associated with despotism. And there peculiarly, as the dark record of their fate gives proof, we are taught to look for

Edinburgh Almanack, 1818, &c. p. 32.