of communion most ecstatic and endearing-of ministry most beneficial and God-honouring-of knowledge most clear and profound-of love, humility, peace and, in a word, of all the fulness of God,-crowd upon the mind, while we gaze upon and look for that glorious city.

And God hath prepared it for pilgrims; for those who are by rich grace dissociated from earth and attached to heaven; for those who walk with God and witness for God, whose citizenship is in heaven, whose hopes enter there, who by faith go as royal priests into the holiest; for them it is prepared. There God will own them, and become their inheritance, in conscious possession and enjoyment; he will be known as their God. (Rev. iii. 12; xxi. 7; xxii. 3-5.) Having come to the heavenly Jerusalem, they will also come to the Judge of all-their Justifier and Father through and in Christ Jesus. Thus will they be at the fountainhead of joy, and will possess the infinite. The glory which they rejoiced in hope of, will then be possessed. The pilgrim will be at home-at rest in God.

There are pilgrims now travelling home to this blessed rest, and these glorious prospects and blessed hopes should have a powerful influence upon them. Right thoughts of a blessed futurity will promote perseverance, and strengthen patience, and increase devotedness. Such were the effects produced upon patriarchal pilgrims, by their communion with things invisible and future, through faith in God's words; and we are called to be "imitators of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises." Let us closely study the character of those early pilgrims, endeavour to get encouragement from God's gracious dealings with them, and seek grace to follow them in their walk with God and their unworldly spirit. Their preferences, their perseverance, their power with God in prayer, their protest against surrounding evil, so well seconded by their separateness from it, are all worthy of our constant study and closest imitation. Let us endeavour to think of this life as a training time for a high and glorious destiny, and never stop short of "the prize of our high calling." Let us study truth diligently in order to make attainments in heavenly-mindedness. Let us testify to all around as we have opportunity, and ever trust God to make good his promises by the way, and at the end. Then, should we, like the patriarchs, be gathered to our fathers, we shall, like them, "die in faith," or, when the King of the heavenly city shall come in glory, we shall be "gathered together unto him."

When all these hopes shall be realised when sin, sorrow, change, death, and imperfection, shall be things gone by, and

when the inheritance of the heavenly country shall be entered on, what a glorious unfolding will there be of God's character! Then will the boundlessness of his resources be revealed, and the pilgrims of time be joint-heirs with Christ of the eternal riches of paternal Deity. There will be infinity to study, and an eternity to study it in. Let us think much of his character now, as revealed in his holy Word, treasure in our inmost souls "the glorious glad tidings of the blessed God," and "rejoice in hope of his glory."

ART. V. THE SIXTH SEAL AND THE TIMES OF

CONSTANTINE.

To Mr Elliott's view of the opening of the Sixth Seal there lies fatal objection in the character of that seal. "There was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood: . . . . And the heaven departed as a scroll," &c.

These expressions must be taken literally, or metaphorically. Mr Elliott refers them to the revolution under Constantine, considering an earthquake to denote a revolution, the sun the civil, the moon the ecclesiastical authority.

Was there any revolution?

We do not call the restoration of the Stuarts or the Bourbons a revolution. A revolution must be from internal causes. The mere march of a foreign army through a realm, paying for all it takes, keeping strict discipline, and meeting no opposition, cannot be deemed a revolution or an earthquake.

What are the facts? Maxentius, the Pope of Rome, having also, like his rightful and legitimate successor, the present Pope, command of an Italian army, excommunicated the Emperor of Britain, who stood in the same relation to him as Louis Napoleon to Pope Pius at present, save only that the Italian army was more numerous than Mastai Ferretti's. But the Emperor of Britain was at the head of a population at least partially Christianised, another part Orientalised, and of legions who had been filled up partly with Christians, partly with worshippers of Isis, and was himself a member of the Basilidian or masonic confederacy, extended through the empire, who taught that outward creeds were indifferent to the initi

ated, and was powerfully supported by his officers, many of whom were Orientals, who had been sent here to keep them out of harm's way, and many Britons, who burned for vengeance on them. On receipt of the excommunication, he marched upon Rome. The total force of Constantine did not exceed seventy-five thousand officers and men. Had the populace seemed even averse, at least half that force would have been required to keep open his communications with his base of operations. No opposition was offered, save by the Roman regulars. The people, heathen as they were, looked calmly at his march. The authorities retained their position, simply swearing allegiance to Imperator Constantinus, instead of Pontifex Maxentius. Three millions of Roman citizens, amongst whom not a professing Christian remained, defended as they were by impregnable ramparts, occupying within these ramparts stone houses and temples, impossible to storm and difficult to break, and supported by eighty millions of professing idolaters outside, stood perfectly neutral, and saw their regular army defeated under their own eyes by the British troops; compelled the survivors, who within the ramparts might have held their own, to recognise the conqueror, and at once elected Constantine Commander-in-chief of the west, Pope of Rome, and High Priest of Venus. What difference was there between Constantine, Philip, and Alexander Severus, all alike unbaptized men, and sworn worshippers of the Virgin Queen? No one was punished, none displaced, none plundered. The new Pope declared that Armenians, Egyptians, Chaldees, Jews, and Christians all worshipped the same God under different names, and therefore licensed Christianity, not as the truth, but as an admissible mode of stating truth, when enforced by seventy-five thousand machæres,— attaching himself, however, as was natural, to that section which, denying the Godhead of our Lord, approached more nearly to his own mystic creed, just as an infidel pope might now declare Irvingism, Swedenborgianism, and Mormonism, licensed creeds and sects of the Church, if they would but recognise his ecclesiastial supremacy.

The establishment, as it is called, of Christianity, was merely the triumph of a British army, composed for the most part of ungodly men, in many cases of infidels, in some of avowed idolaters mingled with, we may hope, zealous and devoted Christians, who sought to free their faith from idolatry, and their race from Roman subjugation, over an opposite army composed of the Italian worshippers of Jupiter, and the German devotees of Odin; no guerilla war, no rally followed;

no revolts, no sieges, no popular reclamation; idolatry was still practised and paid by the state; idolaters still held office; idolatrous priests were still paid out of Christian taxation—the only difference being, that the formerly proscribed worshippers of Astarte, queen of heaven, the persecuted Therapeute of Egypt, the votaries of Maia, were now liberated from danger and induced to ally themselves with nominal Christians for protection against any reaction in favour of the Dacian or northern party in the state. Nothing was asked, except as to baptism, a rite practised, but with different meaning, by the votaries of Venus, of Mithra, and of Christ.

No change was ever effected with so little violence, nor is there reason to believe that the mass of Italian or Spanish people ever conformed to or knew anything about Christianity at all in its true sense or spirit. The wealthier classes, already Basilidian, called themselves Christians without any change of opinion, much less of heart; they were simply philosophic masons, whose rule binds them to conform to the established creed of the country where they dwell. Christianity must be brought into a country. Its first growth is never spontaneous, nor does it ever spring up without foreign aid where it has been totally rooted out. Yet we read of no British missionaries, no converted Jews; on the contrary, we find that the Britons carried back such a horror of the Roman Catholic creed, that they refused communion with its members, and made the performance of Italian chants and the use of the tonsure outward and visible signs of heaven against Welsh nationality.

If the usual symbolical interpretation be right, that the sun means the sovereign, and the moon the ecclesiastical power, the statement would fail equally, for Constantine himself was the sun, and assuredly the ecclesiastical power suffered no injury from him, whether that power was Christian or Pagan.

Above all, however, how comes it that all the Christians of that day (for there were Christians to be found yet)—thought this a day of deliverance, whilst even in pagan and philosophical writers, we find no trace of fear, suffering, anxiety, or complaint, yet the apostle expressly describes the sixth seal as the day of the Lamb's wrath? How was his wrath shewn in the triumph of British over Italian soldiery, and without spilling a drop of civilian blood?

The real strength of Mr Elliott's theory rests on the assumption that the Roman Beast, from the bottomless pit, arises after the breaking of the seventh seal, and, therefore, the seventh seal must have been broken. Could this be proved, we should

feel it alike difficult to admit or to deny his conclusions. But this view is contradicted both by Scripture and facts. We have before shewn that Julius Cæsar had become high priest of the Chaldean virgin worship, as well as supreme pontiff, and that the formal adoption of the Babylonian Mother of Harlots by Rome as her palladium, and formation of the college by whom the pontiff was chosen of seventy-two cardinals in her service, dates back to the days of Scipio. Since Cæsar's days, the pontificate of the Virgin has altered in nothing, except the Pope's military command, now strictly limited to the Roman states; his ecclesiastical and civil authority extend (Britain excepted) wherever Roman horsemen rode, or Roman rescripts ruled; his laws, his worship, are unaltered, save by the admixture of a few legends to please the conquering Lombards, Franks, and Goths. Neither does the Apocalypse, rightly examined, state the rise of Babylon to occur after the seventh seal. On the contrary, the apostle sees her in a supplementary vision, quite distinct from all the rest, in which he is told that she was the great city which then reigned over the kings of the earth, and which should continue the focus of Virgin-worship of the female Messiah, the murderess of the saints, till the very end. The beast, the false Messiah, Julius Cæsar, who pretended to be the incarnate Son of God, had fallen before the apostles' day; but the angel clearly intimates that the beast should revive in a future foe, pretending to be the sent of God; at all events, that he, not the woman herself, but the beast instigated by the woman, should slay God's two witnesses, and then that the time of trouble and the hail from the north should begin. Can any one compare the sixth seal, the seventh trumpet, the seventh vial, without seeing that they describe, the first, the whole-the second, the close-the third, the winding up, of the same period? Place them in contact, and let the most unlearned decide whether the seventh seal usher not in the Sabbath of rest; God's purposes being completed, and a short work made at the very commencement of that seal, the earthquake winding up the sixth seal, the sixth trumpet, and the seventh seal early on the seventh day.

If the fearful language of the sixth seal imply no more than one or two battles between comparatively small armies, fought mechanically, "sans acharnement," and costing comparatively little life; if the great day of the Lamb's wrath, poured out on the world, was, after all, something far less terrible than the campaigns of Marlborough and far more limited in its extent, and result, or the Seven Years' War, or resulted in procuring the partial toleration of real Christianity for the space of seventy