dred corruption of doctrine. If abominations were practised unblushingly in France, in the close of the eighteenth century, which heathens would have hid, they, at least, had never been instructed in the virtue of indulgences or the power of absolution, or the purchaseable and transferable merits of saints, or that money could be paid during life, or after death, for the ransom of a soul from any place of trial or of torment. The moral taint remained after the cause that produced it was gone. The love of unrighteousness ceased not with the belief of a lie. Once men had been taught to think light of sin by its redemption at an easy price; conscience did not recover its power, when reason exposed the fooleries of superstition. Belief in the gospel ceased together with faith in the church; and even the belief of a God, "the birth-right of man," shared the fate of the profane dogmas with which it was associated, and freed from moral restraints as well as from superstitious fears, men sinned remorselessly, without the licence of a priest. Woes had come upon apostate Christendom, and wars had succeeded but still men repented not of the works of their hands, nor of their idolatries, neither of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. The Roman Catholic body-politic was morally corrupted to the core. The peccant and pestiferous humours spread throughout the frame. No ointment on the skin could touch the malady. "Why," as unto backsliding Israel, it might be said, "why should ye be stricken any more? Ye will revolt more and more. whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores; they have not been closed nor bound up, neither mollified with ointment."

The

The church of Rome "could explain nothing,

soften nothing, renounce nothing, consistently with her assertion of infallibility." It could not reform; the evil grew till it could grow no more; and revolution was both the natural consequence and the only remedy. In a diseased body, when inflammatory action runs high, and the malady approaches its crisis, gentle palliatives would have no efficacy, and external applications so strong as to touch the disease, might occasion a fatal revulsion; but, seizing on the most vitiated organ, a single grievous sore, bursting from the body itself, may, though threatening death, be the only cure. Such was the first of the seven last plagues. It came not from without, in the form of a foreign enemy, as, on the first of the trumpets, the hail and fire fell upon the earth; but this was the token of the vial being poured upon the earth, there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. It arose within the Roman Catholic kingdoms of Europe, and was seated and concentrated, at first, where the corruption was the rankest.

No power of reason could prevail against the rack, the gibbet, and the pile. Neither could any meekness of wisdom melt the heart of an inquisitor. Nor is the butchery-work of human slaughter the calling of Christians, the weapons of whose warfare are not carnal. Other agents were prepared for the execution of the judgment, so soon as it began to sit. "Religion cannot exist where immorality generally prevails." Infidelity was generated in the moral corruption, which was the issue of papal domination; the blackness of popery was turned into the paleness of death; and infidelity needed only to assume an active form, to fall as a grievous and noisome sore upon the men that had the mark of the beast, and ирon them that worshipped his image, and to kill with

sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. The term revolution implies the taking away of the dominion from those who possessed it. Till then the natural alliance had subsisted unchallenged in all Roman Catholic kingdoms, between despotic power and papal supremacy. But the revolutionary spirit of the times was specially and simultaneously directed against kings and priests. Down with both was the general rallying cry. Freedom of thought was the order of the day; liberty and equality were the doctrines of the revolution. No sentiments could be more abhorrent to the spirit of popery, or more completely subversive of all its principles. Neither was its yoke to be borne, nor its exaltation to subsist any longer. Ridicule was a weapon which superstition could not withstand. The thunders of the Vatican were the scoff of the sceptics. The rights of man supplanted the infallibility of the church. Men sinned openly against high heaven, and sought not absolution. The charm of purchased pardons was broken when men were hardened in unbelief through the deceitfulness of sin; a seared conscience spurned all palliatives, and sought no cure; and, when once the judgments of men, after long thraldom, were exercised again, the mummeries of Catholicism could not abide the light of reason, though it was otherwise misguided. Whenever the mental yoke was thus cast away, and no power of religion remained to restrain, vengeance was unsparingly executed on the priesthood, and on all the adherents of their falling cause. And the first vial of wrath was freely poured out.

Of the horrors of the French Revolution it were needless to write. It is enough to say, that the blood of the saints began to be avenged. France had for ages yielded the neck to the papal yoke, and lent its aid to bind it on other nations; but never, even under

the dictation of the Abbot of Citeaux, did the counts, or knights, and soldiers of France exercise more atrocious cruelties against the saints of the Most High, than those of which churchmen and loyalists were then the victims. Tithes were abolished; monasteries suppressed; church lands confiscated; the priests despoiled and beggared;* and, at a time when every other form of faith was tolerated, and atheism itself esteemed rather a virtue than a vice, and religious liberty proclaimed, the clergy of France were required to abjure all allegiance to the see of Rome, and that church was "deprived of its earthly power," or, the dominion. forcibly taken from its hands. Even the benefits which France derived from the Revolution, are associated with the record of the miseries of the priests.

"We might add," says Sir Walter Scott," to the weight of benefits which France unquestionably owes to the Constituent Assembly, that they restored liberty of conscience by establishing universal toleration. But against this benefit must be set the violent imposition of the constitutional oath upon the catholic clergy, which led afterwards to such horrible massacres of innocent and revered victims, murdered in defiance of those rules of toleration, which, rather in scorn of religion of any kind than regard to men's consciences, the Assembly had previously adopted.+ The National Assembly was victorious at once over altar amd throne, mitre and coronet, kings, nobles, and clergy. According to the sentiments which they had avowed, they were in their hands as clay in that of the potter, to be used or thrown away at pleasure. The state of the expatriated French clergy, driven from their home, and deprived of their means of subsistence, because they refused an oath imposed contrary to their ecclesiastical vows, and to their conscience, added religious zeal to the general interest excited by the spectacle, yet NEW TO EUROPE, of thousands of nobility and clergy compelled to forsake their country, and take refuge among aliens."

A war of extermination had been waged in France, against the witnesses of Jesus; and there was no

* Life of Nap. vol. i. p. 30. + lb. pp. 227, 254. Ib. p. 289.

place of refuge within its boundaries, for those who had not the mark of the beast and disowned the spiritual supremacy of Rome. But the time was now come when the recognition, even by the priests, of the authority of the pope, was a crime which led to poverty and expatriation. An attempt to save the recusant priests from judicial banishment, was more than the worth of the crown or the life of the king of France.

"A decree was passed by the Assembly, that such priests as might be convicted of a refusal to subscribe the oath to the civil Constitution should be liable to deportation. This was a point of conscience with Louis. On the decree against the priests, his resolution continued unmoved and immoveable. Thus religion, which had for half a century been so slightly regarded in France, at length interposed her influence in deciding the fute of the king and the kingdom." "*

That a noisome and grievous sore fell upon the men that had the mark of the beast, and upon them that worshipped his image, is a fact too notorious to bear any question, and was too awfully demonstrated, as the fearful recollection of living millions may attest, to stand in need of illustration. Yet that we may not altogether leave a chasm in prophetic history, even where the most awful lessons were given to the world, of the death-like character of infidelity, of the righteous avenging of the blood of the saints, and of the ruin which the papacy brought upon itself, by fostering a serpent while crushing a lamb, a few notes may be taken of that evil time, to show how grievous was the sore, and how bitter a thing it proved, that men had departed from the living God, whenever an apostate church began at last to reap the ripened fruit of its doings and of its doctrines. It was not for infidelity to replace the barrier which

* Life of Napoleon, vol. i. pp. 320, 321.