emblem of Christ's person and the Holy Spirit's office the peregrinations in the wilderness was the emblem of the church's pilgrim-life; the coming into Caanan, and settlement there, the emblem of the rest which remaineth for the people of God; and the kingdom of David and Solomon the emblem of the kingdom of Christ, for which we are continually praying. The mystery of the elect church having thus been completed in the emblem, the pattern of the heavenly things having been given; and I may say, the great orrery of the invisible or spiritual heavens having been completed; it was necessary to break it in pieces and grind it to powder, preserving only the book in which it was written, and such vestiges and proofs of antiquity as would verify it to all posterity. For already they were beginning to worship the visible device; that is, the Levitical and the national emblem which God had constituted for them: and therefore, in his wrath, the Lord resolved to break it in pieces, as Moses did the tables of the Law and Hezekiah the brazen serpent. This breaking in pieces of the church under the oppression of her enemies, constitutes the mystery of her humiliation; which began, as I said, to be the subject of open and distinct prophecy in the days of Isaiah, and Hosea, and Amos, and other Prophets;-of open and distinct accomplishment, in the days of the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel; and hath continued accomplishing itself until this day, and shall continue until the coming of the Lord; as Daniel and all the Prophets, from Isaiah unto Malachi, do with one consent declare. Not that the work of teaching by emblems hath not been proceeding all this while, seeing all providence is

but a preparation and an emblem of Christ's advent and kingdom: for the breaking of Babylon's power, and the deliverance of certain ones by Cyrus, was the emblem of the breaking the power of the spiritual Babylon which oppresseth us Gentiles, and the deliverance thence of as many as will go up with our Great Priest and Tirshatha. Also, the birth, and circumcision, and subjection of Christ; his baptism, temptation, and ministry, and death, and burial, and resurrection, and present session in the heavens, are used by the Apostles, not only as the fulfilment of former emblems and prophecies, but also as being itself a great emblem and prophecy of the Christian life and spiritual church in general, and of the experience of every saint in particular: and, to say it all in one word, Christ was the great Prophet of himself; his first advent the unblown bud which wraps up the mystery and beauty of his second advent. He sympathized with the humility of the Jewish church, and the Gentile church sympathized with his humility; and so Jew and Gentile are brought together into the same bonds: and consequently do and can appropriate the same language of present woefulness and future hopefulness.

Now, to return to the beginning of the church's oppression in the days of the prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, I observe that it is laid down. by the last of these prophets, under four successions of bestial dominion, (by Zechariah under the name of the four carpenters), which four beasts have the same origin, and are of the same brutal character; being of one spirit, the spirit of tyrannical and oppressive government, pure oppression, stern cruelty, unsophisticated power

and violence; such as you see the Jews subjected to until this day. But under the last of the four, Daniel saw a power of quite another characterthat little horn which had eyes like a man to circumvent withal, and a mouth speaking great things to deceive the saints of the Most High, assuming the god, and enacting the god, far above the beast: whereas, the others stamped with their feet, or tore with their mouth, or otherwise expressed the natural ferocity which is in them. Under these two diverse spirits of oppression, Daniel saw the church was to suffer until the time of the kingdom of the saints of the Most High, when the Son of Man should possess the kingdom. The second spirit grew out of the last of the former succession, and overswayed his brutal violence to the ends of spiritual circumvention and deception. Now, brethren, I say, that the former of these, that is, natural power, the lust of dominion, the delight of oppression, or the spirit of brute force, under the feet of which the church lay trampled down in the first of the spirits of the text; namely, that out of the mouth of the dragon; and the second, which succeeded to it, and claimed the supernatural, and, with the pretence of the supernatural,-wrought its work of circumventing and deceiving; in plain speech, the spirit of papal blasphemy, that is, the spirit out of the mouth of the false prophet: and for the third, we shall find it without much difficulty. But let me first identify these two with the dragon and the false prophet.

The church had already endured three, in the succession of brutal oppressors, and was passing under the iron feet of the fourth, or Roman, and had felt the beginnings of its terrible trampling

in the destruction of Jerusalem, at the time our seer had this revelation of things to come; and the same emblem given by Daniel, of ten horns, is preserved in the Apocalypse, with the addition of seven heads for greater expressiveness, and more manifold application, and of a tail with which he draweth the third part of the stars of heaven; his heads and horns of strength being in Rome, his tail of heresy and falsehood, sweeping down the ministers of the eastern church. But his chief work is to persecute the woman ready to be delivered of the child which is to rule all nations with a rod of iron, whom, when he cannot devour, he doth persecute the mother which bore him, and endeavour to carry her away with a flood of peoples and nations, which he poured out of his mouth; but this also failing, through the protection of the Lord over the mother church, and her help by the imperial earth, he is content to resign his work, and yield up his place and authority to a certain beast with similar emblems, which cometh out of the sea. Now, this beast turns out to be the same open-mouthed blasphemer and oppressor of the saints, with the same allotted period of forty-two months, as that little horn of Daniel; and he is holpen in his work all the while in close confederacy by another beast, who, like the false prophets of Egypt for Pharoah, doth for it many miracles, to help on the mystery of their mutual wickedness. Of these two confederates, the latter is the divining head, the power and will, while the former is but, as it were, the instrument of its activity; and they compose between them, so long as they act in concert, but one spirit, which in our text is the spirit out of the mouth of the false prophet. But when

the forty and two months of their confederacy is ended, we find them set forth in a very different, and indeed a quite opposite relation to one another; the one using his ten horns to destroy the other, ch. xvii. The false and mighty prophet is now become a drunken harlot, and the beast hath lost the crowns from off his horns, and blasphemeth not with his mouth, but with all his body, being inscribed with it all over, an incarnation and incorporation of blasphemy, which, with his ten horns doth hate the whore, and make her desolate and naked, and eat her flesh and burn her with fire. Therefore, at the end of the appointed confederacy between the false prophet, and the beast which the false prophet overruleth, yea and rideth upon, the beast comes to have quite a new spirit, hateful of the whore, and destructive of her; which spirit of destroying the Papacy, coming into manifestation at the conclusion of the forty-two weeks, is the spirit out of the mouth of the beast, namely, as I shall shew hereafter, the spirit of infidelity, radicalism, and liberality, which, for thirty years after the French Revolution, did devastate the Papacy, and is now rising again to massacre and destroy it utterly.

Such is our idea of the three spirits mentioned in the text; namely, first, the autocratic and self-willed spirit of absolute power, which mocks the Father's sovereignty; secondly, the Papal mystery of iniquity, which assumes the threefold office of Christ, as our Prophet, Priest, and King; and, thirdly, the infidel spirit of the human intellect, levelling all distinctions, which commits the sin against the Holy Spirit, in rejecting his testimony of the Father and the Son,