Horae Apocalypticae, Vol. 2 (Third Edition) (1847)

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Dedication 94' anthron ( 604 ) 208

Papal bulls against heretics 377

Jurien r Vitrigna - France tt

10^th place ( uste ) 416

DEPARTMENT OF

THE HISTORY OF ART

OXFORD

THIS BOOK BELONGED TO

BOB DELAISSÉ

AND WAS GIVEN TO THE LIBRARY

BY HIS FAMILY

Digitized by Google Huston grand resgence from D'antipierre ) 17 ( note

Afterip made at Carlinbay ( Aeschett ' s point etc )

i " venacquer French trans ' ? ( late to ' Romann ' f. 8. Worlds ) '

attitude to Sille in translation England + drame

tubule reduced to 25 years of age ( 146 + 71 )

1 Cor 1 : 30 Centurion u.

A HORAE APOCALYPTICAE;

OR,

A COMMENTARY ON THE APOCALYPSE,

CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL;

INCLUDING ALSO AN EXAMINATION OF THE CHIEF PROPHECIES OF DANIEL.

ILLUSTRATED BY AN APOCALYPTIC CHART, AND ENGRAVINGS FROM MEDALS AND OTHER EXTANT MONUMENTS OF ANTIQUITY.

BY THE REV. E. B. ELLIOTT, A. M. LATE VICAR OF TUXFORD, AND FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

THIRD EDITION, REVISED, CORRECTED, AND IMPROVED;

WITH AN APPENDIX,

CONTAINING, BESIDES OTHER MATTER,

A SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF APOCALYPTIC INTERPRETATION,

AND INDICES.

VOL. II.

SEELEY, BURNSIDE, AND SEELEY; FLEET STREET, LONDON. MDCCCXLVII.

"Blessed is he that readeth and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein : for the time is at hand."

Apoc. i. 3.

"The word of prophecy ; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn." 2 Peter i. 19.

Leonard Seeley Thames Ditton, Surrey.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TO VOL. II.

PART III.

CHAP. PAGE

I. RETROSPECTIVE VIEW OF WESTERN CHRISTENDOM, FROM THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE, UNDER THE SECOND OR TURKISH WOE, TO THE REFORMATION . 1

II. COVENANT ANGEL'S DESCENT FULFILLED IN THE REFORMATION . . . . . . . . . . 39

III. EPOCH OF ANTICHRIST'S TRIUMPH JUST BEFORE THE REFORMATION . . . . . . . . . . 47

IV. § 1. REFORMATION BEGUN IN THE DISCOVERY OF CHRIST THE SAVIOUR : . . . . . . . . . 90

§ 2. REFORMATION ADVANCED IN THE DISCOVERY OF ANTICHRIST THE USURPER . . . . . . . . . 103

V. THE ANGEL'S OATH . . . . .

CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE

IX. THE WITNESSES' ASCENSION 406

X. ENDING OF THE SECOND OR TURKISH WOE 431

APPENDIX.

NO.

I. ON THE WORD Δαίμονου, DEMON, APOC. ix. 20. . 439

II. ON THE CHARGE OF MANICHEISM AGAINST THE PAULI-

KIANS. . . . . . . . . . . . 451

III. LA NOBLA LEYCZON OF THE WALDENSES . . 468

PLATES TO VOL II.

PLATE PAGE

XIV. POPE LEO AS THE LION OF THE TRIBE OF JUDAH - - - - 57

XV. LUTHER AS THE MONK AND THE PREACHER - - - - 170

XVI. THE WALDENSIAN CANDLESTICK - - - - - 362

XVII. HUSS' MARTYRDOM AND PROPHECY - - - - - 404 PART III.

APOC. IX. 20—XI. 14.

THE REFORMATION,

AS OCCURRING UNDER THE LATTER HALF OF THE SIXTH TRUMPET INCLUDING THE ANTECEDENT HISTORY, AND THE DEATH, RESURRECTION, AND ASCENSION OF CHRIST'S TWO WITNESSES.

A. D. 1453-1774.

CHAPTER I.

RETROSPECTIVE VIEW FROM AFTER THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE OF THE PREVIOUS FOUR HUNDRED YEARS' HISTORY OF WESTERN CHRISTENDOM; AND SKETCH OF ITS RELIGIOUS STATE IN THE AERA BETWEEN THAT EVENT AND THE REFORMATION.

" AND the rest of the men, which were not killed by

these plagues, yet repented not of the work of their hands, that they should not worship dæmons,' and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and wood, which can neither see, nor hear, nor walk. Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sor-

VOL. II.

1 δαιμονα.

ceries, nor of their fornications, nor of their thefts." Apoc. ix. 20, 21.

What! would the voice of judgment from heaven be still unheeded? Would that astounding event, the political destruction of the Eastern third of Roman Christendom, by armies bearing onward with them from the Euphrates, the false religion from the pit of the abyss, fail altogether to induce repentance and reformation in the remnant that was left? So indeed it was here declared in the Apocalyptic vision; and, at the same time, a catalogue of the sins of that remnant set in black array before the Evangelist. The representation however was one that would not strike upon his mind with effect so startling, as if no previous intimation had been given of their apostacy from their God and Saviour. Very early, we have seen, (it was after the vision of the 6th Seal, which depicted the overthrow of Paganism,) there had been foreshown to him by a significant figuration on the Apocalyptic temple-scene, the then general abandonment of the Mediator Christ Jesus by the men of Roman Christendom: just as if other intercessors and mediators had been substituted in his place; (for man must have some;)—the first grand step to idolatry. And yet again, in the voice from the four horns of the golden altar, it had been foreshown to him that, up to the time of the loosing of the Euphratean woe, there would have been no return to the Saviour whom they had abandoned, in any of the four quarters of the Roman world,—in its Western division as little as in its Eastern,—no self-application and saving use of His offered means of reconciliation. All this, we may suppose, might in a measure have prepared the Evangelist for what he now heard. And yet, even so, it must have seemed to him an astounding as well as awful announcement. "The rest of the men,"—a phrase including possibly the Christians of the Greek church, who though slain in their corporate political capacity, as the third part of men, still survived as individuals under the yoke of their Turkman conquerors, but doubtless chiefly and specially referring to the men of western Christendom,—" The rest of the men, which were not killed by these plagues, yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship dæmons, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and wood, which can neither see, nor hear, nor walk: neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornications, nor of their thefts."

It is to the men of western Christendom that I shall in the present chapter confine myself, in the explanation of this passage. They constitute that division of the apostacy to which alone almost all that remains of the Apocalypse refers. Compared with the history and fate of her sister in the East, the case of the Western Church, as here represented, resembled that of apostatizing Judah, after the fall of Israel, and indeed before it. In the antitype, as in the type, the treacherous Judah exhibited a guilt yet more unpardonable than that even of the backsliding Israel.1

The announcement is twofold. 1st, It intimates the corruptions that had been in western Christendom during the progress previously of the second woe, up to the fall of the Greek empire; for its asserted non-repentance in respect of them after that catastrophe implies the previous prevalence of the evils unrepented of:—2. It declares the continuance of the same corruptions afterwards. Under each of these divisions it is my duty to show, by historic facts, the truth of the prophecy. And,

1st, The prevalence of these corruptions that had been in Western Christendom throughout the four centuries preceding the fall of Constantinople.

Now considering that the period is a long one through which we are called to trace them, and one of course of many changes, it seems to me that it may be well to preface our review on this head by a brief general view.

of the cotemporaneous history of western Europe. We shall be thus prepared for entering more intelligently into the particular and religious description of it, here distinctively set before us. I the rather give this larger and more general view of it, because the period itself, the "hour, day, month, and year," from A.D. 1057 to 1453, in the course of which the Turkish woe gathered, advanced, receded,—then gathered and advanced again, until at length it fulfilled its destined work of destroying the eastern or Greek empire, was one in many ways worthy of observation in the history of Christendom.

First, it is to be observed that, during this period of four centuries, the kingdoms that formed the constituency of what might now begin to be called the great western confederation of Europe, had been steadily, though slowly and interruptedly, recombining their political elements, consolidating their strength, and ere the xvth century closed in, (up to which epoch I shall just for the present include in my review,) re-adjusting their territorial forms and limits, to some near resemblance of those of the original Gothic kingdoms that emerged out of the ruins of the Roman empire of the west: a form which in the main, I may add, they have retained ever since.—In a series of wars against their Mahommedan conquerors, the Christian remnant in Spain had in the earlier half of the period reconquered the greater part of the peninsula; confining the Moors for a length of time within the straitened limits of the kingdom of Granada: and then at length in the year 1492, under Ferdinand and Isabella, uniting their before divided strength, had conquered and expelled them altogether. In the course of the same period the central Frank or

In the course of the same period the central Frank or French dynasty and kingdom had gradually, one by one, again subordinated to itself the principalities broken off from it in its southern, western, northern, and eastern territory. In similar manner England, after the Norman's conquest of it under William, (Thogrul Beg's cotemporary,) had become united in government throughout its whole length and breadth, and had attached also to its dominions Wales and Ireland.

Thus alike aggrandized, there had begun between France and England that rivalry of above three centuries, which is one of the most marked features of their history in these middle ages; and in the prolonged wars of which, especially under the English Edwards and Henrys, they had, both the one and the other, developed rather than exhausted their national resources. The great elective Germanic empire, so famous under its Henry the Fowler and its Otho of the xth and xith centuries, after a partial diminution of strength and glory through its wars with the Romish bishops and Italian and Swiss republics, in the xiith, xiiith, and xivth centuries, had now at last, under the house of Austria, assumed again an aspect of majesty and strength. It stretched to the east and to the north at this time, so as to include on the one hand the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, and on the other Saxony and Pomerania, even to the Baltic, in its vast circuit. The added strength of the hereditary kingdom of Austria more than compensated to it for what it had lost by the emancipation of Switzerland; and moreover a nominal sovereignty still remained to it, and not a little of real influence, over the Lombard principalities in Northern Italy. Finally, as regards Italy itself,—Italy, the original seat of empire, and which still continued in a most singular manner to be the centre and spring of the European politics, very various in the same chronological interval had been the political phases passing over it. In its northern districts, for the first two centuries and more, the Lombard cities had fulfilled their brilliant course of republican life, and republican factions: and both Pisa, and Genoa, and Venice, had successively or cotemporaneously, triumphed in the Mediterranean, and made their flags eminent in commerce and in war; then one and all, excepting Venice, subsided into small and not independent principalities. To the south, i.e. in Naples, after the meteor-like rise and gradual fall of the chivalric Norman power in the xith and xiiith centuries, the right of sovereignty (still feudatorily however to the Pope, so as under the Norman princes) had come to be alternately claimed and exercised by the royal branches of France and Spain;—the fruitful germ of not far distant wars.

Once more, through central Italy, from sea to sea, the temporal sovereignty—not of the kings, the republic, or the emperors, but of the bishops of Rome, had been about the middle of this period firmly established: so that this division in central Italy was now fully recognized in the European polity as the Ecclesiastical State, or, as it was in part singularly called, the Patrimony of St. Peter.—Amidst all which changes in Italian history, in the course of these four centuries, two results could not but strike the considerate mind that reflected on them; first, the perpetual abortiveness of every scheme to bind the whole country together in one great secular monarchy, like the other European kingdoms; secondly, the sustained ascendancy over the other Italian powers of that of the Roman See.

Thus, I say, had the states of the great European confederations of the west, in a political progression seldom interrupted, been gradually advancing in power; and assuming somewhat of the same form and relative importance that they have borne since. And during their various processes of change and fortune they had, one and all, been advancing also from a state of barbarism to comparative civilization.—Chivalry, during its reign of two centuries, and with the Crusades from A.D. 1100 to A.D. 1300, as its most eminent field of display, had exercised an ameliorating influence of no little power on outward manners. Internal trade, and yet more maritime commerce,—the latter increasing until it might almost be said to have flourished, both to the north, in the German Sea and Baltic, and southward in the Mediterranean, specially with those countries of the east with which the Crusades had early and intimately connected the western merchants,—this commerce, I say, had not only augmented the general opulence of the community, but prepared and led to civil liberty: so that many free towns and cities had come to be established for the benefit of trade; alike in Italy, on the Baltic coast, along the rivers of Germany, in England also, and Spain, and in a measure in France.

And both in England and France, Spain and Germany, feudal servitude, that relic of the Gothic and Frankic conquests, had gradually disappeared before it.

Meantime also the intellectual energies had been awakened from their long comparative slumber. Universities had in the xiith and xiiith centuries risen up in every country, and in every country been thronged with students; at Oxford and Cambridge, Paris and Montpellier, Bologna and Padua, Salamanca and Prague. And although for some long time,—notwithstanding the full course proposed of study in the arts, medicine, jurisprudence, theology,—in consequence of the scholastic philosophy prevailing, it was only the intellectual exercise that profited, and but little real light of science accrued to the associated students; yet at length in the xivth century (a century illustrious as the era of Dante and Petrarch,) a fairer literature, and larger range of study and of thought, opened before them. Yet more in the earlier half of the xvth, after the invention of printing (an invention bearing date A.D. 1440,) and when the scholars of Greece, with their books and their learning, were fleeing westward, in numbers more and more, for refuge from the impending ruin of their empire under the Turkish woe,—with the stores of ancient classic literature thus fully at length set before them, the western literati all eagerly pursued the study of it. Their ardor was that which is natural to the human mind on some new and vast discovery.

Yet once more, throughout the greater part of the period we speak of, religious zeal (if such it may be called) had been a feature in the character of these nations of the West, strongly marked and powerfully acting.

The wars of the Crusades stand prominent on the military page of history, a singular and most remarkable memorial of it. And as memorials of it of a very different kind, but in their way scarcely less remarkable, there rose up those magnificent ecclesiastical structures of the middle ages, that still excite the admiration of the beholder, in England, France, Italy, and Germany. Certainly with those who raised them, religious zeal could not have been lukewarm.

But if it be asked,—and it is to this point that the apocalyptic prophecy, like the rest of the books of inspiration, specially and ever directs the attention,—if it be asked what the character of their religion now was, and whether advances had been made, during the progress of these four centuries, towards the recovery of those truths and of that moral purity of the religion of Jesus, which at their opening, as we have seen, had been so greatly lost,—the answer is altogether unsatisfactory. Notwithstanding the advance in the various kingdoms of the West towards political power, civil liberty, wealth, civilization,—notwithstanding the development of intellectual energy, the acquirements in literature, and widespread religious, or rather superstitious zeal, there is the indubitable testimony of the most authentic records of those middle ages to the fact, that the religion prevalent was the grossest superstition; and that it was accompanied by a grievous corruption of morals, as well as darkness of religious truth. Nor do I see how the whole could be better characterized than by that brief descriptive clause in the prediction before us, which speaks of the men that were not slain by the second woe, as worshipping demons, and idols of gold and silver and brass and stone and wood; and of their fornications also, and sorceries, and thefts, and murders.—Let us now, in respect of each of these points, examine and verify by historic fact.

And first as to the character of the religious worship prevalent through this long middle age, up to the time of the fall of Constantinople. It is described, in the opening clause of the verses before us, as that of "damons, and of idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and wood."—In which statement it is the word damons that first demands notice. And used as the term was in St. John's time, in the current literature of the Roman world, to signify those fictions of men's fancy, the heathen gods, and adopted as that use of it had been in the Holy Scriptures,—at the same time that the more frequent New Testament application of it to the spirits that possessed demoniacs suggested the fearful fact of living malignant spirits acting, though unsuspected, in the heathen system,—I say, since such was the double use of the term in the apostle's time, what could be reasonably infer from the declaration here made but this;—that there would have prevailed through the times referred to, and been established in the professing but apostatized Church of Western Christendom, a system of demonolatry, the counterpart (albeit under the Christian name) of that of heathen Greece or Rome:—a fact for which (as already observed) the early Apocalyptic notice of the abandonment of Christ's mediatorship and propitiation would have prepared him. More particularly that it would be one in which imaginary beings would be the objects worshipped, and for the most part the spirits of dead men deified; that they would be characterized in their worshippers' fancy by about as much, or as little, of moral virtue as the gods of the heathen heaven before them; that they would be supposed to fulfil to their suppliants, just like the latter, the offices of mediators and guardian-spirits; that thus, false as it was and antichristian, the system would as truly be an emanation from hell as its precursor, and one in which malignant hellish spirits would as truly be the suggesters, actors, and deceivers.—Such, I say, would, as it seems to me, appear to be the intent of the predictive clause under discussion, construed according to the recognized scriptural meanings of the word daemon.1 And of the fulfilment of the prophetic declaration, thus far, what well-informed Protestant is ignorant?

The Decrees of the 7th General Council (a Council already some time since noticed by us,2 as authorizing and establishing the worship of the saints and their images,3) were fully in force throughout the period I speak of: and by necessity more and more superseded all spiritual worship of the one God, through the one Mediator Jesus Christ. The parallel between the deified dead men of heathenism and these deified dead men of apostate Christendom, especially as believed in and worshipped through this middle age, held in respect of character, (flagitious character,4) and offices, as well as of origin.—Nor must I omit to notice the similarity of worship, as in neither case confined to the abstractions of mental contemplation, but offered through the medium (as the prophecy further added, and as was sure to follow,) of visible images,5 or on the similar variety, in respect of material and value, in the idols of either system, and the consequent adaptation of the Christian, as of the Pagan idolatry, to the circumstances of every rank in society.

"Idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and wood." The fact in this point, as in every other, answered precisely to the prophecy. And thus houses as well as churches,-the street-corners and the highways,—the cabins of the poor and the palaces of the rich,—had severally their images of suitable material : and before them, through the times spoken of, high and low, rich and poor, laics and ecclesiastics, did all, in contempt of God's command, just as their pagan forefathers, alike bow down and worship.

If, in connection with this its superstition and idolatry, the morals meanwhile of western Europe be enquired of, the answer is given in another emphatic word that we find in the predictive statement before us; which tells of "their fornications."—He who is at all acquainted with the history of the middle ages, must be aware of the wide-spread licentiousness then prevailing, most of all with the clergy. Historians and poets, ballads and acts of councils, alike testify to the fact. Nor let it be unobserved, as being perhaps meant to be intimated by the juxta-position and intimate association of the words in the prophetic clause, that this licentiousness was not only the accompaniment, but the effect, of the dæmon-worshipping superstition prevalent. It was in many ways,—I might indeed almost say in every way,—that immorality and vice were fostered by it.

The notions entertained of the character of some even of the most eminent of the saints worshipped, just as of those of the heathen deities in ancient times, acted as an incentive, rather than preventive, to sins of impurity. 1 The system of indulgences (one formed on the notion of their saints' supererogatory merits,) according to which sins of this class might at a very cheap rate be atoned for and pardoned, confirmed men in the light notions prevailing of their guilt and evil. 2 The very pilgrimages to one and another of their saints' shrines, that were enjoined so frequently in the middle ages, as one kind of penance for sin and means to its remission, being enjoined to multitudes of both sexes at the same time and to the same place, were notoriously the occasion of immorality

In culpam si quae est ingeniosa suam.

Cum steterit Jovis aede, Jovis succurret in aede

Quam multas matres fecerit ille Deus.

Proxima adoranti Junonia templa subibit

Pellicibus multis hanc doluisse deam : &c.

on the largest scale.1 The compulsory celibacy of the clergy, a rule enforced under the strongest penalties throughout the Romish church, from the time of Gregory VII, downward, as also that of the monks and nuns, involved, as it was sure to do, the depravation, both among and around them, alike of the outward morals and of the heart:2 not to add the fact of the regular episcopal licensing of fornication among the priesthood, already noted with reference to an earlier age;3 and which continued through these four centuries,4 indeed, it will appear, still later.5 And the practice of auricular confession,—a practice recommended and fostered, as we have seen,6 by the Popes from early times, but which was for the first time authoritatively enjoined as an integral and necessary part of the Romish religion, in the 4th Lateran Council, A.D. 1215,—that "damnable system of the confessional," as it has been called in its late exposure,7—I say this practice of auricular confession, besides its other appalling evils, made the tainting of the female mind an integral part of Romish priestcraft, and gave consecration to the communings of impurity.8

If it be asked, again, how a system of religion could be admitted and believed in, so monstrous and so opposed, not to the spirit of the Bible only, but even to the moral sense of the natural conscience, we may remind the reader, first, that the religion of the Bible was then almost unknown: next, that the complacency of the natural corruption in a religion in many ways so suited to it, was sure with the larger number to dull the moral sense, and still the misgivings of conscience.—But, besides this, he who would understand the general credence yielded to it, must never forget the lying sorceries with which, as here also preintimated, the priests in those dark ages supported it.

Just as in every country where heathen idolatry has been established, the priesthood have, alike in ancient and in modern times, had their magical deceits, wherewith to work on the credulity of a superstitious people, so it was in those middle ages with the priests of the Romish church; even as also since, indeed, in proportion as the ignorance prevailing might allow of the practice. Who that is acquainted with its history, knows not of the impostures through which miracles were, through all this long period, assumed to have been wrought, whether by the priests themselves directly, or yet more by the relics or images of saints, the priest's puppets:2—images "which could neither see, nor hear, nor walk;" but which were yet asserted, and believed, to be possest of human senses,3 and to exercise the power of making the lame to walk, restoring sight to the blind, and hearing to the deaf?4 Who knows not of the pretended but lying visions related by priests of what was passing in purgatory; and of the asserted effect of the masses, prayers, and indulgences, purchased for their relief, on the souls suffering in it?

"It must not be supposed," says Mr. Hallam, "that these absurdities were produced by ignorance. In most cases they were the work of deliberate imposture." They were the φρα-μακειαι, the sorceries, whereby to stupify and to charm, specified both here and elsewhere in the Apocalypse, as one of the deadly unrepented sins of Papal Rome:—that great city which is spiritually called Egypt and Babylon; and which was indeed, though under a christian name, the very representative in this respect, as well as others, of heathen Egypt, and heathen Babylon before it.

But wherefore did the priesthood and the monks, the bishops and the popes, thus with one consent deceive? Another of the characteristic words in the clause we are considering, points out the master-motive; "They repented not of their thefts."—No doubt ambition and pride operated with most in the ecclesiastical higher stations, indeed with more than the high ones in the priesthood; and again, with many a dark blind superstition: but the love of money, that root of all evil, operated with all. Hence the value fraudulently assigned to relics: of which (just as in the time of Gregory I, and even before it,) the demand and the supply were incessant through the dark ages in western Christendom! 5 Hence the exaltation of this and that saint's miracle-working merit, in order to draw deluded votaries to make their pecuniary offerings at the shrine; and the canonization of new saints, and dedication of new images, when the interest of the old was worn out.1—Hence the invention and sale of indulgences, first by the bishops, alike to clergy and people; afterwards, in the 12th century, by the popes as a papal monopoly: through the which indulgences, in virtue of a sufficient money-payment, not the temporal penance only, due to sin, but even the eternal punishment was now declared to be remitted.2—Hence the prescription of pilgrimages, as an act of penance, to

shrines of smaller note, or greater, and to be performed on a larger scale or less, individually or in multitudes; 1 above all, of pilgrimage to Rome, on the gigantic scale of the Jubilee. The which latter institution, first invented and promulgated by Pope Boniface VIII, in the year 1300, as in lieu of crusades to Jerusalem, 2 was responded to eagerly by all western Europe; the enactment being that each 100th year, and afterwards each 50th and each 33rd, in virtue of a pilgrimage to Rome, and visitation of its churches, every sin was to be cancelled to the pilgrim, and his salvation ensured. 3 Hence the

FIRST YEAR.

£

S.

d.

NEXT YEAR.

£

S.

d.

Christ's altar

Christ's altar

Virgin Mary's

Virgin Mary's

Becket's

Becket's

2 Ferrario (ii. 433) says that Boniface borrowed his idea from the centenary secular festivals of ancient heathen Rome : also that the Jubilean pilgrims "chiamansi Romei, in quanto vanno à Roma."

3 The venality of Rome is early celebrated. So in the 10th century by Arnulph, bishop of Orleans; who calls Rome, "a venal city, which weighs all its decrees by the quantity of money." This was at a time preceding the 400 years under review.—And from after the commencement of the Jubilees, in consequence of priestly appeals to the people of Christendom, and of their superstitious veneration of the spot, "the Vatican and the capitol were," as Gibbon says, (xii.262,) "nourished by incessant and increasing swarms of pilgrims and supplicants." The Jubilee was indeed a happy contrivance, to ensure a vast periodical increase of a supply already habituated to flow to it.

Of the Jubilee of 1300, Muratori relates the result as follows : " Papa innumerabilem pecuniam ab iisdem recepit; quia die et nocte duo clerici stabant ad altare Sancti Pauli, tenentes in eorum manibus rastellos, rastellantes pecuniam infinitam." Hallam ii. 322.

Of the Jubilee next following, that of 1350, Matt. Villani says; "The concourse was such, that between Christmas and Easter there were 1,200,000 foreigners at Rome: the places of those who returned home being supplied by new comers. Between Ascension and Whitsunday there were 800,000 more: and notwithstanding the heat of the summer, there was scarce a day during the season but 200,000 foreigners were seen at Rome." Life of Rienzi, p. 167.

(It was in his Bull appointing this Jubilee of 1350, that Clement VI, in reference to pilgrims who might die on their journey to Rome, used the blasphemous language; " We absolutely command the angels, that they place his soul in paraassurance to the dying man of forgiveness and salvation, in case of testamentary bequests to the church or monastery.1 Hence, after his death, the tales to surviving relatives of the efficacy of masses for the dead, and of indulgences bought by survivors, to free the soul from purgatory.2—To which might be added, within the church itself, the long-established system of the sale and purchase of ecclesiastical dignities from Rome:3 and the episcopal licences of fornication, regularly granted to the priesthood century after century, as we have seen, at a money-price.4—But indeed on this subject, having once begun, where shall we end?5

There is yet another heavy charge against Western Christendom, during " the hour, and day, and month, and year," in the predictive verse before us;the charge of murders.

Need I explain to the reader, how exactly this answers also to the facts of the ecclesiastical history of Western Europe during the latter half of these four centuries? He will be aware, no doubt, how from early in the 12th century a few, congregationally or individually, began to teach more openly, what had never indeed been altogether untestified, a purer doctrine:—a doctrine derived not from priestly legends, or from the schools, not from the decrees of Popes or Councils, or from any books of human literature, but from a book, now all but forgotten, if not unknown, not by the laity only, but by most too both of monks and of the clergy,—the Book of the Holy Scriptures. The moral excellence and innocency of these Waldenses is, for the most part, confessed even by their enemies. And with written authority for their doctrines so unquestionable, with the internal evidence of its own excellence confirming, and the innocency of their lives recommending it,—it might surely have been hoped, that not the general attention only, but the general favour, would have been conciliated towards it and them; the partial opening and almost re-discovery to the French laity of the Book of God hailed with joy; and a foundation laid, in its knowledge and study, for a real and general amelioration of morals. Instead of this, what read we? The Book itself was quickly denounced by Pope and priesthood, and partially suppressed. And against them the cry of heretics was raised; and their extermination forthwith, and long after, urged as one of the most meritorious of religious duties.

First, in the 3rd Lateran Council A.D.1179, anathema was declared against certain dissentients and heretics of cognate character; then against the Waldenses themselves, in papal Bulls of the years 1183,1207,1208. Again, in a decree of the 4th Lateran Council, held A.D.1215,a Crusade,as it was called, was proclaimed against them; and "plenary absolution promised, to such as should perish in the holy war, of all sins committed from the day of their birth to that of their death."

"And never," says Sismondi,1 "had the cross been taken up with more unanimous consent;" and never, we may add, was the merciless spirit of murder exhibited more awfully in all its horrors.—It was accompanied and followed by the Inquisition: an institution assignable to Dominic, or rather Gregory IX,2 as its earthly author, but evidently and originally the invention of hell: that horrid tribunal which carried on its inquest after heresy unseen, but with the power of the secular arm, the Princes of the West, supporting it,3 into all the individualities and privacies of domestic life.—The same spirit was manifested on the attempts at a revival of religion in England, from 1360 to 1380, by Wicliff; and in Bohemia, some thirty or forty years after, on its revival by Huss and Jerome.4 Thus, during the latter half of the four centuries that we speak of, whether under the name of Petrobrussians, Catharists, Waldenses, Albigenses, Wicliffites, Lollards, Hussites, Bohemians, not dissentient heretics only, but disciples of Christ the most genuine, if dissentient from the Romish Church, were marked out as sheep for the slaughter. Popes and councils, priests and people, the secular powers and the spiritual, all united in the war-cry: and racks and gibbets, fire and sword, were deemed the fit weapons to use against them. Murder was one in the black catalogue of the sins, during this period, of Papal Christendom.

Such were the prominent characteristics of what was then called religion in Western Europe: and so did idolatry mark it, together with sorceries, fornications, thefts, murders, as its concomitants,—just as described in this brief but most significant predictive clause,—through the " hour, day, month, and year," up to the fall of the Greek empire.

The devotees to chivalry and romance, indeed, would paint these middle ages as the ages of faith :1 and the lovers alike of mysticism and of ritualism as periods of the illumination and perfection of the Church.2 But the religion contemplated by the majority of such describers, is obviously the imaginative and the external; not that which the Bible alone recognizes of heart-cleansing practical godliness.

And the generalising inductive process by which some, from a series of carefully-selected extracts out of the voluminous scholastic and mystic writers, with more or less of moral beauty in them, and more or less of religious truth, would infer such a religion as the spirit of the age, carries its own refutation with it.1 On this point appeal must be made to the facts of history. And these are as directly against them, as they accord in every iota with the wonderful predictive statement now before us.2

II. Nor, as the prophecy further intimated, did the terror of the fall of Constantinople induce either reformation or repentance. Of these not a sign is discoverable in the acts or history either of the ruling powers or body corporate of Western Christendom. Rather there is to be perceived, in respect of each sin here reprobated, fresh authorization and fresh addition.

Thus as regards the established dæmonolatry.—It was in 1460 that the Dominican Alain de la Roche, in hyper-duleia of the Virgin Mary, revived in the christian world the use of the Rosary first invented by Dominic: the mechanical devotion of which, with its 15 bead-told decads of Aves and Pater-Nosters intermingling,

embraced alike by high and low, laics and ecclesiastics, became soon the rage in Christendom; and, consecrated by Papal sanction still continues.

It was in 1476 that Pope Sixtus the IVth, in support of the same favourite branch of dæmonolatry, gave sanction to an annual festival in honour of the Virgin's immaculate conception; condemning and excommunicating its impugners:—a dogma this not only palpably false, absurd, and unscriptural, but which had hitherto, since first it was agitated, some 300 years before, by the Franciscans, been left even by Popes and Councils, undetermined. Further the system of canonization was still continued, and, by mere Papal fiat, new διαμονία added to the old. For example, in 1460 the enthusiast Catharine of Sienna was canonized by Pope Pius II; in 1482 Bonaventura, the blasphemer, by Sixtus IV; and in 1494, by Alexander VI, the more respectable name of Archbishop Anselm. Alexander's Bull, in language more heathen than christian, avows it to be the Pope's duty thus to

choose out, and to hold up the illustrious dead, as their merits claim, for adoration and worship.

Again, with the increasing dæmonolatry, both sorceries and thefts increased also. Rosaries were for sale; and blasphemous visions and lying miracles were, with the most solemn asseverations, urged by Alain and his fraternity in promotion of the sale. 2 Indulgences invited the devout to the celebration of the immaculate conception; the rites of which were to bring gains, as usual, to the priests that celebrated them, and rob the poor worshipper. Each act of canonization was a recognition of the new saint's miracle-working, whereby to draw devotees and offerings to the local shrine. Nor did Rome accord the canonization without first itself receiving payment. 3 In similar consideration for himself and his capital, (Pope II,) (Pope from 1464 to 1471,) reduced the jubilee cycle for pilgrimages to Rome to a period of twenty-five years; thereby accelerating the return of that absurd but most lucrative ceremony. 4 For those who could not go on pilgrimages to the saints' shrines, relics were farmed, and indulgences also, all through this half-century; and the country overrun by the hawkers that farmed them. 5 With the latter, as the 16th century opened, the name of Tetzel is infamously associated; (of whom more a little later:) and, connected as this was with the legends invented and preached to promote the sale, it may be considered as the crowning example at this epoch of the union of thefts and sorceries in the Papal system.

Meanwhile impurity had advanced also; chiefly among the priesthood. The Popes led the way. So Innocent VIII, elected in 1484 to be the Holy Father of Christendom: whose character is told in the well-known allusive epigram.2 So Alexander VI, his successor: who at the close of the 15th century stood before the world a monster, notorious to all, of impurity, as of every other vice.3 Rome throughout copied his example. "Most of the ecclesiastics," says the historian Infessura, "had their mistresses; and all the convents of the capital were houses of ill fame." And as at Rome, so in the provinces. In many places the priests paid the bishop a tax for the woman with whom he lived, and for every child he had by her: (so established and unblushing was the custom, now of above six centuries' duration:) and Erasmus tells of a German bishop publicly declaring, at a grand entertainment, that 11,000 priests had come to him for that purpose.4— Could the confessional but add to the mischief?

1 The leprosy affected Christendom.

Finally there was a notable persistence in the murders of Christ's saints. Of insulated cases I will notice only that of the Dominican Savanarola; an enthusiast, but one of the wisest and worthiest of the age; who, on preaching at Florence against the vices of Rome, and predicting, what his soul longed for, an approaching theocracy under the Lord Jesus, in place of the then corrupt government, was in 1498 seized by the Papal emissaries, and burnt at the stake.—More early in the half-century, and on a scale of magnitude such as to force the world's attention to them, anti-heretical crusades had been proclaimed and carried on. The Bohemians and Waldenses were the victims. Against the former, Paul the 2nd urged the crusade. Elected Pope himself in the year 1464, because as a Venetian he seemed the fittest of the Cardinals to direct the energies of Christendom against its dreaded foe the Turks, he actually diverted the Hungarian King from warring against them to warring against these Bohemian Hussites; and promised him the crown of Bohemia as his guerdon. Fiercely, but in this case vainly, the war raged seven years. Then the old policy was resorted to, to conquer by dividing. The Calixtines, the less decided and spiritual of the dissentients, were incited against the Taborites, the more spiritual: which latter had already, indeed, since the year 1457, formed a distinct church, under the name of the United Brethren. And the civil persecution thus arising proved to this little remnant more bitter and more murderous, than all they had suffered in common with the rest from external war.3 In the war against the Waldenses of Piedmont, in the years 1477 and 1488, by Popes Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII, the same spirit presided.

Having commented on the heresies of the Vaudois, Pope Innocent commanded all archbishops, bishops, and vicars to obey his inquisitor, and engage the people to take up arms, with a view to so holy and necessary an extermination; granting indulgences to all that would make the crusade against them, and authority to apply to their own use whatever property they might seize. It was then that 18,000 regular troops burst upon the vallies. And had not a feeling of compunction visited the sovereign, Philip of Savoy, the work of destruction would probably have been complete. 1 —Then too was accomplished the actual extirpation of the Christians of Val Louise in the High Dauphiny. "Having retired," says the historian, "into the caverns of the highest mountains, the French king's lieutenant commanded a great quantity of wood to be laid at the entrance of those caverns, to burn or smoke them out. And some were slain in attempting to escape. Some threw themselves headlong on the rocks below: some were smothered. There were afterwards found within the caverns 400 infants stifled in the arms of their dead mothers. It is believed that 3000 persons perished in all on that occasion in the valley." 2 —May not the blood well curdle at a recital of such atrocities?

Once more, it was in 1478 that that reform, as it was called, of the Inquisition took place, the Pope and King of Spain combining in the arrangement, whereby it was rendered an instrument of persecution and murder far more perfect than before. In the first year alone 2000 were burnt as victims. These furnished to it its preliation of blood. Each year others followed. It is Llorente's computation from official documents, that from this its reorganization to the commencement of the Reformation in 1517, there were 13,000 persons burnt by it for heresy, besides 8700 burnt in effigy, and 169,000 condemned to penances.

What it was prepared to do, with the torture and the stake, on the outbreak of the Reformation, who knows not?

Thus have we historic proof in respect of the latter half of the 15th century, following the fall of Constantinople, as well as in respect of the four centuries that preceded it, of the fulfilment of every particular in the prophetic statement before us. "The rest of the men, who were not killed by these plagues, yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and wood: neither repented they of their sorceries, nor of their fornications, nor of their thefts, nor of their murders."

And so the 15th century closed in. Wretched, I may say hopelessly wretched,—seemed the state of the Church at that epoch: hopeless to the reflective and philanthropic statesman or ecclesiastic; hopeless almost to the real Christian. And more especially for this reason: because it was not the mere fact of the present existence of moral and religious corruption that met the eye in the gloomy prospect,—grievous though this was, and such as to force confession from every quarter: but there was the fearful superadded fact, also, that remedies such as human wisdom could suggest, had, during the long period of the accumulation of these corruptions, been tried one after another, and failed; yea, the Christian might think within himself, and the efforts also of really christian reformists, his brethren before him.

Indeed the fact of the trial and failure of these various remedies seems to me so important to the right appreciation of the hopelessness of things at the epoch before the Reformation, that I cannot feel it right to conclude this historical chapter without a brief notice of them. I speak particularly of those remedies which, before the face of Christendom, human policy had suggested and tried for the amelioration of the corruptions of the Church; in so far as they affected, that which alone human policy concerns itself with, the well-being of the social system.

It is to be remembered then that at the commencement of the four and a half centuries we have been reviewing, the prestige had already begun to pass away from the minds of the more intelligent, under which Charlemagne and his successors in the kingdoms of the West, had considered it their policy to accord political power, and privileges almost indefinitely great, alike to the priesthood and hierarchy of their respective states, and to the Bishops of Rome; as if the best and only means of softening and civilizing the minds of the semi-barbarous population under their sway.1 Proud, ambitious, idle, covetous, it had come to be understood that the great object with both the priesthood in general, and with the hierarchy heading them, was not the religious improvement of the community, but their own aggrandizement. Moreover the morals of these ecclesiastics were seen to be as corrupt, for the most part, or even more so, than of those whom they should have reformed.

And thus the cry had now risen up against them, and it waxed louder and louder through the 12th century, as constituting almost the chief cause, instead of the chief cure, of the prevalent immorality and irreligion. 1

It was when this impression was rife and strong, (being early in the 13th century,) and when the ecclesiastical power, and even Papacy itself, might seem to have been jeoparded by it, that there arose the two mendicant orders of monks, the Dominicans and Franciscans; acknowledging, as if to meet the emergency of the case, the general corruption of the clergy, asserting that their wealth had caused their corruption, and issuing forth from Rome themselves bound by a vow of poverty, as the heaven-sent reformers of Christendom. The revival of preaching by them, a portion of the ministerial office almost abandoned at this time by the established clergy, was well suited to increase the hope and expectation of good from their mission. It was possible, men thought, that what the Franciscans declared might be true; and that they were the fulfilment of the presfigurative vision of the Apocalyptic angel, that flew abroad having the everlasting Gospel to preach to every nation under heaven. For near two centuries did the popular enthusiasm, in every country of the West, set in towards these mendicant Friars, as well as the Papal favor. The parochial clergy complained in vain of the neglect now continually shown to their order, and the desertion of their ministrations. The confidence of the public rested on the mendicant Friars, as alone exhibiting to the world an image of primitive simplicity and self-denial, alone acting out moreover the part of evangelists, and consequently as alone the true ministers of Jesus Christ.

1 At length however it was seen, and Wicliff most of all men helped forward the conviction, that covetousness might lurk even under the guise of poverty, 2 ambition under that of humility. The lying fables and ridiculous superstitions, that formed the subject matter of their preaching, were unmasked; their intellectual emptiness and frivolity, their hatred of learning, their quarrelsomeness, proselytism of the ignorant youth, 3 and, against those whom they deemed heretics, their bigot cruelty. The result of their influence and preaching was seen to be anything rather than the reformation of the community. In England the reaction was such that their very name became offensive, and warrants were issued for their arrest. 4 But to rid themselves of this more recent evil proved to the men of Christendom as difficult as deliverance from the old. 5 The Pope, the supreme Head of Christendom, was found to be their patron; as indeed of almost all the corruptions under which it laboured. And against the Pope who could contend?

Then were the eyes of all that wished for an amelioration of things directed to a General Council as the panacæa;1 a Council not such as former ones, mere mouthpieces of the Popes, but free and independent. The cry for it waxed louder and louder during the celebrated 40 or rather 50 years' schism, from 1377 to 1429: when rival Popes were anathematizing each other from Rome, from Avignon, or from Sicily; and the scandal of such a disunion in the visible Church was palpable and offensive. So the memorable Council of Constance was assembled A.D. 1414: and, with a view to the necessary power for remedying the evils in the church and Christendom, the great principle was asserted, that Popes themselves were inferior in authority, and subject to, a General Council. But as to any real moral or religious reformation from it, the expectations so highly, so universally raised, ended, like those before, in disappointment.2 In the matter of Huss and Jerome, (to which I have had occasion already to allude,) the Council exhibited itself as the ready copartner with Popes and clergy, in acts of falsehood, treachery, and oppression the most infamous. The reformation of the Church attempted by it proved to be insufficient, and only external. And even in respect of this, the new Pope, almost as soon as elected, found means of thwarting its intentions, and showing its impotency. Yet more in the subsequent General Councils of Ferrara and Florence, held about the middle of the 15th century, the very principle of the subordination of Popes to Councils, from which so much had been hoped, was formally renounced. The Council of Basle indeed reasserted it, but was at last worsted in the struggle by the Popes. Æneas Sylvius, its most celebrated advocate, having been made Pope, issued his own solemn Bull in retractation of it.3 The secular powers, wearied with the ineffectual struggle, showed themselves less and less careful for the most part to reassert it.

As the 15th century drew towards a close, the old clerical dogma had manifestly risen into reascendancy, that the Pope, as in God's place on earth, could not err, and by earthly powers might not be controlled.

There remained yet one remedy, and from which the more intellectual spirits of the 15th century hoped highly; I mean the light of literature, which had now at length broken on the long intellectual night preceding; and which the cotemporaneous invention of printing, and flight of the Greek literati, with their literary treasures into the kingdoms of Western Europe, had combined, as was before said, to accelerate. Nor indeed was its effect on the established religion and the church small or unimportant. From Dante in its earliest and dim twilight, to Erasmus, two centuries after, at the day-dawn, the effect was more and more to expose, in the light of common sense and intellectual truth, alike the corrupt morals of the clergy, and the absurdity and falsehood of much of the long-received system of superstition. And it was not merely the laity that felt the influence. By the higher and more educated of the ecclesiastics it was felt also; especially in Italy, that cradle of the new-born classic literature of Europe. But in what spirit? And to what practical result? Was it so as to induce a purer faith, and an abandonment of the superstitions and corruptions thus exposed to view? Far from it. The faith of the gospel of Jesus, classic literature professed not to teach, nor indeed itself knew. This lay hid in the Bible; a book still little known, and where known by the mere classic enthusiast, despised. Literature without the Bible could make infidels; it could not make Christians. And thus it did with them. As to the superstitions established, false as they were now felt to be, the selfish interests involved in their retention with the clergy, and with the laity the penalties of heresy, forbade their abandonment.

Nor did the new philosophy make objection. It professed not the martyr's spirit; nor had it any more the wish than the power to arouse the conscience, or turn the heart to repentance. Thus the superstitions of the Romish apostacy were in outward rite and form persisted in as before: while the current conversational language, and even the writings of high ecclesiastics evidenced their unbelief in them; and the fashion arose to give them, as much as possible, a classic and a heathen turn. Instead of reforming the church, the effect on the great mass of the priesthood, ministering in it, of this boasted march of literature and intellect, was only to add to their other corruptions a more unblushing profaneness and hypocrisy.—Above all, this was the case at Rome. The character that has been given of the last Pope of the 15th century, was in a measure applicable also to the literary cardinals and hierarchy of Rome gathered round him. It was an atheist priesthood; and its hypocrisy deliberate, systematic, avowed, and unblushing, before the face of God and man.

Such was the approved futility and failure of each human scheme and effort at amelioration of the corruptions of the church;—amelioration of them, I mean, in so far as they shocked the public mind, and palpably

affected the public weal.

As the 16th century opened, there were still many proficients in literature, indeed, that looked for a change, though a change they knew not what, as the result of the literary and intellectual development in progress. Nor had the hopes from an independent Council been altogether abandoned. In fact a council with this pretension had gathered just at this time at Pisa; disavowed by the Pope and the rest of Christendom, but with a few cardinals and the French king supporting it. Its feebleness was however manifest. The hopes that centered round it were but the shadows of what, a century before, had attended and watched around the gathering at Constance.—On the whole, the evils of the church seemed to be beyond the reach of human remedial policy or power. And with many of the more reflective, doubtless, the suspicion had arisen that the disease must needs be deeper seated, as well as the remedy more powerful and searching, than any yet suggested.—In effect such was the very case. It was apostacy from their God and Saviour that constituted the essence of the disease that had so long afflicted Christendom. And remedy there could be none, but the republication of his own gospel of grace, and with the power of his own Spirit accompanying it.

Nor let it be forgotten, finally, though this is not the place to dwell on it, that some there had been, and were, that understood this truth of the case, both as regarded the disease and the remedy; some the off-scouring perhaps of men, but the beloved of God:—the same that had been prefigured in vision as the mystic 144,000, "called, and chosen, and faithful," which would as a body remain indestructible before Him:1 most of them being indeed only God's secret ones: but some, bolder and more discerning, his witnesses, in an apostate world; and with a view imprest on and testified by them, respecting the existing corruptions, precisely similar to that which is here exprest by their representative St. John. Of these last many and earnest had been the efforts (as I have already just hinted, and must in my chapter on the Witnesses notice yet again) to make the gospel of the grace of the Lord Jesus known among men.

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