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lation of every Christian precept of justice, humanity, conjugal fidelity. He was lustful, cruel, treacherous, arbitrary. But throughout this contest there is no remonstrance whatever from Primate or Pope against his disobedience to the laws of God, only to those of the Church. Becket might, indeed, if he had retained his full and acknowledged religious power, have rebuked the vices, protected the subjects, interceded for the victims of the King's unbridled passions. It must be acknowledged by all that he did not take the wisest course to secure this which might have been beneficent influence. But as to what appears, if the King would have consented to allow the Churchmen to despise all law-if he had not insisted on hanging priests guilty of homicide as freely as laymen, he might have gone on unreproved in his career of ambition; he might unrebuked have seduced or ravished the wives and daughters of his nobles; extorted without remonstrance of the clergy any revenue from his subjects, if he had kept his hands from the treasures of the Church. Henry's real tyranny was not (would it in any case have been?) the object of the Churchman's censure, oppugnancy, or resistance. The cruel and ambitious and rapacious King would doubtless have lived unexcommunicated, and died with plenary absolution.'-vol. iii., pp. 525–528.

These are fine sentiments, expressed in free and bold writing. With them we must close our extracts from these volumes, which we hope many of our readers will study for themselves. They are an important and highly valuable contribution to a department of our literature which has not yet been sufficiently elaborated, and we hope they may prove but the precursor of many similar productions. Dean Milman intends to continue the work to the Pontificate of Nicholas V., that is, to the middle of the 15th century. As this brings the history to the period immediately preceding the Reformation, we presume the learned author would make the latter event the subject of a distinct work. May he live to accomplish such an object, and to complete, in recording the details of the great European awakening, the design which he commenced many years ago in his History of the Jews. It may be well to remind our readers that Dr. Milman has before published three volumes, which are introductory to those now under our notice, distinguished by the same qualities of accurate inquiry, liberal sentiment, and graphic writing.i

But for what historian is reserved the history of the Romish Church, as it will appear in its completeness to those who in far distant centuries shall look back upon it as having been but gone for ever? To the disciples of the school of modern expounders of prophecy this question will appear to admit of an easy reply, since the fate of Rome is presumed by them to be clearly defined

i The History of Christianity, from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire.' In three vols. 8vo. London, Murray. 1840, VOL. VII.-NO. XIII.

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in Holy Writ, and to be near at hand. Already, in their view, the mystery of iniquity is tottering to its ruin, and those elements are seething and boiling which are to destroy the city on the seven hills, and to create a catastrophe greater than the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, the smoke of which is to ascend up for ever and ever! That the evil deeds of the papacy are specifically described in prophecy; that their limits are determined; and that a physical destruction of fire and brimstone is to be the awful punishment of centuries of corruption, are axiomatic deductions in the theology of a large number of Christian people, the belief of which is orthodoxy, but the doubting of them its ill-favoured and much-dreaded opposite. We have already alluded to our own view as not harmonising with that now mentioned, and the subject is important enough to deserve a few further remarks from us.

We are willing to concede that no language is too strong to express the crimes of the Romish Church for many centuriescrimes which increase in depth of colouring as ages have rolled away, and which would seem to have attained their confirmed and darkest dye under the bright beams of modern light and civilisation. As we recede backward in history many extenuating circumstances present themselves which modern Roman Catholicism can by no means lay claim to, and we are compelled to look at a priest of this communion now officiating among our population as a far more responsible and therefore, with our convictions, a more guilty man, than those who bore the same office in the tenth century. We look upon the system now as bad altogether, and cannot but desire its utter overthrow; nor are the tendencies of taste and learning which make us view the ages of the past with much interest and reverence, at all able to blind us to the utter sinfulness of the papacy, and the guilt of its supporters and promoters. We wish explicitly and ex animo to state this, partly from our regard to religious truth, and partly because of the strong prejudices of the prophetic party just now referred to. We know well that to say a word in favour of Rome, at any period of its history, is to subject ourselves to the charge of being either infidels or Romanisers, but we indignantly deny both counts of the indictment. We will yield to no class of our fellow Christians in our zeal for scriptural truth on the one hand, nor in our entire repugnancy to the theory and practice of the Romish Church on the other.

But surely it does not follow that a hatred of Rome necessarily entails with it a scheme of Biblical interpretation, or is indissolubly identified with some stereotyped form of criticism. Because we cannot think that the grand object for which Italian volcanoes

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exist is that they may soon belch out their pent-up flames and destroy THE CITY, does it follow that we approve of its blasphemies, or symbolise with its untruthful and unscriptural dogmas? Yet this is precisely the reasoning of a class of men who intrude themselves into matters not revealed to man, and presumptuously attach meanings of their own imaginations to the darkly mysterious pages of Holy Writ. In spite of the declarations of the Bible, which prohibit a prying into the times and the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power, these men rush in where angels fear to tread,' and pronounce, as with the clearness of actual vision, what is to take place in the latter days, not in the general terms employed by ancient seers, but with a particularity of application to existing systems. Hence there is no part of printed theology more utterly unsound than that plentiful portion of it based upon the Apocalypse; no speculations of a religious kind more calculated to excite a blush on the face of a believer, and make the infidel sarcastic, than those of the prophetic school. We need only refer to the abundant interpretations of the number of the beast, to their incongruousness, their utter discrepancy, and their entire failure, in proof of our assertion. The comments on that passage in the Revelation are indeed an instructive, though melancholy, portion of pretended scriptural exegesis, and will probably be viewed in future ages as yielding in crude reasoning and wild fanaticism to nothing in the whole history of the human mind.

There is something monstrously uncritical in the idea of a physical destruction of the papacy; but there is also an anility about it, a childish want of thought and largeness of view. Let us suppose for a moment that hidden fires should overthrow in a night the whole Roman states: would that at all prostrate Popery, or lessen its influence as a religious system upon the nations of the earth? If we could make all papists read events with the eyes and minds of these prophetic expounders, then indeed we might hope for an end to be put at last to a system of iniquity. But nothing is easier than to interpret providential dispensations according to our own subjective notions, and we can imagine we hear the zealous papist, on the sight of the supposed calamity, thanking God that he had by such means crippled the political power of the Holy Catholic Church, only to make its spiritual domination more real and more extended. 'Too long,' might the English Romanist say, 'has the Church been shorn of its glory by the decrepit sway of a political pontiff; too long have we been taunted all over the world with the dependence of the Pope on heretical governments, and his inability to take the place of a mighty monarch among the kings of the earth. God, in his

great care of us, and our Lord, in the fulfilment of his promises, have interfered and rolled away this reproach, never to return. The last remnants of pagan Rome are now swept away, but the Church of St. Peter still lives, destined to renew its youth by being brought nearer to its pristine poverty, and to exert a mental rule by the destruction of that which was of the earth, earthy.' Let any one seriously ask himself in what way the professors of the Romish faith, all over the world, would be affected by Rome being delivered to the burning; let him answer the question in the light of a knowledge of human nature and of past history, and we are much mistaken if he does not see that, without a miracle, such an event would, to say the least, be quite as likely to advance as to retard the spread of popery.

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The whole history of the Church for eighteen centuries is a practical reproof of this morbid attempt to give a date and a definite subject to unfulfilled predictions. Speculations of this character commenced in apostolic times, and yet the failures of centuries seem to teach no lessons of wisdom to this age, which with greater eagerness than perhaps any former one pries into the mysteries of the dim and dusky future. With death at the door of each of us, ready at any moment, unknown to us, to dismiss us to our everlasting destiny, it does seem strange that so much thought and energy should be given to matters in which we can have little personal concern, or which, even if they were to be realised in our day, would interest us far less than our own certain prostration before the king of terrors.' Then surely there are sins and follies enough in the very purest bodies of Christians to employ all spare energies in the work of reformation, without this concentration of blame, and we fear, in many cases, malignant censure of the Church of Rome. If Christ has borne with her sins so long, without stirring up his wrath or exchanging his peaceful character of the atoning lamb for that of the lion of the tribe

kNow we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.'-2 Thess. ii. 1, 2.

'Nobody, not even the Apostles, so far as their writings allow us to judge of their progress, was able to elevate himself to the height of Christ's great prophetic mind and words, so as to believe that the kingdom of God, announced by Christ as near at hand, could appear upon this wretched and sinful earth without the previous physical destruction of our globe. The world as it existed was believed to be about to perish by fire, as a former one had perished by water, in consequence of a similar state of general depravity. It seemed indeed to grow daily more wicked, and daily running more headlong into perdition. Christ was soon to come back to judge the living and the dead, and to raise up a new state of things out of its smouldering ruins-out of the dry bones which the grave and death should surrender,'--Bunsen's Beginnings and Prospects of Christianity, vol. i. p. 87.

of Judah, surely erring mortals like ourselves should be occupied more in prayers than in invectives, more in efforts to turn the erring from his ways than to long for the coming of a day of ruin to him and his. Alas! how much more easy is it to censure than to be charitable; to wish the heterodox and apostate out of the way, than to seek to save their souls from death, and thus to hide a multitude of sins. How difficult to say, Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly, in the mild and loving spirit of Him whose advent we wish for.

We believe that the study of Church history, in the spirit in which Dean Milman has conducted his investigations, is the only effectual remedy for the Millennarianism and its cognate vagaries now spreading so far among us. This is not the place for the full exposition of the views we are disposed to entertain of unfulfilled prophecies and their bearing on the Church of Rome; we will merely observe that we deprecate dogmatism on such subjects altogether, and consider them as far removed from the proper sphere of our mental operations. But apart from any unwarranted use of prophecy, it is quite lawful and consistent with sound principles of interpretation to extend our views to the future, and endeavour to imagine what may be the bearings of present ecclesiastical systems upon the ages to come. Acting in this way, one man may conjecture that God will probably appear in a miraculous manner, and alter the character and complexion of Romanism; and, so long as he does not take the ex cathedrâ position of Scripture authority, we can listen with interest to his opinions. On the same principles of rational conjecture we hope to state our own views without being called by names which sound ill in theological ears, or stigmatised as superficial because we do not attempt to fathom an abyss into which angels would not descend. On the general doctrines of Holy Scripture we may safely predict the ruin of all antichristian systems, and of the Roman one among the rest. All are foredoomed of God, and shall certainly be consumed by the spirit of His mouth, and destroyed with the brightness of His coming. But whether this destruction is to be of the system alone, or of the system and persons together, is not revealed to us. Such a prophecy would receive its accomplishment quite as really and effectually by a gradual renunciation of error and a return to truth on the part of beguiled disciples of sects and systems, as by any physical manifestations. And all we know of God's government from his Word in the New Testament, and from the past history of the Church, leads us to believe that Roman error, as well as every other, will be gradually conquered, if subdued at all, in this way.

What a noble task is presented to those who think that God

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