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 re

ferring 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.'

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,

Ist, 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

1 Jer. iii. 11.

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 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,1 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

1 Maximilian was elected emperor, A.D. 1493.

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 sovereigntynot 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