has alone the right to give laws without receiving them at the hands of any person. She will usurp, at least in her conduct, the august and incommunicable title of the Holy and True. (Rev. iii. 7.) By a necessary consequence of this attempt, she will desire that all her mandates should be executed without resistance, that all her words should be revered as infallible oracles. Not contented with having invaded or annihilated the most sacred rights of those whom she ought to cherish as brethren, she will extend her domination, even over the spouse of the Son of God. She will leave no means unemployed to reduce her to slavery; she will lord it with tyranny over her, whom she ought herself to obey. Such large excesses will be furnished with unlimited permission to plunge herself into still greater. By degrees she will be led even to proscribe and anathematize the most important parts of the depository of faith. She will prostitute her favours, she will furnish with arms a number of teachers of lies, who have conspired to ruin the faith. Abusing the ascendancy which her prerogatives have given her, she will make kings and pontiffs, priests and Levites, and the faithful of every rank and state, drink the cup of her abuses, her errors and her attempts against righteousness and truth. She will erect into laws the most palpable and grossest simonies, and the most shameful traffic in holy things. She will set all an example of pride and tyranny. She will lull sinners to sleep by her arbitrary dispensations, and by a scandalous expenditure of the treasure of the Church. She will asperse by her iniquitous censures the characters of the just, who will have refused to burn incense to her tyranny, or to fall in with her infamous irregularities. She will make open war on the most astounding miracles, however so little adverse to her pride or her disastrous policy.

All these excesses, and many others which we pass over in silence, will make up the character of the symbolic woman, whom St. John did not see except with profound astonishment, and who in the end of the dispensation is to take so signal a part in affairs, will be the cause of so many evils, will produce so many double-dealers and victims, will bring to its crowning height the Mystery of Iniquity, and will entail on the Gentile Church-the accomplices of her crimes and falsehoods, the dreadful inflictions so often announced in Scripture. It is an objection not less frivolous than odious to say, that Protestants have also looked at Rome as the harlot of the Apocalypse. There are here two extremes to avoid, the one the adopting the erroneous and schismatic views of the sec

taries of the sixteenth century: the other the applauding to excess the Court of Rome. We ought neither to follow blind and headstrong heretics, who, under the vain pretext of reform, have trampled underfoot the holiest institutions, nor to imitate the superstitious and deluded Catholics who respect thousands of practices which the Gospel condemns.

But because the original chair of St. Peter did not deserve the outrages of these bitter and headstrong innovators, it does not follow that the Popes may not before or after that epoch fall into great excess, and declare war on the most important truths. Still less just is it to conclude, that at some future time, they cannot more criminally abuse their ministry, and that towards the end of the Gentile dispensation, (when the defection or apostasy, spoken of by St. Paul, shall reach its consummation,) one of these Pontiffs carrying the depravity to its height, may not, to his own destruction, verify in his person that which the prophet Ezekiel and others have so clearly announced for the last times of the Gentile dispensation.

Whoever since the second or third century should have asserted that the Mystery of Iniquity was consummated, of which St. Paul pointed out the first germ, and that it consisted in the Catholics believing in the real presence of the Eucharist, and the verity of the sacrifice of the mass, in their offering prayers for the dead, and in fasting at Lent; whoever, I say, should have asserted this, would have been justly considered an innovator, or a fanatic.

But this does not prevent the Mystery of Iniquity from being destined, after progressive increase, to arrive one day at its consummation among the Gentiles, to work their entire reprobation. The essential thing for us is to discern well its nature, and by what marks we may recognise it, with a view to assure oneself against that fatal disease. It would be great madness, or show much bad faith, to conclude from thence, that the features under which St. John describes the harlot, cannot at any time apply to Rome; no, not even in that day when Jesus Christ, tired with our impenitence and our crimes, shall remove us from his kingdom, recal his people Israel, and put them in possession of all the blessings of which we have rendered ourselves so unworthy.

But Mons. Bossuet, you will say, maintains and appears to prove that the text of St. John cannot allude to any but Rome Pagan : "To mark," says he, "a fallen Church, he ought to have opposed to holy Jerusalem, of which St. John has given so beautiful a picture, a reprobate Jerusalem. He ought to

have chosen, at least, a Samaria, once in covenant with God, and afterwards immersed in idolatry and schism. But the apostle chooses, on the contrary, Babylon, a city altogether as profane, which never knew the Lord, and never had been in covenant with him. St. John calls it again, in the mystical and spiritual language of the Apocalypse, a Sodom, an Egypt, and, by consequence, a people which never had anything in common with God."

"Still further, this holy apostle does not ever employ the word adulterous; so anxious does he seem to do away with the idea of a faithless wife. It is as plain as the daylight, then, that the Rome of St. John is Pagan Rome."*

We have seen in the former part of this work, that, according to the Bishop of Meaux, no person is constrained to adopt without examination the different senses that the Fathers have given to the book of Apocalypse, because then we are treating not of dogmas of faith transmitted through apostolical tradition, but of views more or less just, where each, without deferring to the authority of ancient and modern writers, can prefer those which appear most conformable to the plans of God in reference to his Church; such, I mean, as he has traced along the whole range of Scripture. We may, therefore, very well, without in any way being wanting in respect due to the great Bishop, submit his opinion to an examination and analysis, and give it up, if it shall turn out to have no just foundation.

That which Mons. Bossuet asserts to be a truth as clear and clearer than the day, is not so very clear; nay, it is untenable when we look closer at it :

1st. It is not Rome but another city which St. John calls Sodom and Egypt. He gives it (par excellence) the name of the Great City. Now, through the whole extent of Christendom, is there any one city which this character better fits than that of Paris?

Or can one doubt that Paris is not a true Sodom both by its infamies, which this name brings to remembrance, and by the frightful corruptions of every sort, which have long reigned and are always on the increase there?

It is also an Egypt. Let any other city be pointed out, where, since the establishment of Christianity, God has performed wonders so astonishing, but which nevertheless have only served to harden the court, the princes, and the pontiffs; -wonders-that have been rejected, despised, and dishon

* Bossuet's Pref. to Apocalypse.

oured, with an audacious incredulity and obstinacy, of which we find no example, except in the synagogue of old during the ministry of the Son of God, and in Egypt under Pharaoh. It is verily in this city,* so excessively guilty, that Jesus Christ was crucified in his truth, in his wonders, in his servants, as much and much more than in any place in the world.

2d. The Jews were in covenant with God. He had chosen Israel as his peculiar people and as his heritage. Did that prevent the prophets (Ezek. xvi. 3) from addressing them as "liars of the race of Canaan?" St. John Baptist and Jesus Christ called them a "brood of vipers," and "children of the devil," " synagogue of Satan." (Matt. vii.; xii. 34; John viii. 44; Rev. ii. 9.)

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Can we, then, feel astonished that John should call by the name of Babylon, a Christian city, which has become Antichristian, as it must be at the time of Antichrist, by means of his corruption and opposition to the spirit of Jesus, and to the most holy truths which Christ taught us by his precepts and example? It is not at all necessary, in order to account for this language, that this city should have been never in covenant with God. It is enough, that by the corruption of its morals and feelings it outrages God, and violates, in points the most essential, the covenant which he has contracted with her. Then this is what Rome will do under the reign of Antichrist. In the opinion of the Fathers a city deserves the name of Babylon when it becomes, under the Evangelical law, what that guilty city was of old in the darkness of Paganism. St. Augustine and other ecclesiastical authors after him regard as citizens of Babylon, and as themselves composing a guilty city, all the wicked, who are in the outward society of the true Church, who make profession of its faith, who partake of its sacraments, and who even exercise often in its bosom the most mysteries, but who nevertheless neither possess its spirit or its feelings.

But, argues Mons. Bossuet, if St. John had desired to mark out in this passage Rome under Christianity, he would have called it a "reprobate Jerusalem," or at least a "Samaria." I am astonished that this great man should not have seen what little solidity his objection has; for

1. Jerusalem and Samaria have promises which assure them of their re-establishment, and their re-establishment with God,

By the public renunciation of the Christian religion, and the setting up the Goddess of Reason on the high altar of Nôtre Dame.

while, instead of this, the reprobation of the apostate Church, and (by consequence) also of Rome (who will have the principal share in the apostasy) is announced in the holy writings as an eternal punishment which never can be rescinded. St. John had no need to call Rome a "reprobate Jerusalem.”

2. It has entered into the plan of the Almighty that the threats held out against the apostate Gentiles (although very plain to men of upright hearts and attentive minds) should be covered with a veil, and mistaken by the crowd of guilty ones on whom those judgments are one day to be poured forth. St. John then was necessitated to describe in a manner peculiarly striking the new Babylon, which the Lord intends to smite with dreadful plagues.

"Why, then," continues Mons. Bossuet, "does St. John never give to this Babylon, if it is a faithless wife, the title of adulteress?" "By calling her a prostitute or female of light character, he makes us clearly understand that she has always been a stranger to the covenant with God, and by consequence that he is not speaking of Rome Pagan; instead of which Judah and Israel are always drawn by the prophets as faithless wives who have abandoned their Lord."

The observation of Mons. Bossuet is absolutely false, and hence the objection which he founds on it falls of itself to the ground. It is not true, in point of fact, that the prophets never accused Judah and Israel of harlotry, that they never represented them under the image of an abandoned woman. Let any one turn to the prophet Hosea (i. 2), and they will find these remarkable words :-" Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord." Observe here the ten tribes accused of prostitution, and the people of Israel drawn in the character of an harlot. (Isaiah i. 21; Jer. ii. 20; iii. 2; Ezek. xvi., xxiii.)

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Nothing is in Scripture more common than to see Judah and Israel, though they have always been under covenant with God, represented as harlots on account of their infidelities. We must, therefore, express our surprise that Bossuet should have lost sight of these passages of Holy Writ. However this may be, it is certain, from these texts of Scripture, that St. John designed, under the emblem of an harlot, "Rome, Christian indeed, but also apostate and faithless to the covenant which God had made with her, and one that committed fornication with the kings of the earth." That wife is not only an adulteress, but also a harlot, who permits the addresses of many. It is into this shameful