that is past. On the contrary the danger still stares us full in the face, and numberless Jesuits are now hastening to our shores. Let us then profit by the experience of others, and guard ourselves against the impending evil.

COUNTER-RETROSPECT, BY THE REV. E. B. ELLIOTT, OF THE SEVERAL TRACTARIAN, ROMISH, AND RATIONALIZING DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLAND OF THE LAST HALF CENTURY.

CONCLUDING LETTER IX.

To the Editor of the Christian Observer.

DEAR MR. EDITOR,-Allow me, ere the year closes, to send you yet one more Letter on the subject of my Counter-retrospect, in the light of divine prophecy, of the several anti-christian developments of the last half-century, down to the present time inclusive. Events have occurred since I wrote you my 8th Letter for your May Number, which will furnish fit matter for this conclusion.

Very naturally there was kept up a sharp look-out both by men who felt reverentially about divine prophecy, and by others who thought of it only with sneer and contempt, (the force of the long continuous past chain of evidence being too generally over-looked, even by the former, in their absorption of thought on just that one testing point of the present) to see if the years 1866, 1867, which had been so long looked forward to as years of crisis to the Papacy by Protestant prophetic expositors of the old school, (these being the supposed ending years of the great prophetic period of the 1260 years,) should really develop any such events of crisis. And I have been told that a well known daily Journal of great ability intimated in one of its numbers last January, or February, that it was now high time for prophetic expositors of that stamp "to shut up," seeing that 1866 and 1867 had passed without any such events happening as they had expected.

But was such the case? Presently after came a voice from the Pope, resounding throughout Europe, which told quite a dif

ferent tale.

It was in July last that there was issued the Pope's Bull for the Convocation of an Ecumenical Council, to assemble at Rome in the December of next year. And, in the terms of address in the Bull, there appeared on one point a most remarkable variation from the terms of address which had been used in all former Bulls of the same character. The difference was this;-that, whereas in those former Bulls the secular Princes of Western Christendom were always summoned to attend, either in person or by deputy, as well as Roman Catholic Bishops and certain other high Ecclesiastics of that Church, (let me beg to refer to the important chapter on the

Image of the Beast in my 3rd Vol. of the Hor. Apoc. for illustration,) in the present Bull it was Ecclesiastics alone.

The omission was too remarkable to escape notice. It was remarked on, for example, by M. Veuillot, Editor of the well known Popish journal at Paris, L'Univers, in the passage following:-" The Bull does not invite Sovereigns to sit in the Council. The omission is remarkable. It implies that there are no longer Catholic crowns: -that is to say, that the order in which society has lived for the last 1000 years no longer exists. What has been called the middle age has come to an end. The date of the Bull is the date of its death, its last sigh. Another era begins. The Church [Romish Church] and State [that is of Roman Catholic kingdoms] are separated."

So M. Venillot. There are some little inexactnesses in this passage. For he speaks of the régime of Roman Catholic crowns, spiritually subject to the Pope, as if begun only 1000 years ago; whereas it had existed above 1200 or 1300 years. Nor, again, does he refer to the temporary interruption of that régime which was suddenly and violently introduced by the French Revolution;-an event, I am persuaded, not unnoticed in the Apocalyptic prophecy. But the main fact that he refers to is justly observed on by him as a very remarkable sign of the times. Above all it is in one way that he never thought of most remarkable :-viz. as holding out before the world, under the Pope's own sign manual, an admission of the completed ending of the period of the kings of Western Christendom spiritually subjecting the power of their kingdoms to him; that is, of the completed ending of 1260 years. For thus it had been declared in the divine prophecy, Apoc. xvii. 17; "God hath put into the hearts. of the ten kings to fulfil his will, and to agree and give their kingdom unto the Beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled;" in other words, (compare Dan. vii. 25, 26,) until the end of God's appointed period of the 1260 years.

Now when was it that this period may be considered to have begun? What the terminus à quo from which it is to be measured? It was during the course of the sixth century, as I have shewn at large in my Hor. Apoc. from history, that the then newly established Romano-Gothic kings of Western Christendom, one after ananother, recognised the Roman Pope as Christ's Vicar on earth, and so subjected their kingdom spiritually, and in matters of conscience, to him; the three last being the Anglo-Saxons, the Lombards, and the Bavarians, each near about, or soon after, 600 A.D. And if, following the precedent of the Old Testament prophecies respecting Judah's seventy years' captivity in Babylon, and consequent return, we suppose (as I have done in my Hora Apocalyptica) a primary imperfect commencing epoch, with a correspondently primary imperfect ending epoch, and a secondary and more perfect epoch of commencement, with its own correspondent and more perfect epoch of ending,-and, moreover, that royal decrees (like those of Cyrus and Darius, Ezra i. 1, vi. 1,) may have been had respect to by the Holy Spirit as epochal signs in his prediction respecting the great New Testament prophetic period of the 1260 years,--then we have,

for our primary solution of this period, the 1260 years from Justinian's Pope-recognizing decree, about A.D. 530, to the French Revolution, about A.D. 1790; and for our secondary solution the 1260 years from Phocas' decree, A.D. 606, according to Baronius, or rather, according to Muratori, and other the best chronologists, 607, to A.D. 1867.

Now, after the ending of the great Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in the Peace of Paris, there had been a return on the part of certain of the kingdoms of Western Christendom to their old spiritual allegiance to the Pope; e. g., of the Italian kingdoms of Sardinia and Naples, the kingdoms of Spain and Bavaria, and, above all, the empire of Austria. And this allegiance involved to a considerable extent the same intolerance of Protestantism, designated as heresy, and enforcement by the arm of secular power of the Pope's decrees and laws of the Romish Church,—especially with regard to divine worship, marriage, education, and freedom of conscience and of the press, -as had more fully characterized all the kingdoms of Western Christendom, excepting North Germany and England, in the times previous to the great French Revolution: -all, in those earlier times, in fulfilment of the obligations to which the kings had subscribed by their deputies in the great Papal Ecumenical Councils.* But within the last six or eight years the Sardinian kingdom, first of the thus re-Papalized States, after absorbing into itself Lombardy, Tuscany, Naples, Sicily, the larger part of the Pope's own territorial domain (called Patrimony of St. Peter), and finally Venetia, and having so become the kingdom of Italy, dissolved everywhere the old ties that had bound those several polities in religious subjection to the enforcement of the decrees of the Papacy. Then (the war which ended in the battle of Sadowa having in 1866 prepared the way,) Austria, so long the Pope's main prop, found itself forced in 1867 to renounce its Concordat with the Papacy, and to establish throughout its dominions religious liberty. Finally in Spain,-after that in the autumn of 1867 there had been unsuccessfully made under Prim the first attempt at overthrowing (not simply, as in former insurrections, the existing Spanish ministry, but) the Bourbon Queen and dynasty, and therewith the Papal all-domineering religious power,-the attempt was renewed, and with entire success, in this present year 1868. Neither

See again, on this, my chapter on the Image of the Beast.

So the Berlin Correspondent of the Times, Oct. 10, 1868: "The present rebellion in Spain is only the continuation of a previous one, which ended in smoke;"-that is, the attempt of Prim in the autumn of 1868.

I give a few extracts from the Letters of the very intelligent Paris correspondent of the Guardian Newspaper at the time of Prim's attempt in 1867, in corroboration.

"Aug. 21. Spain is reported in a

state of revolution. A Paris correspondent writes:-'We may expect a rebellion, the most serious that has occurred since the death of Ferdinand. This time it is not the overthrow of the Cabinet, but that of the Dynasty, that will be aimed at. The days of the reign of Isabel may be looked on as numbered."

Sept. 8. Battle at the foot of the Pyrenees: 6000 insurgents: army faithful. Insurrection crushed. Prim has made his escape.. Execution of prisoners in all the large towns. Reign

....

the Queen's ministry, nor the Pope, were ignorant of the impending revolutionary storm; and that Spain, consequently, was no more to be reckoned on, when the Bull of Convocation was issued, than the other kingdoms of Western Christendom. Hence the Bull's omission of the Spanish Queen as well as other sovereigns. As M. Veuillot expresses it, there are now no longer Catholic crowns in Christendom. God's appointed period for this having been fulfilled, the kings no longer give the power of their kingdoms to the Beast. The Pope's own published Bull testifies to that effect; and therewith (though he thought not of it) to the fact of the completed expiration of the 1260 years.

And now, then, what remains between us and the consummation but the supplemental period of the seventy-five years of Daniel xii., of which I have often of late years had occasion to speak? Our present position being at the close of the 6th Vial,-a Vial of which the fitting to our own times has been so strikingly marked, both politically by the drying up of the waters of the Euphrates, or decay of the Turkish and Mahometan powers, and also by the outgoing over England and the world of the three predicted deluding spirits of Infidelity, Popery, and Priestcraft, all united in the one object of acting against the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ,-I say, our present era being thus marked as at the close of the 6th Vial, or commencement of the 7th, with its Vial out-pouring into the aërial atmosphere, significant, I conceive, of the vitiation of the very elements of thought and principle, religious, moral, and political, what remains for fulfilment under this Vial, and during the course of Daniel's seventy-five years of the "time of the end," but the progress of the last great predicted war of Armageddon (war, woλeμor, Apoc. xvi. 14-16, not battle, as in the English version) against Christian truth? Hence politically a revolution is indicated, as ere long to follow, more mighty than any that has occurred since the first establishment of the Romano-Gothic kingdoms of the Popedom in Western Europe, and resulting in their tripartition: the gospel-voice meantime sounding forth everywhere throughout the world, antagonistically to the everywhere sped forth spirits of antichristian delusion (Apoc. xiv. 6-10); and so the gathering out of God's election of grace from every people and kindred and tongue and nation, as ordained under the present dispensation, and preparation too of the Jews for their predicted restoration and conversion,-being brought to a completion. After which is to follow the final utter fall of the seven-hilled Babylon; and then, and thereupon, Christ's glorious establishment of His kingdom. "Blessed is he that cometh to the 1335 years."

of terror. Fearful reprisals in store for a future which cannot be far distant.

"Oct. 14. Ministerial Circular from Madrid to Spanish Envoys at foreign Courts, saying, 'that this revolt aims [pres. tense at destruction of social order and existing policy; including, as

social consequences, the destruction of the constitutional and monarchical principles, the Catholic principle, and the Dynasty, as the symbol and practical application of the whole.""

* Compare Matt. xxiv. 14; Acts xv. 14; Rom. xi. 5; Apoc. vii. 9-14.

Two final observations :-
:-

1. Let me observe that, though the kings may not any more give their kingdom to the Beast, yet this does not imply their own formal rejection of Popery. At the moment before its final sudden fall Babylon is represented in the Apocalypse as exulting in the thought, "I shall not be a widow, or see loss of children;" and, moreover, the kings of the earth are depicted as contemplating her fall with something of sympathy, as well as awe. A prediction this very agreeable with what we now see of the state of Western Christendom, and what we might thence augur as to the probable future. 2. Let me observe, with reference to the remarkable fact of the interval between the primary and secondary endings of the 1260 years, being very nearly 75 years (viz. from about 1790 to 1866, 7), the very same length as Daniel's time of the end, that this may have been ordered by the Omniscient Spirit with a view to keeping alive throughout that interval the expectation of the Lord's coming as imminent at the end of it; the supposition being natural that these 75 or 76 years were, in fact, the very 75 terminating years of Daniel xii. So, when Christ's first coming was drawing near, I conceive that the accomplished ending of the 70 weeks of Daniel= 490 years, about B.C. 46, if dated from Cyrus' Decree, (instead of from Artaxerxes', 80 years later,) may have thenceforward served to excite and keep up the lively expectation of his coming as near at hand, which we know did in fact from that time prevail among the Jews.

Here, dear Mr. Editor, I take my leave. And, thanking you for your ready kindness in having so often and so largely allowed space in your valuable Periodical for my letters on these important subjects, I beg to remain, with much regard, very sincerely yours,

E. B. ELLIOTT.

NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

Our Dispensation; or, The Place we occupy in the Divine History of the World. By Josiah Miller, M.A., Author of "Our Hymns: their Authors and Origin." London: Jackson, Walford, & Hodder. 1868. -This little work evinces much earnestness and spirituality of mind; and has the additional recommendation, on almost every page, of giving Scripture references in support of the writer's views. It is a work which deserves a wide circulation, as we think the following extract, which we take at hazard, will shew :

"To some, the facts we have established-that this is the Spirit's dispensation, and that it is of surpassing excellence-may seem to be mere truisms; yet there can be no doubt that the fuller recognition of these great verities would have a most important effect upon the position of the great religious questions of the day, and upon the life and progress of the Christian Church. What a craving there is, in some directions, for ceremonial and symbolism! Works larger in size than the Bible, and reminding us of the Shasters of the