venerate the Pope not otherwise than they before obeyed the emperor. Blondus, a celebrated antiquary of the fifteenth century, says, The princes of the world now adore and worship, a perpetual dictator, the successor, not of Cæsar, but of the fisherman Peter; that is, the Supreme Pontiff, the substitute of the afore-mentioned Emperor. As to the ten kingdoms answering to the ten horns of the beast, it is necessary that we satisfy ourselves geographically as to the extent of the Roman territory, on which, and, chronologically, as to the time at which such kingdoms ought to be sought. It is chiefly from their adapting their several lists to more or less of the territorial extent of the old Roman world, and to the epochs, earlier or later, in the prolonged period of the flux and reflux of the Gothic waters over it, (Sir I. Newton's, 416; Mede, 456; Dr. Allix, 486; Bishop Newton, the eighth century,) that interpreters, in their lists, have differed more or less from each other. The large measure of agreement has arisen from the notoriety and prolonged fixedness of most of the kingdoms. The ten kingdoms are to be sought on the territory of the western Roman empire only. The separation of the empires was first sketched out in Diocletian's formation of the seventh head, and one by which the latter division only was attached to the city of the seven hills as its capital. This separation and division was effectually carried out in the interval between the first wounding of the seventh head and the rise of the eighth, or Papal. It was over this part only of the Roman world that the Gothic flood swept away the old imperial government, and made new room for new kingdoms to arise; and yet again, over this part only, that the authority of the eighth, or papal head, was properly or permanently established. The ten horns all rose with the beast from out of the inundating flood, and as its product. The Franks originally were confined to the island of Batavia, with the ancient dioceses of Tourney and Arras, until they, under Clovis, conquered, in 486, the Roman king, as he was called,-Syagrius, the then ruler of the natives, and barbarians of Soissons and its neighbourhood. I make 533 the chronological epoch of my enumeration. From about 486 to 490, the following were the existing Barbaric kingdoms, formed by the invaders within the limits of the western empire:-Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Allemans, Burgundians, Visigoths, Suevi, Vandals, Heruli, Bavarians, Ostrogoths,-ten in all. The Anglo-Saxons, in 446, invaded Britain; and the various principalities formed by them were completed, in 582, into the Saxon heptarchy. The seven kingdoms of the Saxon heptarchy formed, to some intents, but

one single political body. I have noted the Saxons first of the ten kingdoms, as being most northerly; but their heptarchy was, in fact, completed latest of all, and so the tenth in order of time. The Apocalyptic prophecy viewed them as a monarchy, the germ of what it afterwards calls the tenth of the great Papal city. In 532, there existed the following ten kingdoms on the platform of the western Roman empire,-viz., the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks of central, Allman Franks of eastern, and Burgundic Franks of south-eastern France, the Visigoths, the Suevi, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Bavarians, and the Lombards,-still ten in all. Machiavel enumerates the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Sueves, Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, Heruli-Saxons, Huns, Lombards. He dates the Lombards as I do, 526. Bossuet, the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Franks, Burgundians, Sueves, Alans, Heruli, Lombards, Allmans, Saxons. Mede, the Britons, Saxons, Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Sueves, Vandals, Allmans, Ostrogoths, and Greeks. Sir Isaac Newton,-the Vandals, Suevi, Visigoths, Alans in Gaul, Burgundians, Franks, Britons, Huns, Lombards, Greeks of Ravenna. Bishop Newton,the Britons, Saxons, Franks, Burgundians, Allmans, Huns, Lombards, Greeks of Ravenna, and dukes of Rome. Odoacer abstained, during his whole reign, from the use of the purple and diadem Clovis, on the day of his inauguration, placing a diadem on his head, was invested with the purple tunic and mantle. Pepin's coronation by Boniface was the same. Gibbon makes the Papal kingdoms ten, of the twelfth century; Daubuz, of the time of the Reformation; Whiston, of the commencement of the eighteenth century; Cunningham, of that of the last great political settlement of Europe in 1815,-all make them ten kingdoms. Gibbon, speaking of Roger, first king of Sicily, 1130, thus writes,-The nine kings of the Latin world might disclaim their new associate, unless he were consecrated by the authority of the Supreme Pontiff. He enumerates the nine kings,-France, England, Scotland, Castile, Arragon, Navarre, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary. With the exception of the Papacy, they had no point of union. The beast's character and actings, superhuman pride and power, blasphemy and oppression of the saints, are the characteristics assigned to the ten-horned beast, or, rather, to its eighth head in the prophecy, the bishops of Rome. Its incipient development is synchronically with the rise of the ten kingdoms. The synchronism is implied in the pictured symbol itself; for it represented the ten horns as attached to the eighth head of the beast on its very emergence from the flood, directly asserted by the

angel in the twelfth verse of the 17th chapter. The ten horns are ten kings that receive their power or authority as kings at one and the same time with the beast; and if so, the converse follows, that the beast itself, or that which the angel identifies with it, its eighth, or Papal head,-would receive its characteristic authority and power synchronically with the ten kings. The Gothic kingdoms began to emerge early in the fifth century, and were completed, to the number of ten, about the end of that century, or opening of the sixth,-the Lombard kingdom not having appeared on the platform of the western empire till the year 526; so that from about 430 to 530, the Papacy incipiently assumed that principle of domination over the ten kingdoms of western Christendom, as well as of blasphemy against God, and hostility to the saints, by which it has been characterized. It might have, in that period, become an ecclesiastical metropolitan power, supreme in rank and authority over the clergy of the west, as the Constantinopolitan patriarch in reference to the eastern clergy; and yet no domination have resulted to it therefrom over the kings and kingdoms. It was the spiritual authority officially attached to him, which constituted the principle of the Romish bishop's headship over the kings, as also of blasphemy against the Most High in after ages, an authority distinct from, though very mainly upheld by his ecclesiastical power over the clergy. This spiritual power was derived from his being supposed to be officially the representative of the Apostle Peter, with the power of the keys centred by Christ in him, and so, by speedy consequence, Vicar of Christ, or, to use John's singularly characteristic appellation, of Antichrist. This precise authority, thus early, and within the century named, claimed by the Roman bishops, legitimatized by the Roman Emperors, and, shortly after, recognized and submitted to by the barbarian Western Kings. The Antichristian vicarial authority spoken of, was the subject, even thus early, of Papal claims and Papal assumption. The supereminently high ecclesiastical rank that attached to the bishops of the Roman See in the second, third, and fourth centuries, was attached to them in consequence of Rome being the imperial city and capital of the empire. When that groundwork of their supremacy in rank was destroyed,first, by the removal of the western capital to Ravenna, under the emperor Honorius; and yet more by the barbarian king's conquests of Rome and its empire, and establishment of their several capitals elsewhere, it was then that the deep craft of Rome's invisible patron and inspirer appeared; and its supremacy was boldly put forth by the Pope's, on the new and

spiritual grounds, of its being the See of the Prince of the Apostles,-Peter. In the council of Ephesus, the legate of Pope Celestine said, It is a thing undoubted, that the Apostle Peter received the keys, and power of hinding and loosing; which Peter still lives and exercises judgment, in his successors, even to this day, and always. Pope Leo's legate, in the council of Chalcedon, some twenty years later, said, It is Peter that speaks in Leo. Rome is the head of all the churches. Leo himself, in a sermon on St. Peter and St. Paul's day, thus expressed himself before the Roman congregation, as being the See of the blessed Peter,-Thou, Rome, art made the head of the world, so as to have even wider rule through religion than by the power of earthly domination. The Bishop of Rome, he said, was officially guardian of the Catholic faith and of the traditions of the fathers. Hilary, Leo's immediate successor, accepted Vicar of Peter; and Pope Gelasius, from 492 to 496, claimed Vicar of the blessed Peter. He wrote to the emperor,-There are two authorities by which the world is governed, the Pontifical and the Royal; the first being the greater, as having charge of the sacraments of life, and in things divine; it becomes kings to bow the neck to priests, especially to the Head of priests, whom Christ's own voice has set over the Universal Church. Pope Symmachus, in 501, in a council convened by King Theodoric, asserted, that the Pope was judge in place of God, and could himself be judged by no one. Justinian's letter to the Pope in 533, addressed the Pope as head of all the churches, and as head and judge of the faith. Phocas, in 606, confirmed the Roman See and bishop to the headship of all churches. Clovis, in 496, embraced the Roman faith, and received the title, transmitted downward through nearly 1300 years to the French kings, his successors, of Eldest Son of the Church. Pope, or Father, 500, was now appropriated to the Roman Pontiff. Gregory II., about 730, excommunicated the Iconoclasts, or image-breakers. The Rev. E. B. Elliot calls the period of about two centuries, from Justinian and Pope Gre gory to Pepin and Charlemagne, the transition period; for in it there were changes corresponding to Daniel's three of the ten horns of the Roman beast being plucked up and subjected before the little horn, (Dan. vii. 8.) The coincidence in purport between this prediction of Daniel respecting the three horns, and that of Paul concerning the imperial let or hindrance in his time existing, must be perceived; for if it needed that the imperial power ruling at Rome should be removed, in order to the first and earliest development of the Antichrist, the same

necessity would obviously require the removal, in order to its future development, of such of the ten horns as might have established themselves in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, and be in a condition, with the plenitude of their royal power, to oppress or overawe it. First, the Vandals, as rulers within the bishop's own diocese of Corsica and Sardinia; secondly, the Ostrogoths, the successors of Odoacer, in the kingdom of Italy; and, thirdly, the Lombards, who, although, in the year 533, referred to far distant in Panonia, were, some thirty or forty years after, destined to conquer Lombardy, and afterwards extend their conquests to the very neighbourhood of Rome. First, in 533, the horn of the Vandals in Africa, Corsica, and Sardinia; and, presently after, that of the Ostro goths in Italy, was rooted up by Justinian's forces under Belisarius. After which, and the establishment of the Greek Exarchate at Ravenna, (a power that can never be reckoned among the ten horns of the prophetic beast, emerging, as the latter are said to have done, one and all, out of the Bavarian invading flood,) the Lombards came in, just as if to neutralize the Greek emperor's power in that country, and prevent its domineering over the Pope at Rome, as over the Patriarch at Constantinople. In the course of the eighth century, the Lombard power altogether preponderating, and, after the conquest of the Exarchate, A.D. 752, acting, like its predecessors in Italy, to overawe the Roman See, the assistance of the Franks was called in from the Gaulic province; and then the Lombard horn was eradicated through the instrumentality of Pepin and Charlemagne, (like those of the Vandals and Ostrogoths, never again to be heard of in Christendom,) and the Exarchate of Ravenna, together with other of the Roman conquests, attached for ever to the Roman See, under the very singuar appellation of the Patrimony of Peter. The Exarchate included the territories of Ravenna, Bologna, and Ferrara, and the Pentapolis, from Rimini to Ancona to the Appennines. The donation by Pepin was made in 755; its confirmation and enlargement by Charlemagne, A.D. 774. In 816, Louis I. confirmed the gift of the Dukedom of Rome. The subsequent fuller development in the Roman bishops of the pride and blasphemies, the success and power, and the oppression of the saints, here ascribed to the Apocalyptic beast. The period is nearly 1000 years; from Charlemagne to Gregory VII.; from Gregory to Boniface VIII.; from Boniface to Leo X.; from Leo to the French Revolution; of the which, its four constituent parts, the first (to use the Waldensian simile) may be regarded of that of the Papal Antichrist's growth into a perfect man; the two next, those