the souls of the weary and heavy laden who come unto him. The nations were thirsting for liberty, without the moral aptitude of self-control which would have rendered it a blessing, when Bonaparte presented them with a vial of wrath, and coerced them by a military despotism before unknown in Europe. When that vial was exhausted, and he, who had held it, tasted its dregs in all their bitterness, and when his sword was broken, superstition came forth anew with her poisoned cup, and popery raised its yoke again over a portion of Europe; it sought to bind the mind as well as the body, and the struggle that ensued has marked its kingdom as full of darkness, and fraught with the bitterest miseries. The very darkness that reigns over papal kingdoms precludes, in a great measure, the adduction of positive proof of the fact. The kingdom of the beast is so full of darkness, that sufficient light is wanting to decipher its intensity. And in default of documentary official evidence, where none is given, and of historical proof, not yet evolved till the thick darkness pass away, recourse must be had to individual testimony to disclose the power of the priesthood, where it prevails, the tyranny of the governments controlled by its influence, and the miseries of the prison-house under their joint domination. That domination is, perhaps, nowhere greater, nor may its effects be anywhere more clearly seen than in Spain and Portugal, which have discarded liberty when proffered for their acceptance, and rejected it when within their reach. From these countries, therefore, as well as from Italy, over which popery holds undivided sway, some illustrations may be drawn, how on the pouring out of the vial on the seat of the beast, his kingdom was full of darkness; and how they gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the name of God because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds. A work of great celebrity, "Rome in the Nineteenth Century," in which remarks on the state of society, &c. are incidentally introduced, in a series of Letters written during a Residence in Rome in the years 1817 and 1818, supplies us with ample testimony borne by an eye-witness, to the darkness and misery that pervaded Rome and Italy, at the very period to which prophetical history has brought us down-the very eve of the present day. "All the riches and blessings with which the prodigality of Heaven has dressed the shores of Italy, have only served more effectually to rivet her chains. The highest gifted among the countries of the earth, she stands the lowest in the scale of nations. The strongest in physical power, she is trampled under foot by the weakest."* "The Romans passed beneath the yoke of despotism, never to be liberated. They have, indeed, known change of tyrants. In a long succession of ages, they have been the successive sport of Roman, Barbarian, Goth, Vandal, Pope, and Gaul: but freedom has revisited the Seven hills no more; and glory and honour, and virtue and prosperity, one by one, have followed in her train. Long annals of tyranny, of unexampled vicc, of misery and of crime,-polluted with still increasing luxury and moral turpitude, record the rapid progress of Rome's debasement."† The fifth vial was poured upon the seat (goves, the throne, or seat of government) of the beast, and we may first look on the picture of wretchedness which Rome itself, the famed eternal city, presented to view, at the very period after the imperial power of Bonaparte was finally annihilated. It is not to Rome in its glory, but to a city surrounded by every symptom of decay and many tokens of judgment, and encompassed by plagues, that the traveller approaches, on entering, during · the annual prevalence of the malaria, the renowned plain of Latium. * Rome in the Nineteenth Century, 4th ed. pref. p. 20. 1 "Between the Sabine hills on the east, and the Hills of Viterbo (Monte Ciminus) on the north, the bold ridge of Mount Soracte rose from the plain, insulated from every other height, the most picturesque, and, excepting the Alban Mount, the most lofty and beautiful of all the Amphitheatre of mountains that surround three sides of the plain of Latium. Far as the eye can reach, the Campagna stretches in every direction, to the base of these hills. To the west a wild sullen flat extends to the sea. A profusion of bushy thickets, and a few solitary trees, were scattered over the broken surface of this unenclosed and houseless plain;-for a plain it is-since, at the distance of sixteen miles, where we now stood, we distinctly saw Rome. "Over this wild waste, no rural dwelling, nor scattered hamlets, nor fields, nor gardens, such as usually mark the approach to a populous city, were to be seen. All was rain: fallen monuments of Roman days-grey towers of Gothic times-abandoned habita tions of modern years, alone met the eye. No trace of man appeared, except in the lonely tomb, which told us he had been. Rome herself was all that we beheld. She stood alone in the wilderness as in the world, surrounded by a desert of her own creation-a desert which accords too well with her former greatness and her present decay. It may perhaps be soothing to the contemplation of the traveller, or the fancy of the poet, to see the once beautiful Campagna di Roma abandoned to the wild luxuriance of nature, and covered only with the defaced tombs of her tyrants, and the scarce visible remains of the villas of her senators; but it is melancholy to reason and humanity to behold an immense tract of fertile land in the immediate vicinity of one of the greatest cities in the world, pestilent with disease and death, and to know, that like a devouring grave, it annually engulphs all of human kind that toil upon its surface. The unfortunate labourers employed in the scanty cultivation occasionally given to the soil to enable it to produce pasturage for cattle, generally fall victims to the baneful climate. Amidst the fearful loneliness and stillness of this scene of desolation, as we advanced through the long dreary tract that divided us from Rome, a few wretched peasants, whose looks bespoke them victims of slow consuming disease, occasionally reminded us of the tremendous ravage of human life which this invisible and mysterious power is annually making."* "Nothing is more striking to a stranger than the sombre air which marks every countenance, from the lowest in Rome. The faces even of the young are rarely lighted up with smiles: a laugh is seldom heard, and a merry countenance strikes us with amazement, from its novelty. Rome looks like a city whose inhabitants have passed through the cave of Trophonius. "The country with the unexampled cold and drought of the spring, is dried up-vegetation is pined and withering, and there *Rome in the Nineteenth Century, vol. i. pp. 99, 100. is but too much reason to dread that the miseries which the poor have suffered during the last dreadful year of scarcity," (or 1816, the very first year after the final extinction of the empire of Napopoleon,) "will be increased tenfold in the next. Pestilence is already added to famine;-the lower orders are perishing by hundreds of a low contagious fever, brought on by want, and numbers have literally died of hunger by the waysides. This dreadful mortality at present extends all over Italy, and the sufferings of the living are still more cruel and heart-rending than the number of the dead. You daily see human beings crawling on the dunghills, and feeding on the most loathsome garbage, to satisfy the cravings of nature. That this may occasionally be done to call forth charity, is unquestionable, but it is also done when no eye is visibly near; and the extremity of misery,-the-ghastly famine that is written in their looks cannot be feigned. The failure of those teeming harvests that usually cover the earth, spreads among the improvident and overflowing population of this country, horrors of famine of which you can have no conception. The dying and the dead surround us on all sides; the VERY STREETS are crowded with sick, and the contagion of the fever is thought so virulent, that a cordon of troops is drawn around the Great Hospital of the Borgo San Spirito, to pre vent communication with its infected inmates. From the returns it appears that forty-six per cent. die at the hospital San Spirito at Rome, whereas at Paris the average is only seven per cent., and in England it seldom exceeds four."* And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the SEAT of the beast. And his KINGDOM was full of darkness, and they gnawed their tongues for pain, &c., While Rome, more especially is the seat of the beast, his kingdom comprises the countries over which the dark dominion of the papacy still prevailed, and which superstition and despotism were again leagued to enslave. And that kingdom was full of darkness. The light of science, at least, began to dawn in Italy, under the reign of Napoleon; in Naples, under Murat ; in Spain, alternately under King Joseph and the cortes; and in Portugal, under the protection of the British and the sanction of the king; and in all these countries religious opinions, aftar ages of darkness, had for a season been free. But on the reestablishment of the pope in his dominions, and of * Rome in the Nineteenth Century, vol. iii. pp. 196, 197. Letter 79, dated 31st April 1817. Su Roman Catholic despots on their thrones, incipient religious liberty was crushed, and the reign of darkness returned in all the fulness of its power. perstition and infidelity acted and reacted on each other-while men were not prone to learn righteousness. The gross mummeries of the Romish church shocked reason, and men, making shipwreck of faith, were stranded on scepticism, and thought, for a moment, that they were safe. But wheh atheism appeared, not in theory but in action, and exhibited its horrors, any form of religion was deemed preferable to none; the mind, when overawed, clung to superstition anew, even as the shipwrecked mariner would cling to any plank. It is thus, perhaps, in some degree to be accounted for, that the gross darkness of the tenth century was partially revived in the nineteenth, and that if the latter be called enlightened," it is not to those kingdoms where popery most prevails that we have to look for the proof. It is the prophetic characteristic of the kingdom of the beast to be full of darkness. And such darkness denotes where that kingdom is to be found. 66 And his kingdom was full of darkness. "Superstition prevails not only in Rome, but in all the states of the church. A government wholly pacifie like that of Rome, might console itself for its political nullity," (the judgment had already began to sit which was to take the power out of its hands,) "by encouraging and protecting letters, but an INTELLECTUAL DEADNESS Seems to pervade the Roman states. -full of darkness. "The Roman nobility-read not, think not, write not.-The Italian noblemen, for the most part, are ill-educated, ignorant and illiterate." * Malte-Brun's Geography, vol. vii. pp. 678, 679. Rome in the Nineteenth Century, vol. iii. pp. 208, 219.-It is added, "I could give some curious proofs of this, but I content myself with mentioning one, which I witnessed the other night at the |