nationalize a church, they assume the right of determining what the faith and homage of their subjects shall be. They appoint a creed; they enjoin a worship; they prohibit all others. They offer their will as a reason why that creed should be held and that worship offered; they treat a dissent as a violation of their rights, and punish it as a crime. They thence clearly assume that the laws which God imposes on their subjects are under their dominion. Their procedure implies and arrogates a jurisdiction over the duties their subjects owe to him, and thence over his right to their obedience and homage. When, therefore, they demand and compel submission to this usurped authority over his laws, they enjoin and compel a homage to themselves that is due only to him. This is the relation accordingly in which their usurpation is exhibited in this prophecy. They who approve and support their legislation over the doctrines and laws of the gospel, are represented as worshippers of the wild beast; and they who assent to a similar usurpation by papal ecclesiastics, are exhibited as worshippers of the image of the wild beast. And that is manifestly the import of those acts. If civil and ecclesiastical rulers have no jurisdiction over the legislation of God, why do they attempt to re-enjoin his religious laws on their subjects on their own authority, and punish a nonsubmission to their dictation as a violation of their rights? If it be not their prerogative to determine what the duties are which their subjects owe to God, why do they interfere between him and them, and attempt the determination of those duties? If it be the prerogative of the Almighty alone to assert and maintain his rights by legislation, why do they arrogate that office as being equally theirs? And why, unless they are regarded as truly possessing the powers which they thus arrogate, are their assumptions approved and vindicated by their subjects? Nothing can be clearer, then, than that when they appoint a creed and enjoin a worship on their subjects, they arrogate a dominion over his laws and rights, and treat him as subordinate to themselves. If they appoint the same faith and worship which he has enjoined, they still treat them as subject to their authority. If they enjoin a different system of doctrines and rites, they assume the power of rescinding his laws and superseding them by their own. And such would be instantly seen and felt by every civil and ecclesiastical ruler to be the import of a similar agency of a foreign ruler towards them. Were the emperor of Russia to issue an edict enjoining the laws enacted by the British legislature on the subjects of the British empire, enforce them by new sanctions, treat

a violation of them as an infringement of his rights, and attempt to punish it as a crime, it would be interpreted by the monarch and legislators of Great Britain as an arrogation of supreme dominion over that empire, and implying that the obligations of its population to them are subordinate to their obligations to him.

To nationalize a church therefore, is to offer the most flagrant violation to the rights and insult to the majesty of God; and to assent to such a nationalization, is to sanction that violation, and pay a homage to usurping creatures that is due only to him. And to perceive and appreciate this truth, to discern and honor the rights of God in their greatness and sanctity, publicly and appropriately to assert and vindicate them, in opposition to the usurpations of civil and ecclesiastical rulers, and withdraw from connection with churches acknowledging their usurped jurisdiction, will be to rise to an attitude towards God and civil and ecclesiastical rulers which his servants have never yet assumed, and fulfil an office they have never yet discharged. The great advocates hitherto of toleration have placed their objections to compulsion and persecution on no such ground. Bishop Taylor, in his voluminous work on the subject, lavished the treasures of his learning and the subtleties of his genius in an endeavor to maintain on the one hand the divine right of kings, and the obligation on the other of subjects to non-resistance and passive obedience, justified and applauded the assumption by civil and ecclesiastical rulers of jurisdiction over their faith and worship, and cited even the arrogation by the heathen emperors of that dominion, as authority for a similar usurpation by Christian princes. He regarded the right as belonging naturally and necessarily to monarchs and bishops, ascribed to their exercise of it an absolute and divine authority, and exhibited it as under no restriction whatever in regard to the subject, and none in respect to God, except that no doctrine or worship was to be imposed but such as he has enjoined. His principles accordingly yield no liberty whatever of dissent to the subject. It is only by surrendering them that he grants that obedience may be withheld from the law of the creature, when it is seen to be at war with that of the creator. His pleas for toleration in reality therefore, if interpreted by his doctrine, are nothing more than reasons that rulers should impose no faith and worship on their subjects, but such as God enjoins. If not so interpreted, and they are undoubtedly incapable of that construction, except by the rejection of all their significance, then his theories of the powers of rulers and the rights of subjects are

wholly inconsistent with each other. Nor is it easy to believe that he was not aware of their inconsistency. Had it been his aim in his doctrine to justify the arrogations of Charles I. and Archbishop Laud, but in his reasonings against persecution, merely to embarrass the anti-prelatists who had risen to power and driven him from his station, and restrain them from retorting the cruelties which his own party had been accustomed to inflict, he would naturally have indulged in the self-contradiction which his discussions exhibit.

Mr. Locke's plea for toleration is founded chiefly on the ground that the magistrate's office has relation solely to civil affairs, that he transcends his powers therefore and encroaches on the rights of the subject, when he imposes a creed and a worship; not that he infringes the prerogatives and arrogates a dominion over the laws of the Almighty.

While Bishop Hoadly held that God is the only rightful lawgiver of the church, and denied to magistrates and ecclesiastics authority to impose any other faith or rites than those which he has enjoined, he yet held that they may impose those, and approved accordingly and supported the English establishment, on the ground that its faith and worship are those which are appointed by God.

Bishop Warburton held that although the church is naturally independent of the state, it yet may voluntarily place itself under its jurisdiction, and that it is the right and policy of the state to give it a civil establishment. He accordingly approved and advocated its nationalization, and objected to intolerance and persecution, only on the ground that they are violations of the rights of conscience, and deemed they were justifiable when thought requisite to the safety of the state.

În like manner the objections of the English dissenters from the days of Elizabeth to the present time, have been directed, not against the principle of an establishment, but against the doctrines, rites, and ceremonies which the British legislature have imposed, and the violation by compulsion of the rights of conscience; and are generally extremely frivolous compared to the objection to the principle of nationalization itself. Thus Mr. Towgood, one of the ablest of their writers, argues not against nationalization, but only against the imposition of doctrines, rites, and ceremonies which are not authorized by the gospel, the violation of conscience, and other peculiarities of the establishment which he deemed unnecessary imperfections of nationalization. He approved of a civil establishment, and desired it to be ex

tended to his own and other denominations; and such it is said is the desire at the present time of the English non-conformists generally. The office to which the sealed are to be called, is one therefore which no body of believers has ever yet fulfilled.

Commentators, though varying widely in their expositions, universally assign a different meaning to this symbol. A large number interpret it as denoting the exemption of the true people of God from the calamities with which the tempest winds are to overwhelm his enemies. Thus Grotius, Dr. Hammond, Eichhorn, Rosenmuller, exhibit it as foreshowing the withdrawment of the Jewish Christians from Jerusalem and Judea to Pella or elsewhere, anterior to the ravage of the country and overthrow of the city by the Romans; Vitringa interprets it of the preservation of the evangelical church of Europe, amidst the dangers of a religious war by the civil powers, which he regarded the tempest as foreshadowing; Mr. Mede, Dr. Cressner, Mr. Jurieu, Mr. Whiston, Bishop Newton, of the protection of the true church from the evils denoted by the symbols of the first trumpets chiefly; Dean Woodhouse, Mr. Cuninghame, Mr. Bickersteth, of its preservation from the judgments by which at the seventh trumpet the antichristian powers are to be overthrown; and allege as an important ground or confirmation of their construction, the ninth of Ezekiel. But that interpretation is not in harmony with the symbol. The office of a mark clearly is to distinguish, not to preserve; to show to whom the person or object marked belongs, not what is to be its destiny. Nor is it in consistence with analogy to regard the mark as the means or occasion of preservation. It is not to be supposed that when the slaughter which the vision of Ezekiel symbolized took place, the slaughterers were withheld from destroying the people of God by noticing a peculiar mark on their foreheads. The marking therefore denoted some analogous agency, anterior to the slaughter, by which they became conspicuously discriminated from the worshippers of idols. That they were to be exempted from the slaughter, was shown not by the mark, but by the direction subsequently given to the executioners not to approach them, and which implies that they were not to be still promiscuously intermixed with those who were to be slain. Had not that direction been added, who could have inferred with assurance that they were to be exempted from the sword, which was commissioned to destroy so many others? Nor whether that vision foreshad

owed the destruction of the apostate Jews by the Chaldeans, or the Romans, is it to be doubted that the true worshippers were led to refuse all concurrence in their apostasies, to testify in a public and emphatic manner their disapprobation of their rebellion, whether it were the worship of idols or the rejection of Christ, and maintain the attitude of faithful servants of God. It is incredible that during the ravage of Judea and siege of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans, a single true worshipper should have refrained from expressing his abhorrence of the idolatry which drew that scourge on the nation, and notwithstanding the exhortations of the prophets, continued in such an attitude as to sanction the apostasy of the priests and rulers. It is incredible that under the example and teachings of the apostles and their disciples, and the extraordinary influences and gifts of the Holy Spirit, a single believer in Christ should have wholly abstained, as the Roman war approached, from the expression of his faith, and continued in such a relation to the unbelieving faction, as to countenance their rejection of the Messiah, and trust in deceivers and false Christs.

The sealing of the servants of God, in like manner, is not a symbol of their exemption from the blast of the tempest wind, but of a change in their relations to the antichristian powers anterior to that blast, by which they are to withdraw all sanction from the usurpations and apostasies of the wild beast and nationalized hierarchies, and own and honor Christ as alone the king and lawgiver of the church. So far from being exempted from the tempest, its excitement is to result in some manner from their being sealed, and its violence to be directed in an eminent degree against them.

Mr. Brightman and Mr. Daubuz regard Constantine the Great as the angel from the east, and interpret the sealing of his agency in freeing the church from the obstructions of persecution, establishing it in peace, and prompting it to a more discriminating and authoritative profession of the true faith. But in the first place, that construction is founded on the false assumption that their exposition of the seals, which refers them to events anterior to Constantine, is correct; and in the next, the change wrought by that monarch in the condition of the church, was wholly unlike that which the symbol denotes. The agency of the angel from the sunrising is limited to the servants of God. He affixes the seal on no others. But the public recognition by Constantine of the Christian religion as of divine origin, and allowance of all who chose to profess it, and worship according to its rites