dominion the emperor who represented the last and most enlarged of the autocratic dominations; and not only so, but he did make himself to be revered by all the people, insomuch that his pontifical word could dissolve allegiance and abolish natural ties. He even attained unto the claim of absolving from all guilt, of dispensing from all obligation; and his word canonized saints, dispensed righteousness, changed laws and time, and otherwise usurped the office of Christ, the Ruler of the earth and the Dis

And into his city

penser of the Divine will. flowed the riches of the Gentiles, and up to his city went the most holy of the people. Yet he himself removed not thence, neither shewed himself openly, save at the high solemnity, when the assembled myriads knelt before him, and he bestowed upon them his blessing, as the blessing of God. Time would fail me to explain, point by point, this full-length portraiture of our true Melchizedek; which, had it been an idea written in a book, and held up unto the church as the great object of its hope, would have been the greatest, the noblest, the best performance of piety and wisdom; but, being a reality embodied unto sense, a pageant contrived by the devil and informed by a man, is the fiend's arch-mock, the master-piece of delusion, the consummation of idolatry, the most daring attempt of men and devils to parody the purpose of God, and destroy the expectation and desire of the whole earth. If idolatry before the

coming of Christ was the great object of Divine hatred and prevention because it attempted to inculcate the great secret before the time, by giving form unto God before he had taken form in the seed of the woman, and so anticipating the glory set apart for his Son, as the Eikon, or statue, of the invisible God; so, after Christ, the image of the invisible God, had been manifested in humility, together with a promise of bringing him in the second time in glory, then it became the great act of sacrilege to attempt, by any device, to forestal, or upon any person to fix, that glory which God hath reserved for his Son: whereof, indeed, every baptized man is constituted a witness, having the Holy Ghost given unto him, as his earnest that he himself shall in the like glory appear: but if, instead of witnessing that the Priest-King, the Infallible, the Absolute, is not yet in the world; we do give that honour to a man like unto ourselves, who is in the world, or oppose him not unto the death who claimeth it; then, I say, are we guilty of a tenfold sacrilege and a tenfold idolatry, and are servants of Satan far beyond the most gross, crude, and cruel image-worshippers on the earth. There is no language, there are no similitudes, for expressing the abhorrence of an enlightened and pious Christian towards the Papacy; and there is no such sign of lukewarmness in the Christian church, as to have become so tolerant and so fair spoken towards that abomination. Never

theless, while I thus speak; like the Fall, and the natural world under the Fall, and the constitution of universal absolute kingdoms, there is nothing so worthy the study of a wise and patient man, as that master-piece of Satan's invention the Papacy; through which he hath inflicted such a blow upon Christendom, as that all the disciples of the Lord, saving a handful of stragglers here and there, have entirely forgotten the Melchizedek kingdom of Christ which is to come. I will say it over again, for the use of Protestants, and especially for the sister churches of Scotland and England, that the Papacy, as it formed itself in the times of Jerome and Augustine, and from an earlier time, did gradually abolish the primitive hope of the church concerning Christ's coming and kingdom; which hope hath never yet dawned again upon the spiritual heavens, though oft and oft it hath struggled in the midst of the clouds and darkness and mists of hell which that superstition brought over the face of heaven. We have had such a bout to maintain and keep the single point of justification by faith, that we have never got to the subject of our hopes at all. Oh, this Protestantism is become a beggarly thing! a poor, beggarly system of expediency! Verily, it is like the last tatter of a beggar's outward garment, hanging shivering in the wind, without comfort and without shelter. It took too low an aim when it merely set itself to contradict the Pope: it should

have studied him, it should have profited by him, it should have interpreted the wisdom of Satan and turned it against himself: then, instead of merely denying purgatory of the soul, Protestantism would have gone into the whole question of a Christian's hope, as they went into the whole question of a Christian's faith; and then the primitive doctrine of the advent and kingdom of Christ would have come out in its fulness and its beauty. No religion can be founded upon negatives: the Protestant religion necessarily took up a negative, and it should have been more guarded against the peril which arose out of this singular prerogative.--But, to return. The thing which I am to teach concerning the Papacy is, that such a vast structure of Providence was not ordained without great purposes of wisdom; of which the principal, as I conceive, was, to give types and forms and figures for the right conceiving of that spiritual kingdom which is to be established under Christ. I say that this is the principal end of it for this reason, that to defeat, and dislodge from the church, the hope of Christ's advent and kingdom, was the purpose of Satan in the Papacy-in which, alas! how admirably hath he succeeded! Now, I know that Satan is always outwitted by God; that the thing he works at always works out his own defeat; and therefore my counsel, though late, unto those who have faith in Christ's advent and kingdom, is, that they

should work the mine of the Papacy with more patience and good temper than did Luther and the Reformers, and they will bring out of it a more wonderful treasure than the Reformation did. With this remark I do now proceed to open a little the mystery of the Protestant kingdom, as it is established in the midst of us; concerning which, if I had been writing some few months ago, I would have spoken in the language of the Prophet Ezekiel (xxviii.), "The workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub Thou hast been in Eden, the

that covereth. garden of God.

Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty."

First of all, the constitution of our kingdom is intolerant of the Papacy, and doth not endure communion with it in any form whatever. From the time of the Conqueror until the Reformation, there was one struggle after another against that hideous usurpation; which ended in the most complete and entire protestation against it, as an abomination with which no terms should be kept. It is the only polity or state in the world with which the ministers of our king dare not have a correspondence, from which they dare not receive an accredited messenger or a written message. Every counsellor of the king, every member of his parliament, every judge and magistrate and sheriff, and officer in the army and navy, and