mulated facts, that such causes hold but a subordinate rank even in the revolutions of earthly kingdoms, and that there is a first Great Cause which controls them all, and overrules them with supreme dominion. To the purposes of the Most High, the labours of sceptics, as well as the ravages of heathens, may all be made alike subservient. And they who, following in the wake of Gibbon, would consign the work that was of God to the sole agency of secondary causes, and think that the gospel of his Son was the device of human wisdom, and its propagation through the world the mere effect of human means, may look to the result of all their master's labours, whieh fix him for ever as a commentator on the apocalypse; and, witnessing the suicidal act, they may gird on that sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, before "the sepulchre of the martyr" to a vain philosophy, which, instead of a crown of glory, can at best requite its self-immolated victims with nothing but the poisonous breath of human praise, while it shuts them out from that kingdom, compared to which the throne of the Cæsars was a bauble, their sceptre a straw, and all the history of their empire, like a dream when one awaketh. Empires and men may each have their day but the word of God abideth for ever.

:

From the first founder of the Persian empire to the last of the Cæsars, we have seen the truth of that word traced down from point to point, and the character and order of all the successive eras marked, as a "local habitation," was given them in the Scriptures, before they had a name on earth. And now at last, bordering again on modern times, and looking on dominions that still exist, little else but one grand moral revolution remains to be seen; and, in the direct line of prophetic history, nothing but the connecting link between it and another revolution

has to be traced, till the reader may look with the light of prophecy on scenes which perhaps excited, cheered, or startled him in his boyish days; and the same divine light may lead us on till the grey-headed man may learn to look for other scenes that he yet may see.

END OF VOLUME FIRST.