"Of thirteen sail of the line, nine were taken, and two burnt; of the four frigates, one burnt, another sunk."—How small a proportion, even after such a scene, of the hundred and eighty-nine sail of the line, and the three hundred and forty-eight frigates, besides an innumerable multitude of smaller vessels, which were taken or destroyed in the course of the war. The vial was poured upon the sea, and it became as the blood of the dead.

Nu

And every living thing died in the sea. merous and vast as were the national engines of naval warfare, and terrible as was the destruction which they wrought, other agents were called in to enter in the strife and to do the work of seizure and of slaughter, besides the navies of Britain and France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Denmark. A system of privateering was established. A naval war became the trade of individuals as well as of nations. Letters of marque were issued; and the merchant could sit calmly at his desk, and under the sanction of human laws, fit out a privateer. The quarrel of nations was converted into the privilege of private plunder, or of sharing in the spoil. From being the high-way of the commerce of the world, which God had left open from shore to shore, the sea, whether for large fleets of ships of the line, or for the single two-gun privateer, became a field for the chace, or the scene of battle, where warriors decided the controversy of kingdoms, and the licensed pirate went forth to capture or to slay and hence, after the first few years of the war, the number of the smaller vessels that were taken or destroyed, cannot, from their multiplicity, be accurately ascertained. The ocean was never so polluted with blood. And interdicts and edicts, affecting commerce, or whatever pertained to the sea, were passed, such as had never before been heard of in the world; and

such as, either on the earth or on the sea, there never was a power to enforce till then. On principles of reciprocal ruin, added to those of vengeance and plunder, the famous Berlin and Milan decrees, in the north and in the south of Europe, which shut all its harbours against Britain, were answered by Orders in Council; and the retaliation was seconded and enforced by more than a hundred thousand British seamen. France, during the war, lost every one of its colonies. But Europe was armed against Britain, or in alliance with her foe. And not a ship of Continental Europe could ride in safety on any part of the sea; an embargo was virtually laid along every coast and on every port, from the straits of the Dardanelles to the Gulph of Bothnia. And as if the open sea had been the bare desert, which the wild beasts claim as their own, and where not a liv ing thing could encroach without danger or death on their domain, the British lion trode unchallenged over it, and many a jackal watched for the prey. As pertaining to all the dominions in league with France, or in subjection to its power, it might well be said, as of no time beside, when the vial was fully poured out, every living thing died in the sea.

They that are of God, said he who came from God, hear God's words; and the cause why men do not hear them is, that they are not of God. The cares of this world, said he also who knew what was in man, the deceitfulness of riches, the pleasures of this life, and the care of other things, choke the word and render it unfruitful. While busy thus in the service of the god of this world, and loading themselves with thick clay, or dead while they live in pleasure, how lightly, nay contemptuously, from the blindness that is in them, do men treat the word of God, not counting it worth the reading or the hearing. Yet if not blinded by the god of this world,

clearly might they see, as if by actual experiment, that all the treasures of the world, if weighed against a single word of the living oracles of God, are lighter than dust in the balance. Not only were ships without number destroyed, and colonies taken, and the sea dyed with blood, but, to reckon by Mammon's only rule, more than three hundred millions were, from first to last, expended by Britain alone in illustration of a single verse, with as little thought or purpose of thereby fulfilling that word, as Saracens invaded the Roman empire and overspread great part of Asia, Africa, and Europe in fulfilment of

another.

The prayers of saints are golden vials full of odours; but the works of fanatical atheists and daring blasphemers were vials of wrath. Boldly as the British seamen rushed to the battle, it is a matter of bitter sorrow and lamentation, that, too generally, they rushed as fearlessly against the thick bosses of the buckler of the Almighty; and were guilty of doing, with the most reckless levity, what, above all things, men are commanded in God's holy word not to do-above all things, swear not. But yet the wrath of men, blasphemers though they were, was made to praise the Lord. And, if possible, more marvellously still, and not less manifestly, we have only, in the next place, to come and see, how avowed unbelievers, utterly controverting their own infidel principles, farher accomplished the same end; and how the Directory of France, in issuing their mandates to one of the greatest generals who ever filled the world with his fame, by the counsels which they devised, and the great task which they put into his hands, vied with the British Board of Admiralty in doing, in its appointed order, the express work that was written in those scriptures which they denied.

Judgments were not suspended, so soon as they

began to sit upon the earth, although the second vial of wrath had begun to be poured upon the sea. But the third vial, coming in its course, was poured out on its appointed place.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE THIRD VIAL.

THE reader may perhaps have already seen, how prophetic terms may derive their most intelligible exposition from historical facts. And it is not now, when we have reached the period of manifest judgments, that the word of God anywise needs that man should come in with his terms of explanation. But comparing things spiritual with spiritual, the meaning may be plain. And, looking unto events that fill their place in history, and that startled the world with their magnitude no less than the foremost of naval wars, the proof may be as clear. The sea was the scene of the second trumpet as well of the second vial. And, in like manner, the third trumpet determines the site of the third vial.

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter, Rev. viii. 10, 11.

And the third angel poured out his vial upon the RIVERS AND FOUNTAINS OF WATERS; and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast,

and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink, for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.

The first trumpet sounded over the Roman empire. The second re-echoed from the coast of Africa to the shores of Italy and Spain, and spread over the Mediterranean sea. The scene of the third was the rivers and fountains of waters, the fountains that rise and the rivers that flow from the Alps and Appenines, and which render northern Italy a land of streams. There Attila, the great star, fell. Reducing, in his course, the cities of Acquileia, Altinum, Concordia, and Padua, to heaps of stones and ashes, and, burning as it were a lamp, the inland towns of Vicenza, Verona, and Bergamo having also been exposed to the rapacious cruelty of the Huns, he spread his ravages. "over the rich plains of modern Lombardy, which are divided by the Po, and bounded by the Alps and Appenines." The waters, or the same region under the same name, continued to be wormwood to the empire of Rome, after the ravages and death of Attila. "Many thousands of his subjects assembled on the plains of Piedmont." And subsequently, at Tortona, at the foot of the Alps, an impetuous sedition broke out in the Roman camp, the final result of which was the extinction of the western empire. The chief of the confederates of Italy fixed his residence at Milan (situated in the midst of waters), which Attila had previously possessed, and it was from Milan that "Ricimer marched to the gates of Rome."

The locality of the rivers and fountains of waters, as descriptive of a specific region in the Roman territory, abridged as then it was, and in reference to the downfall of imperial Rome, may thus be held as de