may experience, prospers, until his angry defiance of the living God is finished '. - Such a declaration does not specify a precise time in days or in months or in years : but, for the comfort of the Church, it clearly enough intimates, that a certain limit is fixed to his tyrannical malignity. His impiety, we are told, shall be allowed to vent itself to the full: his angry defiance shall meet with no lasting or effectual check in its progress ; but it shall be permitted to complete itself to the uttermost. Yet the very turn of the clause plainly implies, that his prosperity will not be for ever uninterrupted. He is to prosper, until his angry defiance shall be finished. Prosperity is promised to him during the course of his defiance: and prosperity, for any thing that is said to the contrary, may attend upon him for some short time after his defiance shall have been completed. But the construction of the clause certainly seems to import, that the days of his prosperity are numbered, and that the tide will turn against him not

It is not unworthy of note, that the same word dyp is used by Daniel to express, both the angry defiance of the holy covenant on the part of Antiochus-Epiphanes, and the angry defiance of the God of gods on the part of the Roman king. Compare Dan. xi. 30, 36. This studied identity of expression serves to shew, that the angry defiance on the part of the Roman king was to be homogeneous with the angry defiance on the part of Antiochus-Epiphanes. Each was to be an act of daring impiety and irreligion.

very long after the permitted completion of his angry defiance.

Accordingly, what is thus insinuated by the particular turn of the clause is required by the general context of the prophecy.

We may observe a chronological break, between the atheistical exploits of the Roman king on the one hand, and between his final war with the kings of the South and the North on the other hand. There is a manifest chasm or hiatus in the joint course of those two successive periods, which are commensurate with the latter part of the history of the Roman king: an hiatus of quiescence, because nothing specially deserving of prophetic notice is performed; but not an hiatus of annihilation, because the Roman king again appears conspicuously on the stage when he is attacked by the kings of the South and the North'.

Hence we may collect, that the marked and triumphant prosperity of the Roman king ceases, when this chronological break commences and hence we may learn, that, having now finished his defiance of the God of gods and of the Desire of women, he shortly experiences some striking reverse, and is compelled to a reluctant quiescence until a new movement on his part produces a joint attack upon him from two then contemporaneous sovereigns.

Now we may justly reckon the defiance of the

1 Dan. xi. 40-45.

Roman king to have been finished, when Christianity, in however corrupt a form, was finally and authoritatively restored : for, as the defiance in question was a defiance of the God of gods and the Desire of women, the defiance was finished when Jehovah and his Christ ceased to be publicly and nationally defied. Individual unbelief, or the spirit of the Antichrist, might prevail as widely as ever : but prophecy, for the most part, respects the deeds, not of individuals, but of kingdoms. Hence, as the public and national establishment of Infidelity chiefly constituted the angry defiance of the Roman king : so the public and national establishment of Christianity will mark the termination of his angry defiance.

At the latter end of the year 1799, Napoleon Buonapartè, upon his accession to power, became the instrument of restoring to France the free exercise of the Christian faith. By general consent, the mummery of Reveilliere Lepeux's heathenism was abandoned. The churches were opened for public worship: pensions were allowed to such religious persons as took an oath of fidelity to the government : and more than twenty thousand clergymen, with whom in consequence of intolerant laws the prisons had been filled, were liberated upon the same condition. Public and domestic rites of worship in every form were tolerated and protected : and the law of the decades or theophilanthropic festivals was abolished ?.

See Scott's Life of Napol. Buonap. vol. iv. p. 196, 197.

finished, he may ere long expect to taste the cup of humiliation and adversity.

Accordingly, his prosperity continued but a short time after the completion of his angry defiance. In the year 1808, the tide turned against him. Spain had the glory of making the first effectual continental resistance: and, notwithstanding some partial gleams of good fortune, the current ceased not to set strongly against him, until at length by the fatal battle of Waterloo he was reduced to a state of humiliating quiescence'.

At this time, if we arrange prophecy synchronically with prophecy, the short-lived seventh head of the apocalyptic Roman wild-beast was mortally wounded by the sword of foreign violence: and the wild-beast himself, all his seven heads being now extinct, sank into that condition of political non-entity as a collective federal Empire, which the interpreting angel describes by the phrase of his ceasing to be or his non-existence. But the same short-lived head, which was mortally wounded by the sword, is destined, we are told, to revive : and, through this predicted revival, the wild-beast, which

· Buonapartè himself reckoned his downfall from his alike unprincipled and impolitic attempt to appropriate Spain. That wretched war, said he of the Spanish contest in the bitterness of his soul : That wretched war was my ruin. It divided my forces; multiplied the necessity of my efforts; and injured my character for morality. Scott's Life of Napol. Buonap. vol. vi. p. 125. We may doubt, whether it very seriously injured the imperial moral character.