this is the year, from which we must begin our retrogressive inquiry.

The appearance of the locusts is preceded by a thick smoke, which rises out of the abyss : and, from the midst of this smoke, they seem to issue. Hence, if the locusts issued forth in the year 612, the thick smoke, which came out of the same abyss with themselves, and which shortly darkened both the sun and the air, must have begun to rise previous to that year. This smoke, however, must clearly be connected with the locusts : both because they come out of it, and because they and the smoke equally rise out of the same abyss. Such being the case, I see not what the smoke can be supposed to mean, except the dense and noxious fumes of that corrupt theology, which at first was privately taught by Mohammed from the year 609 to the year 612; but which, in a wonderfully short space of time after the latter of those years, darkened, to a large portion of the world, the Sun of righteousness, and obscured the wholesome air through which his beams had heretofore shone upon the Roman earth. We may reasonably, therefore, conclude, that the smoke began to rise, when Mohammed, in the year 609, began, as yet privately, to breathe the fumes of his intoxicating imposture upon his fourteen earliest converts.

But, before the smoke begins to rise, the door of the pit is opened by a star, which had recently completed its fall from heaven. Hence the pit must be opened, and the star must complete its

issuing forth of the locusts, is immediately pre: ceded by the completion of the fall of a star from heaven or (in plain language) by the completion of the apostasy of an eminent Christian Bishop. Now the great demonolatrous Apostasy was completed by the revelation of the lawless man of sin : and the lawless man of sin was revealed at the commencement of the latter three times and a half, when the times and the laws and the saints within the limits of his appointed western domain were unanimously given into his hand by the existing representatives of the ten Gothic kings. But this unanimity first occurred in the year 604: and, immediately afterward, or in the year 609, Mohammedism, as we had been taught to expect both by Daniel and by John, stood up or commenced. Hence the phantasm of the star completing its fall from heaven to earth, which immediately precedes the rise of Mohammedism in the year 609 and the issuing forth of the Saracenic locusts in the year 612, is chronologically determined to mean the completion of the demonolatrous Apostasy by the revelation of its lawless head at the commencement of the latter three times and a half: and hence, as the completed fall of the star, with which the vision opens, immediately precedes the rise of Mohammedism in the year 609, the latter three times and a half must have commenced immediately before that year 609. But no epoch, thus chronologically determined, will serve for the commencement of the latter three times and a half, except the year 604,

in the answer to this question. The Christians of the seventh century had insensibly relapsed into a semblance of Paganism : the great demonolatrous Apostasy, foretold by St. Paul, had extended itself far and wide throughout the Catholic Church : and, at length, in the year 604, it was completed by the revelation of the man of sin as its authoritative head; when, by the unanimous delivery of the times and the laws and the saints into the hand of the little western horn, the papal supremacy was established. This was the circumstance, which rendered the seventh century so peculiarly favourable to the rise and progress of Mohammedism. The impostor's intercourse with the Christians and the Jews taught him the gross folly of his national polytheism : but his natural shrewdness at the same time led him to perceive, how widely the Christians of that age had departed from their own acknowledged principles, by their worship of dead men, or by what the historian well denominates their lapse into a semblance of Paganism. Accordingly, his religious system was avowedly constructed on the basis of a direct opposition to idolatry of every sort and description. During six hundred years, the Gospel, he allowed, was the way of truth and salvation: but the Christians insensibly forgot both the laws and the example of their founder 1. Hence he publicly declared, that he was commissioned of God, to destroy polytheism and idolatry,

• Hist. of Decline, vol. ix. p. 266.