every person in Europe trembled for existence before the Arab sword. In that year, the first kingdom now in existence-the Greek Empire, Persian, and the Pontificate of course excepted -was set up. In it we find that Goth, and Basque, and Celtiberian, became one people, and took as Spaniards one name. Intermarriage to a limited extent began, many Gothic soldiers having escaped to the Basque provinces, but few Gothic females. The relation was no longer that of conquerors and slaves, of the Englishman to the Hindoo, but of Northmen to the Saxon in England, of the Protestant to the Romanist in Ireland. Still, the example thus set was followed. Between A.D. 719 and 1062, we find first the laws of Howel Ddha set up over all the little kings of the west, then the same laws adopted by Alfred through Asser, his British secretary and prime minister of the English people, through whom he had negociated for support of the army which restored him to the throne he had lost; no Saxon then knowing how to put three sentences together in any civilised tongue, and every country speaking a different patois, whilst through the southern counties the old Flemish prevailed. We find also the laws of Charlemagne, which ruled Germany till 1805; the Lombard laws, which prevailed in northern Italy till 1798; the Venetian laws, which continued till 1842 in Spain, till 1833 in Portugal; the French salic law, till 1790; the digest of the Moslem code, imposed upon men as the sayings of Mohammed; and the elaborate legislation of Haroun-al-Raschid and the Egyptian and Eastern Khaliphs, on which all oriental jurisprudence is to this day framed. This was expressly the era of law-making. It was only as lawyers, physicians, and agents, the priests could influence the landed nobles, or share their spoil. No one can peruse Guizot's " Civilisation" (if, indeed, any one ever had patience to peruse a work more indefinite than a production of Mr Gladstone's, which might have been written by a galvanised Egyptian muminy, so dead is the writer to human character) without seeing that it consists almost entirely of the acts of emperors, kings, councils, synods, assemblies, striving to legislate on what can never be effected by legislation, invariably set at nought by some mountain baron, whose craggy fortress and steady vassals enabled him to defy bishop and priest. Everything is fixed by law, to the number of dishes a man may have at table, or the exact texture of his wife's petticoats. No people ever laboured harder during this time, than did the Popish or Roman priests-the words are synonymous-to substitute the rule of law for that of the sword; but, then, as they claimed to be the sole makers and interpreters of law, their decisions always proved infinitely

more tyrannical and oppressive than those of the military northern chiefs, who sought to perpetuate their families, not to enrich an institution, and who, therefore, softened also by female influence, as husbands and fathers, were generally merciful to their own vassals, how stern soever they might be to other men. The Gothic lady, high bred and chaste, devoted to her family, delicately modest in her character, was a very different person from the spoilt, self-willed, wanton, Roman mistress of purchased slaves; she could always mediate between the knight and the serf who incurred his indignation.

The black horse of the third seal plainly appears, according to Oriental practice, to denote a merciless judge, a judge who condemns to capital or cruel punishment. Such was the case now. In the preceding seven jubilees, although the slaughter in war was dreadful, comparatively few judicial executions followed. Where two parties fight till they can contend no longer, and each fears his enemy, wanton slaughter becomes rare. In this third seal, however, we find Alfred hanging more of his Saxon people than probably fell in any of their defeats by Guthrum or Hastings, and executing judges faster than we do murderers, whilst the Church and its tribunals encouraged the putting to death of twenty thousand, thirty thousand, forty thousand persons at a time, under Charlemagne; orders being given to butcher all above four feet four inches in height, or exceeding the length of the conqueror's sword. The punishments are aggravated. Under Roman government no Roman citizen could suffer except for renouncing worship of the Emperor, save by the sword; and for centuries all Britons, Gauls, and, in fact, all white men who chose, had power, on payment of a fine, to become Roman citizens. True, the Western and Scottish Britons had refused, and mocked at the offer to turn Italians, but the practical result of this act of emancipation had been, to confine ignominious or torturing punishments to the Christian martyr, who was forced to deny his worship, by refusing sacrifice to Cybele or the Emperor, and to the slave population, which was mainly of Asiatic or African descent, and very numerous only in Italy, Portugal, and Andalusia.* But habitual fasting, and separation from female influence, especially when accompanied by constant and severe flagellation, render men

* The modern Italians of the South are, like the Greeks, mainly the descendants of the old slave population. The writer desires not to be understood as tolerating infliction of these cruelties on the slave population. He would be the last to do that. He objects here to their extension to the free, as an increase of the evil.

naturally the mildest, the most indifferent to all the feelings of humanity.

It will, perhaps, be asked, how can men be found to take gratification in self-torture? Now the fact is, that if fasting and mental stimulus be carried to a certain extent, the mind becomes morbidly sensitive; absolute quiescence will have reduced the pain of fasting to nothing; but when the great ganglion of the stomach is brought to the due pitch of nervous excitability, as distinguished from sensibility, the effect of choral music upon a man, if of Celtic, Pelasgic, or even German blood, coupled with sweet incense-we will not name the necessary drugs, the priesthood know them-produce an intoxication of delight; even a few drops of opium cause perfect happiness. Under such circumstances, the more highly his nervous feelings can be stimulated, the greater will be the extent of his delirium. Hence the constant recourse to flagellation in monasteries and convents, so as to excite the nerves to the

highest pitch of contraction. The object is, to keep up a direct morbid irritation of the whole system, the lungs and liver alone excepted. Hence this system of fasting has to be interrupted with most individuals by occasional excesses, but its constant repetition deprives the monk of all the powers, feeling, and ideas of man, renders him a mere bodiless ghost, not yet released from flesh, and inevitably a cruel persecutor-or, if he possess unusual force of passions and strength of will, a recreant to his creed. You must have the whole system, or none of it. A Protestant convent, without fasting, flagellation, mesmerism, and penance of every kind, mingled with rich music and sweet incense, is simply a childish farce. The system never succeeded in Wales, for that race has not the slightest idea by nature of musical harmony. In Wales, the use of Italian music was treated as treason, and even now not one native Welshman in a hundred but would regard Beethoven, Mozart, or Handel, as a German bore. He who thinks an immaterial heaven can be attained only by wearing out his useless body by self-scourging daily till the blood flows, by incessant self-torture, by overcoming all earthly emotion, so that the spirit or pneuma be disengaged from the carcase ;—who, in fact, believes his spirit the property of the mother of God-who deems it sinful to wash away the filth that covers him, or dislodge the vermin that swarm in his uncombed, unshorn locks-who thinks it criminal to allow his weeping mother to behold him-who believes that Christ, the Judge, delights in human anguish, and that none can please Him save by sacrificing his physical powers-who believes that

every pang inflicted on his carcase is a tribute paid to the Almighty, and who regards even the Holy One as his debtor; whilst, at the same time, his heart is consumed with desires for that imaginary goddess who haunts his drug-produced dreams, just as the vision of sumptuous banquets afflicts men perishing of starvation ;-such a being will have no mercy on other men, no tenderness on human frailties, no compassion on those who go astray. He will not deal gently, like Him in whom there was no sin, with the feeble and the weak. He contends only for the abomination of extending these tortures, and making one hundred millions of men liable to cruelties from which they had been legally freed. Yet, with all this, he may oppose any attempt to re-enslave the blacks of Barbadoes; and he may not be indifferent to the sufferings of those who have never been emancipated, although he may not see how as yet their deliverance can be effected without war, which he would fear to sanction. Hence, with the ascendant of the Greek and Roman priesthood, we find the plucking out of both eyes, the amputation of limbs, the branding with hot irons, the incarceration in cold, light-withdrawn dungeons, scourging not confined to the Scriptural limit, but carried to an extent beyond man's power to bear, the rack, the strappard, the wheel-cruelties unknown to the British, who had no priests but only ambassadors from God, and employed even by the Romans only for slaves, whom they wickedly deemed to have no rights as men-everywhere introduced. Fearful as were the cruelties of the preceding seal, it was yet a happier time for those who lived under it. The white horse had, it is true, given place to the red of battle, but from battle there may be escape, and in it there may be victory. There is none from the scaffold, the inquisition, or the torture chamber of the priest. The sword may be parried in a good cause, if you keep a quick eye, but there is no parrying the scourge of a monk.

But it will be said, You fall into the same error with which Edward Irving has justly charged all preceding commentators, that of limiting the application of Scripture to a comparatively small part of the world, and making it of private application. Not so: it will be found, that to the entire Greek and Persian and Indian Empires, as well as the Roman and the Northern, these remarks also apply, thus comprising the whole three then existing divisions of mankind. It was during this very period that the judicial slaughters of Charlemagne and Alfred raged fiercely; that in Persia conspiracy succeeded conspiracy; that the Moslem power, as it became more conso

lidated and more Persian, daily grew more tyrannical; that thousands and thousands died by the sabre, the bow-string, or the impaling stake; that now raged the merciless El Hamza, the truest representative of Antichrist; and that, distrusting the scimitar, the Sultan sought to strike terror rather by torture than by the sword. The period was one of deep oppression, not of absolute destruction. Men could increase, and multiply, and settle, but they drew not near to God. They did not pray for deliverance, and none was vouchsafed.

Let us, however, now come to the literal interpretation of this seal. The instructions to this rider are" A measure of wheat for a penny, or three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine" (Rev. vi. 6). What does this mean?

Excellent men say, that by "wheat" is meant the gospel. What then does "barley" mean? A certain facetious public character is once said to have remarked, that the relation between the English clergy and the Scotch Kirk was that between pheasants and barn-door fowls-equally wholesome, but the one a little more savoury to tastes jaded by epicurism. It were profanity, however, thus to explain the Word of God, and we cannot accept the mystical interpretation, because we know God's gospel was not procurable or accessible at any point, from the Mesopotamian hills to the Severn, at any price whatever, much less at a labourer's daily wages, any more than in Spain. Now, would it not be mockery to issue a proclamation, fixing the price of wheat flour at sevenpence halfpenny the quart, if there were no flour in store, and no hope of any? Where, when, and how, was the gospel preached during this period? Let one instance be produced. How was the Spanish, the Italian, the French peasant, or even the Goth who had lost his father's tongue, to know anything about a Bible which was not translated into any language save the Latin of the monks, the Sclavonian, the Syriac, the Greek, and partially the British and German, and was accessible to the British laity alone even in part, the priests elsewhere keeping it to themselves? The Saxon priests, we all know, south of the Humber—an important distinction for those north of it were evangelised by Scotch and Welsh, not Italian, missionaries-were unable to read in the days of Alfred, who used his reconciliation with the Britons against the Danes, to import British missionaries even into the south, for the Kentish and Cambridgeshire Britons. In France, and Spain, and Greece, we see, from their unanimous acts, the entire clergy were as idolatrous as any Hindoos. How, then, with a