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The slow and deliberate rise and establish ment of the reformation, afforded an abundant harvest of glory to God, by yielding additional and strong evidence to the power of christian principles, independent of the imagined aid of fanaticism; which it rejected with contempt, and repressed by the punishments it occasionally merited. Its melancholy progress was continually to be tracked with the blood of genuine martyrdom, and more numerous instances occurred of patient suffering for the love of Christ, and of the most cool and deliberate preference of the fiery stake, with a safe conscience, to accumulated honours and grandeur with the loss of Christ, than all the united rancour of the jews and pagans in the first ages, had occasioned.* Even women and children "resisted unto blood, and overcame by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their

This is acknowledged by this writer, so far as to the greater number of christians destroyed by christian persecutors ; but he has no higher, or more, praises to bestow upon the ge nuine virtue of the modern martyrs, than upon that of the ear jest sufferers in the same cause.

lives unto the death;" (Rev. xii. 11.) when those motives, to which the historian of the roman empire attributes so powerful an influence, were wholly out of the question. Magna est veritas, et prevalebit.

SECTION IX.

The prophecy of the MAN OF SIN;- the obstruction in his way to be removed by time; -a set time for his appearance, and duration. He is described as-a lawbreaker, -blasphemer,-and ANTICHRIST.

THE truth of the christian religion has for this reason, no doubt, been permitted of Providence to be very closely urged, by the bold hostility of its open adversaries, and attacked by the insidious cavils and concealed insinuations of its false friends; that the proofs and arguments it rests its pretensions upon, might be sifted and examined to the very bottom. For thus, additional and strong evidences of its truth and certainty have been brought forward, sufficient to supply the absence of that species of proof, which unbelievers so unrea

sonably demand; the continued ministration of living prophets, and the testimony of present miracles. For it amounts to the same thing in effect, whether we are eye witnesses to a miracle wrought in our own days, or have undeniably pointed out to our observation, the still visible and operating effects of miracles wrought ages ago, and of prophecies delivered by holy men of old, receiving their accomplishment in every age, in regular progression down to our own times, and even to the end of the world.

The internal evidence of christianity, which opens itself to the minds of its sincere profess ors, more especially in times of severe trial, by the genuine influences of the illuminating, comforting, and supporting grace of the Holy Spirit, (on such occasions imparted in larger measure,) ever has, and ever will maintain its cause, against the external force of persecu tion. Like the palm tree, it will rise up with a divine and incoercible elasticity, against the superincumbent weight that presses it down. It belongs to a false religion only, to be blown

up with fanatical delusion to a mysterious importance, which hath nothing real in it; to have recourse to pious frauds and the refuge of lies;* to bolster up a false credit with the world; and retain its superstitious votaries within the narrow limits prescribed to their hunger and thirst, for that spiritual sustenance which it either cannot, or dares not to supply,

The apostle of the gentiles was an utter enemy to imposture, and he fully undeceives the christian converts, in regard to the error that had obtained amongst them concerning the DAY OF CHRIST,-and the DAY OF JUDGMENT:-as if one and the same event were intended by those phrases, wherever they occur, and in every application of them.

This is the chief purport of that famous prophecy of the man of sin,† in chap. ii.

Isaiah xxviii. 15,

+ The man of sin, or Antichrist.—By this name all the adversaries to the christian faith are signified, as St John says, " even now are there many Antichrists." (1 John ii. 18.) But the chief application belongs evidently to the roman hier archy and its spiritual chieftain; and that not from the be

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