unless we take into the account the more insidious devices of the enemy in raising up from among the very 'household of faith,' foes to its doctrines and principles, who, under the semblance of giving it their support, are employed in secretly undermining its foundations."-Bishop Van Mildert. Interpretation of Parables. "Those parts which signify nothing are added on account of those which signify something. The earth is ploughed only with the ploughshare, but in order to this, the other members of the plough are necessary. It is only the strings of harps and other musical instruments that are useful; but to make them so, there are things which are not touched by the musician, but which are yet in connexion with those parts which give forth the sound. So in prophetic history some things are spoken which have not any special meaning, but to which these parts which have significance are linked.”—Augustine De Cir., b. xvi. ch. 2. The Kingdom of Christ. "In the last thousand years of the world, this knowledge and enjoyment will be much greater and more universal. Israel or Zion will then be the chief church of the earth; the glory of the Lord will be seen specially upon them; but the Gentiles, also, will walk in their light, and kings in their brightness. The priesthood of Christ will then be explained much more deeply and fully, both by the types and the writings of the New Testament, in that temple of which Ezekiel speaks. The Spirit of God will then bestow great gifts, and produce mighty effects. Then the Song of Solomon, which is now the most obscure book in Holy Scripture, will be clearly understood, and correspond more than any other with the experience of the Church, for the marriagefeast of the Lamb will be celebrated in heaven (according to Rev. xix.), and on earth it will be a Solomonic period, peaceful, quiet, glorious, nuptial, not in a carnal sense, but in a spiritual, even as the Scripture of all the prophets testifies. Israel will then be again a Theocracy; it will be ruled, not according to worldly, but according to divine statutes; not by strangers, but by Israelites; however, there will be then no king, but a prince, and thus the blessed Sabbatic period of the Judges will return, not in the glory of the Old, but of the New Testament (Ezek. xlv., &c.; Isa. i. 26). Such will be the kingdom of the Lord, Obad. 21; Rev. xi. 15."-Roos. Resurrection with Christ. "In Christ the world rose; in him the heaven rose; in him the earth rose; for there shall be a new heaven and a new earth."Ambrose, De Fide Resurr: 2. 102. The Millennial Sabbath. "When the sixth day shall have passed, rest shall come, after its blasts are over, and the saints shall keep Sabbath" (sabbatizabunt).— Augustine, Serm. 125. 4. The Ages. In the sixth age, the world is completed; in the seventh, the Lord judges the earth (τýv oikovμévηv); in the eighth, the righteous depart to everlasting life, the others to everlasting punishment.”—Athanasius on Ps. vi. The Scriptural Use of the Expression "Coming of Christ." "Time was when I know not what mystical meanings were drawn, by a certain cabalistic alchymy, from the simplest expressions of Holy Writ-from expressions in which no allusion could reasonably be supposed to anything beyond the particular occasion upon which they were introduced. While this frenzy raged among the learned, visionary lessons of divinity were often derived, not only from detached texts of Scripture, but from single words; not from words only, but from letters from the place, the shape, the posture of the letter; and the blunders of transcribers, as they have since proved to be, have been the groundwork of many a fine-spun meditation. 66 "It is the weakness of human nature, in every instance of folly, to run from one extreme to its opposite. In later ages, since we have seen the futility of those mystic expositions in which the school of Origen so much delighted, we have been too apt to fall into the contrary error; and the same unwarrantable licence of figurative interpretation which they employed to elevate, as they thought, the plain parts of Scripture, has been used, in modern times, in effect to lower the divine. Among the passages which have been thus misrepresented by the refinements of a false criticism, are those which contain the explicit promise of the coming of the Son of man in glory, or in his kingdom, which it is become so much the fashion to understand of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman arms, within half a century after our Lord's ascension, that to those who take the sense of Scripture from the best modern expositors, it must seem doubtful whether any clear prediction is to be found in the New Testament of an event in which, of all others, the Christian world is most interested."-Horsley's Sermons. Rome the Babylon of the Revelation. They have lately built a superb viaduct across the valley from Albano to Aricia-a more magnificent work the Romans of Trajan's days could not have reared. It has three tiers of arches, and over the lower gallery there is an aqueduct. On the further side, to be seen by persons travelling towards Rome, they have placed the following curious. inscription :—' Viam ad urbem novam Jerusalem, et ad limina apostolorum Pius IX., Pont. Max., in hanc altitudinem creari jussit.' Rome thus is the New Jerusalem ;' -the limina apostolorum' is an euphemism for St Peter's and St Paul's, the two churches of chief note here. If this New Jerusalem' had its streets' of 'pure gold,' they would all disappear in twenty-four hours; nor would they, I fear, have the effect of displacing the paper currency, which, in spite of several loans, contrives to keep gold and silver out of sight. As for the 'precious stones' of the foundations, they are only to be seen in the Pope's tiara a splendid present sent him by the Queen of Spain, and containing 19,000 jewels of great value. This will, probably, in due time be pawned to the Jews, as was the tiara of Pius VI., for everything here is miserable and poor, and at the same time extravagant. They are making efforts to get up an army, and there is a vigorous trumpeting and drumming every morning in my square to exercise the troops. I often think how uselessly the poor Pope is trumpeting away his money, for if it should come to the scratch,' as we say in England, these soldiers would, in all probability, turn against the government. They are, however, uncommonly well dressed and got up.' I never saw soldiers more neatly set out anywhere. So are the dragoons a very fine body of men. Then there are infantry, cacciatore (chasseurs), versaglieri (riflemen), artillery, and noble guards. They make a very imposing show; no troops can look better anywhere, and I assure you the other day when they were following their Levite king (in the great procession of Corpus Domini), who was carried kneeling on a platform, preceded by an innumerable host of prelates in their mitres, and all the religious orders, the Papal troops added greatly to the splendour of the scene. The Pope's person is surrounded by his Swiss Guards, who muster on these occasions about fifty. They are dressed in the antique form of the sixteenth century, with helmets and corslets of steel, and huge halberds such as you see in ancient pictures. In short, everything that can be imagined, from Buddah and Foh, through the middle ages down to a modern tailor's shop, has been raked together to create the pomp of the 'Head of the Church,' who, by the way, over one of the doors of the inner court of the Vatican, is called in an inscription, 'Vicarius Filii Dei. When I see these grand processions, I think of the processions of the Roman conquerors to the Capitol, which, though more splendid (doubtless), did not represent such great victories, for they had only subdued earthly sovereigns, but the Pope has mastered Christ, over whom I consider these processions to be a triumph. The day will come when He will break them in pieces like a potter's vessel; but in the meanwhile the Popes have driven the woman into the wilderness, where she is hid for a season." Thus far writes our friend, under date "Rome, May 29, 1856." Surely the assumption of being "the New Jerusalem," and thus "the Bride, the Lamb's wife" (Rev. xxi. 9, 10), is in perfect keeping with the character of the great whore, Rev. xvii.—Achill Miss. Herald, VOL. VIII. 2 E Correspondence. WE continue our extracts from the letters of a friend : Deut. xx. 10-20.-Oh, the depth of cruelty that is contained in the Church's cry for Christ to delay his coming until the world becomes better prepared for him! Whenever a cup of sin is full, the sooner judgment is executed the greater will be the quantity of precious materials to be saved out of it. All cry for delay, which, on the part of faithless brethren, is the mercilessness of those who would prevent the besiegers of a city perishing by famine from terminating the miseries of their comrades, starving in its dungeons, by a vigorous escalade. Let us see how wondrously all this is shewn out in the history of the Church under Moses. We have seen that Now, as these cycles of the Church's "times" are ever to be seen imaged in the history of her champion, be he who he may, we find the life of Moses composed of three great periods of forty years, each terminating in a floodtide an "accepted time" of the Church, which, if neglected, "All the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea were they then afloat, And they must take the current when it serves, The first of these periods, when "a door was opened" for the Church, occurred when Moses was forty years old. It then "came into his heart" to visit his brethren. Now, he thought, they would have UNDERSTOOD how God, by him, would deliver them. Alas, in all ages "my people have been destroyed for lack of knowledge." The stork and the swallow observe the times of their migration, but Israel did not understand God's voice, saying "now" to them: they knew not that it was "the day of their visitation," and therefore their history for the next forty years was "full of shallows." Had they then read aright the signs in Heaven's telegraph, God, doubtless, would have brought them out of Egypt, not by the staff of a poor prophet, but by the sword of the Prince of Egypt: they would not have become imbruted by a prolonged bondage among the heathen; and doubtless, the Lord's "now for them to leave Egypt was secretly echoing in the hearts of all Egyptians to permit them to go; as the ripeness of the seed, and its ejection by the plant, are the simultaneous action of two processes of one and the same life. Well, they did not seize "the nick in Time's restless wheel" at the exact moment, and so they had to wait till the wheel again revolved its periodical circuit of forty years, during which dreary time Moses, for their sins and "slowness of heart to believe," had to undergo a new and tedious education to fit him for the altered form of the deliverance preparing for them not the triumphant procession of an army under the Prince of Egypt, but the hurried flight of a timid flock of unarmed shepherds, led by an outlawed cowherd. Well, the forty mysterious years again came round, and this time they were delivered; but they came out like a body that had lain too long inertcovered with lichens-a mixed multitude now so leavened with the Egyptian element, that the forms of their sins for ages to come were earthly; looking backwards and downwards, instead of forwards and upwards-as our Churches have ever been looking backwards to the Apostles and Fathers, and down wards to the grave, instead of forward to her Bridegroom's advent, and upwards to the New Jerusalem. But this is not all the evil which the Church's sluggishness brought upon mankind. When the second forty years had expired, the Church, which might have been taken out of Egypt with a blessing to both, had now so rooted its fibres in the Egyptian soil, that in her deliverance from the house of bondage that soil was so torn up, that it was truly said by Pharaoh's people, "Knowest thou not that Egypt is destroyed?" Truly the marks of those terrific convulsions are now seen, in that Egypt has been "the basest of kingdoms" ever since. So much for the mercifulness of the Church in refusing God's emancipation, under the plea of love for man-crying for a little more space for evangelising Egypt. It is the old cry of Solomon's sluggard-" Yet a little sleep; a little slumber; a little folding of the hands to sleep." But deliverance from Egypt is one thing-entrance into Canaan is another. The first act God prevailed to do; alas, the second part of the process failed through the old sin deeply inwrought in their being through their loitering in Egypt-that of looking back, and standing still, instead of pressing forward to know and possess the things freely given of God. God's "now" again sounded: they shrank back from leaving the security of their shepherd condition, and enter on their true vocation of being soldiers and kings, just as they had shrunk from Moses, the soldier king, forty years before they preferred their humble tabernacle to the promised temple; the light manna to the new wine of Eshcol-as we do our decaying Churches, yea, and our priestly stoles, to the gorgeous purple, and the imperial crown, and the golden apples of the New Jerusalem. "There is a history in all men's lives, The Church having again refused to seize, or be seized, by "the nick in Time's restless wheel," had again to fulfil her times. Man cannot frustrate God's purpose, though he may retard it. The mysterious forty years did again come round, and the Church did enter into Canaan; but in what condition did they find it! That land, whose cup, filled eighty years before, had now become so overflown with sin, boiling over the brim for fourscore years, that instead of finding nations of servants to be their vine-dressers, over whom they might have ruled as kings and priests, not one thread of continuity was left to pass the old life of Canaan into the new, save one, and that a harlot ! Yea, so irretrievably had the malaria of a society remaining in stagnant sin for eighty years spread, that not one good thing could God quicken out of it, but all must be destroyed! So much for the tender mercy of the Church in delaying the time of God's judgment !-15th May 1844. 1 Poetry. THE EVERLASTING MEMORIAL. Up and away, like the dew of the morning, |