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13. "Prudence, as well as modesty, requires that we should forbear all curious inquiries into the nature and condition of this future kingdom; as how Satan should be bound for a thousand years, and afterwards loosed again; how the raised saints shall dwell with the living, and judge and govern the world; how Christ shall manifest himself to them, and reign among them; how the new Jerusalem, the city and church of the living God, shall descend from heaven to earth; how Satan shall at last deceive the nations, and what nations they shall be. These are points which the Holy Spirit hath not thought fit to explain; and folly may easily ask more questions about them than wisdom can answer." Farewell.

Letter II.

INTRODUCTION CONTINUED.

Dear Brother Benjamin,

Let me invite your patient attention to a few more extracts on the subject of the millennium.

§ 1. The Rev. G. S. Faber, who published, in the commencement of this century, "A dissertation on the prophecies relative to the 1260 years," in two volumes, closes the whole with the following recapitulation: "From what has been said, we learn that the 1260 days are the appointed hour of the powers of darkness, the space of time allotted for the prevalence both of popery and Mohammedanism, and for the short-lived triumph of Antichrist.

"In the year 606, the saints seem to have been first given, by the secular power of the Roman empire, into the hand of the papal little horn; consequently, from this year the 1260 days ought most probably to be computed. The desolating transgression of the Mohammedan little horn, however, is destined to prevail during the same space of time that the papal little horn is permitted to reign. Hence, in order that the two periods of 1260 years each might be made to synchronize together, it seemed necessary that the desolating transgression of Mohammedanism should first make its appearance in the very year when the saints were delivered into the hand of the papal little horn. Accordingly we find that it did first make its appearance in that year, for the year 606 is the most proper date of the Mohammedan imposture, because in that year Mohammed first retired to the cave of Hera.

§ 2. "The papal horn arose, as we have seen, at the precise time when Daniel predicted that it should rise; namely, while the Roman empire was falling asunder, and while ten independent kingdoms were springing up out of its ruins. It arose gradually and almost imperceptibly, among and behind the ten horns of the fourth beast; three of which were successively eradicated before it, and, by their fall, gave it an opportunity of becoming a temporal, no less than a spiritual power. For some time after its rise it was only an ecclesiastical kingdom; but that kingdom, though small at first, continued perpetually to increase in size; till, in the year 606, when the Pope was declared universal Bishop and supreme head of the Catholic church, it became a mighty ecclesiastical empire. At this era, which seems to be the proper date of the 1260 years, an epoch when the old Pagan Roman beast, which had been mortally wounded by the sword of the Spirit under his sixth head, revived, under the same sixth head, by setting a spiritual tyrant in the church, and by relapsing

into idolatry. St. John first introduces upon the stage the power which Daniel symbolizes by the little horn of the fourth beast. The power, however, had now become an universal empire, instead of being what it had hitherto been, a limited ecclesiastical kingdom. Hence the apostle, instead of representing the ten-horned beast as having likewise a little horn, describes him as attended by a second beast, whose character precisely answers to that of the little horn. By the instigation of the corrupt spiritual power, the ten-horned beast, or the secular Roman empire, wages war with the saints during the period of the 1260 days, through the instrumentality either of his last head or his ten horns.

§ 3. "The desolating transgressions of Mohammedanism arose in the same year that the papal horn became an universal spiritual empire. A few years after its rise, it acquired its predicted character of a little horn of the Macedonian he-goat; and soon, agreeably to the prophecy, waxed exceedingly great toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. In the course of its progress, it cast down many of the symbolical stars, or Christian pastors, to the ground; took away the daily sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving; polluted the spiritual sanctuary; and presumed to magnify itself against even the Prince of princes. As for its character, it was notorious for trampling upon the truth; for prospering in a wonderful manner; for making its appearance exactly when the transgressors were come to the full, by publicly re-establishing idolatry; for teaching dark sentences; for being mighty not through its own unaided power; for exterminating its opponents with the utmost barbarity; for persecuting with peculiar violence the people of the Holy Ones; for advancing itself by craft, and for destroying many while in a state of negli gent security.

"In the Apocalypse a more full account is given of the

agents by whom this apostate religion should be propagated. A fallen star opens the bottomless pit and lets out the destroying king of the locusts. These locusts are permitted to continue their ravages during the space of five prophetic months, or 150 years, which is found from history to be the precise period allotted to the continuation of the Saracenic incursions. The locusts are succeeded by an immense body of horsemen under four leaders, from the banks of the Euphrates, whose commission is limited to an hour, a day, a month, and a year, or 391 years and 15 days, and who are empowered to kill a third part of men, or the Roman empire, which their predecessors, the Saracenic locusts, had only been permitted to torment.

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History accordingly teaches us that the Saracens were succeeded by the Turks; who came under four leaders from the banks of the Euphrates; whose armies consisted almost entirely of cavalry; whose career of conquest exactly continued 391 years; and who subverted the Constantinopolitan empire, which the Saracens, severely as they harassed it, had never been able to effect.

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The Mohammedan little horn itself, or the religion of Mohammed, is to prevail to the end of 2200 years from the invasion of Asia by Alexander the Great, which is found to bring us down exactly to the year 1866, and thus to allow precisely 1260 years for the triumphs of Mohammedanism, reckoning from its commencement in the year 606.

§ 4. "After the era of the Reformation, and in the last days of atheism and insubordination, but previous to the commencement of the time of the end, the infidel king, according to the sure word of prophecy, was destined to arise; that Antichrist who was alike to deny the Father and the Son; that audacious tyrant who should magnify himself above every god; who should speak marvelous things against the God of gods; who should neither regard the God of his fathers nor the desire of women; who should

nevertheless honor a foreign god, and acknowledge gods protectors; and who should be allowed to prosper till the indignation be accomplished.

"As the contemporary rise and progress of popery and Mohammedanism is described in the Apocalypse under the two first wo trumpets, so the appearance of the great Antichrist is announced by the third. His full developement, however, is to be immediately preceded by the last event of the second wo trumpet, a tremendous earthquake, by which a tenth part of the great Latin city, or one of the ten horns of the Roman beast, is to be overthrown. The last wo, which extends beyond the termination of the 1260 years, at least to the end of the seventh vial, if not to the commencement of the millennium, comprehends the periods of the harvest and the vintage.

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Thus, after the epoch of the Reformation, and immediately after the French Revolution of the year 1789, we have seen the manifestation of a terrific monster which alike set at defiance the laws both of God and man. We have beheld scenes of carnage and impiety which well deserve to be ushered in by a distinct wo trumpet, and which may justly claim to themselves the title of the harvest of God's wrath. The scenes have at last passed away, like the distempered and fantastic vision of a sick man; and the sun of military tyranny has begun to scorch the irreclaimable inhabitants of the Papal Roman empire with an intolerable heat. The fatness of the harvest, therefore, is past; and we must expect in due season the commencement of the vintage, in which the enemies of God will be finalıy destroyed for ever.

§. 5. "At present we are living under the fourth vial; and from the great length of time which popery and Mohammedanism have continued, we cannot be very far removed from the end of the 1260 days, whatever be the precise year from which they ought to be dated. The year which I have

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