Ib.  Part II. p. 145.

Second characteristic.  ’The kingdom shall be divided.’—­Third characteristic.  ’The kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle.’—­Fourth characteristic.  ’They shall mingle themselves with the seed of men:  but they shall not cleave one to another.’

How exactly do these characters apply to the Greek Empire under the successors of Alexander,—­when the Greeks were dispersed over the civilized world, as artists, rhetoricians, ‘grammatici’, secretaries, private tutors, parasites, physicians, and the like!

Ib. p. 153.

’For to them he thus speaketh in the Gospel:  And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.  And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.’

I cannot deny that there is great force and an imposing verisimilitude in this and the preceding chapter, and much that demands silent thought and respectful attention.  But still the great question presses on me:—­’coming in a cloud’!  What is the true import of this phrase?  Has not God himself expounded it?  To the Son of Man, the great Apostle assures us, all power is given in heaven and on earth.  He became Providence,—­that is, a Divine Power behind the cloudy veil of human agency and worldly events and incidents, controlling, disposing, and directing acts and events to the gradual unfolding and final consummation of the great scheme of Redemption; the casting forth of the evil and alien nature from man, and thus effecting the union of the creature with the Creator, of man with God, in and through the Son of Man, even the Son of God made manifest.  Now can it be doubted by the attentive and unprejudiced reader of St. Matthew, c. xxiv, that the Son of Man, in fact, came in the utter destruction and devastation of the Jewish Temple and State, during the period from Vespasian to Hadrian, both included; and is it a sufficient reason for our rejecting the teaching of Christ himself, of Christ glorified and in his kingly character, that his Apostles, who disclaim all certain knowledge of the awful event, had understood his words otherwise, and in a sense more commensurate with their previous notions and the prejudices of their education?  They communicated their conjectures, but as conjectures, and these too guarded by the avowal, that they had no revelation, no revealed commentary on their Master’s words, upon this occasion, the great apocalypse of Jesus Christ while yet in the flesh.  For by this title was this great prophecy known among the Christians of the Apostolic age.

Ib. p. 253.

  Never, Oh! our Lady! never, Oh! our Mother! shalt thou fall again into
  the crime of idolatry.

Was ever blindness like unto this blindness?  I can imagine but one way of making it seem possible, namely, that this round square or rectilineal curve—­this honest Jesuit, I mean—­had confined his conception of idolatry to the worship of false gods;—­whereas his saints are genuine godlings, and his ‘Magna Mater’ a goddess in her own right;—­and that thus he overlooked the meaning of the word.