rebellion against the civil authority.  Of course the saints were then executed as traitors.  Even a superficial view of the signs of the times will result in the conviction, that a great change has taken place in the policy of nations and churches.  The dragon has now prevailed with most politicians and statesmen, as well as with most professing Christians, to demand a total “separation of church and state;” by which demand they do not mean a divorce of the unscriptural and antichristian alliance only or chiefly, but a simple and absolute rejection of religion, and especially the Christian religion, from any connexion with or influence upon civil affairs.  This is undeniably the avowed aim and declared desire of the great body of the population of Christendom at the present time, (1870.) And what is this but an open denial of the authority of the Mediator as he is the “Prince of the kings of the earth?” Thus has the dragon, since his ejection from heaven become a terrible “woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea!” And thus has the “earth opened her mouth and swallowed up the flood;” so that the woman remains comparatively safe “from the face of the serpent” in the very obscurity of her position.  Some of her sons, from time to time, venturing abroad from their secluded place in the wilderness, becoming weary of sackcloth and aspiring to worldly distinction, have been borne along by the waters of the flood, and drowned in the general deluge.  Against the force of this strong current of popular errors, nothing will avail the seed of the woman but the “living water” which Jesus imparted to the woman of Samaria.  To him who partakes of this water, those of the dragon will be distasteful; for “it shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John iv. 14.) Since the middle of the seventeenth century, when by the reformation in Europe and the British Isles, the dragon was cast down from the symbolic heaven, he has been assailing in “great wrath” all ranks and degrees of men, not, as before, with fire and sword, with scaffolds, gibbets, thumb-screws,—­torturing and destroying their mortal bodies, that he might reach their immortal souls:  but by bringing them together in voluntary associations on principles of the covenant of works, subversive of the covenant of grace, and consequently aiming at the drowning of the mystic woman.  This the enemy of all righteousness has been attempting, and with too much success, by public and professed ecclesiastical and Christian associations; such as Jesuits, Socinians and other self-styled Unitarians, Latter-day Saints, Mormons,—­or by combinations in secret and sworn confederacies; such as Odd Fellows, Freemasons, Sons and Daughters of Temperance, with other affiliated fellowships innumerable.  The special subtlety of the serpent consists in blending these two kinds of communions, so that under the name of reform, moral and spiritual, those who fear God may be unconsciously drawn into the snare.  And alas! how many simple ones have been thus carried away by the waters of the flood!  And many strong men have been thus cast down from their excellency.  We are not to be surprised if we find the witnesses few in our time,—­the seed of the woman diminished when the dragon makes his final attack.