reformers lifted a testimony against the heresies, immoralities and tyrannies of the church of Rome.  And among all the churches of the Reformation, that of Scotland is justly entitled to the pre-eminence.  In no nation or state in Christendom did the witnesses of Christ,—­the second angel, attain so nearly to a scriptural model of organized society in church and state as in that land, whose mountains and valleys were “flowered with martyrs” for a “Covenanted Work of Reformation.”  As Zuingle the Swiss-reformer excelled Luther, Calvin and others in Europe in the application of the divine moral law, as revealed in Scriptures, to civil society, so John Knox in Scotland was equally clear, that royal personages are amenable to the body politic, and both to the Mediator.

We are now under the ministry of this second “angel.”  The revival effected by the first angel had greatly declined before the second made his appearance; and all persons of intelligence and spiritual discernment in our day, lament the visible decline in practical godliness, arising from indifference to divine truth.  Most professing Christians, including the descendants of the martyrs, are “willingly ignorant” of the attainments and sufferings of their illustrious predecessors.  The work of reformation to be accomplished by the second angel, we suppose to have been completed about the middle of the seventeenth century.  Since that period his work appears from history to consist in testifying against defection from the reformation which had been reached.  The “great city” is to fall “because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.”  She is “spiritually called Sodom and Egypt,” neither of which was a church any more than Babylon.  These were all heathen communities, never married to the Lord; therefore Babylon is not here charged as an adulteress, but with fornication.  The nations are her paramours.  Her wine is intoxicating.  It deranges the intellect and stupifies the conscience.  Will any reasoning prevail with a drunken man?  An active politician is proverbially unscrupulous, and proof against the law of God.  There is, however, “wrath” in this cup.  Those who refuse to “kiss the Son” must feel the weight of his iron rod. (Ps. ii. 9, 12; lxxv. 8.)

The “little book” introduced at the 10th chapter, is included in the first 13 verses of the 11th chapter, which comprehends a concise history of the 1260 years, as we have seen.  At the 15th verse, the seventh and last trumpet is sounded which introduces the millennium and gives a brief outline of events till the end of the world.  Then the three following chapters give in detail the events prior to the millennium, a commentary, as it were, on the “little book,” but resuming a narrative of the sealed book’s contents, which had been suspended at the end of the 9th chapter.  There, as we have seen, the first and second woe-trumpets left the population of the Roman church and empire