Assuming that the third woe trumpet was sounding in his ears, the Doctor, transported with the imaginary but delightful prospect, that the kingdoms of this world were speedily to become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, speaks of France as follows:—­“She had given assistance to the sons of freedom on the plains and along the shores of Columbia, until the republican eagle snatched the oppressed provinces from the paw of the royal lion of England.”—­We may admire the metaphors of the orator, while we deplore the political feeling of the divine.  It is true, as the orator in calmer moments reflects,—­“The political conduct of professing Christians is generally lamentable;” and alas! this “lamentable conduct” is usually tolerated and too often exemplified by their spiritual guides.  It has been generally so since the days of Jeroboam who “made priests of the lowest of the people,” and thereby rendered the ministry the stipendiaries of the state.  And as it was then, even so it is now, whether in the kingdoms, empires or republics of the earth.  “Let us,” with the Doctor, “lament the political conduct of Christians in the present age of the world.”

Allusion has been already made to seeming inconsistencies in the Doctor’s sentiments.  There is truth in the adage,—­“tempora mutantur et nos mutamur cum illis,”—­“times change, and we change with them.”  And indeed changes are allowable in matters of a circumstantial nature which do not affect moral principle.  Moral principle, however, is in its nature immutable.  In the early period of the Doctor’s public life he had nobly proved “Negro Slavery Unjustifiable.”  But this accursed system was from the first interwoven with the very framework of that “Republican America,” which in his “Lectures” he takes occasion thus to eulogize!  “We never formed a street of the mystical Babylon....  Let this be the asylum of the oppressed....  She (Republican America) has not, either by sea or land, encouraged oppression (?) or despoiled of his goods him that was at peace with us?”—­I confess my inability to credit these statements, or to reconcile them with “the great moral principles” which the author justly tells his readers it was the object of the Author of the Apocalypse to illustrate before the world.

I have thus noticed some of the most important particulars in which I dissent from the interpretations of the Doctor and others, that the reader may be guided by all accessible way-marks in searching after the mind of God in this mysterious but highly instructive part of his precious word.  I can again cordially recommend to his attention the Lectures of Doctor M’Leod, as the best exposition of those parts of the Apocalypse of which he treats, that has come under my notice.  In the Notes will be found minor points of dissent from the Doctor’s views, and from multiplied aberrations of many others.  I have studied great plainness of speech, abstaining from the introduction of many verbal criticisms on the original text, and from the use of terms and phrases not familiar to the unlearned reader.  Let no sincere Christian be deterred by seeming difficulties from reading the Apocalypse, or be dissuaded from searching it, by the discrepancies of interpreters; for this is equally true of “the other Scriptures.” (2 Pet. iii, 16.)