authority, shall be the head; and this monopoly of civil government he will endeavor to consolidate and complete, by gathering around himself the perverted religious sentiment of the age. This will be secured by the satanic power with which he shall be endowed, and the signs and lying wonders, meeting the diseased craving for the preternatural which is even now being developed throughout the civilized world, are again and again referred to in prophecy as being of the most extraordinary character. The Lord warns men that they will deceive, if it were possible, the very elect. As the professed apostles of liberty and enlightenment in a former generation, paid degrading homage to a prostitute as the representative of human reason, so this is the humbling conclusion of the boasted progress of the age- a world grown wise in its own conceit, first wondering after the beast, then worshipping the dragon, who gave him his power, and then worshipping the beast himself-the incarnation of all iniquity.

There is a necessary progress in moral degradation, and it need not surprise us if this man-worship ends, as man-worship did in earlier ages, in gross idolatry. Even the Jews, after all the lessons of their past history, and after so many ages of apparent freedom from the earlier idolatrous tendencies of their nation, shall be found bowing down before the image of the beast-the unclean spirit which had gone out of them shall return, and find his house swept and garnished, and their last state shall be worse than the first. In the prophecy immediately before us, we read: "And for the overspreading of abominations He shall make it desolate." Most of our readers know that the word abominations is the Scriptural name for idols. In the margin we read: "And upon the battlements shall be the idols of the desolator." This is what in the Apocalypse is styled the image of the

beast, which all men are required to worship on pain of death. The prominent and public places of Jerusalem shall be filled with these idols; and our Lord gives it as a warning sign to the faithful few of that day, that the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet shall stand in the holy place. O wretched people! O shameful delusion! and is not the degradation complete when that foul and monstrous idol stands in the place where the Shechinah shone between the cherubim, and the sanctuary is polluted with their abominable rites? And this is the end of the progress of the age!

Is not the world, then, ripe for judgment? Can the indignation longer slumber? All righteousness is crying out: "How long, O Lord, holy and true?" "Even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate," or rather, as it is in the margin, "upon the desolator." The last waves of tribulation shall pass over Jerusalem, and, as in a former age, he for whom they forsook God shall himself be the instrument of their chastisement. Under the unrelenting cruelty of this blasphemous despotism, they shall be led to that period of which the Lord says: "Then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time; no, nor ever shall be." But Jerusalem will not be the only scene of the awful delusion, nor will the Jews be the only sufferers in the great tribulation. The whole world is involved in both. At length spirits of evil, working miracles, will go forth to the kings of the earth to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty. At the head of his countless legions, and in the very moment of his supposed triumph over Jerusalem, and when he fancies he has extinguished the last ray of Divine light on the earth, Antichrist shall meet his terrible doom" that determined

shall be poured upon the desolator." In his overthrow by Christ, and His glorified saints, the deliverance of the faithful few shall be accomplished. By success in acts of judgments all things that offend shall be weeded out of His kingdom, which shall then be established in peace and righteousness over all the ransomed earth. Then of Jerusalem it is said: "Thou shalt also be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of thy God. Thou shalt no more be called 'Forsaken;' neither shall thy land any more be termed 'Desolate:' but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married."

LIFE IN THE MIDST OF DEATH.

JOHN says of himself and all believers: "Now are we the sons of God, but it doth not yet appear what we shall be." What we shall be he immediately intimates: "We shall be like Him, for we shall see him as He is." It is not, therefore, merely true that, as to our present circumstances, "it doth not yet appear what we shall be," but in ourselves we are very unlike the sons of God, carrying about with us the body of this death from which we groan to be delivered. We are the sons of God; and, as the same Apostle declares, "Whosoever is born of God sinneth not ;" and all will agree that, if this be true, it is not what appears in the actual life of any believer on earth. If it were so, believers would stand in no need of the assurance: "If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The real, then, is not the apparent with the believer.

The truth is, as the Saviour distinctly teaches, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh," and can never be any thing else. It is equally true that "that which is born of the spirit is spirit," and can never be any thing else. So long, then, as any thing that was born of the flesh remains about the believer, we may be assured that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. Nay, Paul confesses: "In me—that is, in my flesh-dwelleth no good thing." The Scriptures continually speak of these two elements in

the believer's earthly existence- the flesh that lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; the old man that must be continually put off, and the new man which must be continually put on. The latter is also styled the inner man, or the hidden man of the heart, which is the true man-the true life of the child of God. But the other is the apparent or outer man, and to the last is unchanged It is the corruptible which must be exchanged for incorruption; the mortal, which must give place to immortality; the vile body, which Christ at His coming will change. "And," as it has been expressed," although the new nature is in its essence as pure as God, from whom it is derived, and looks earnestly toward the glory of God as its promised rest, yet it lives here in weakness and incessant conflict with the evil which hems it in on every side."

No wonder, surely, if those who are endeavoring to find peace and assurance from what they find in themselves, and who seem really to expect that that which is born of the flesh should be transformed into spirit, if they are indeed born of God, should be miserably disappointed, and tormented with endless fears and uncertainties-no wonder if they should be disheartened in the conflict, or if they should be taken off their guard, and fall into the snare of the devil. We dwell upon this point, not because we would reconcile any one to the presence of sin in this mortal body, and encourage carnal security; we have no fears that a plain testimony to the truth will have any such tendency. But we dwell upon it that believers may learn not to seek peace and strength "by looking in for evidences of spiritual life, but out at the object that imparts life"-that those who are sensible of the burden of the flesh, just in proportion to their spirituality, may be delivered from the despondency which is the frequent consequence of their mistaken introspection.