heaven opened, and behold, a white horse and He that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness doth He judge and make war. And He was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood, and His name is called the Word of God. And out of His mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it He should smite the nations, and He shall rule them with a rod of iron; and He treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And He hath on His vesture and on His thigh a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords." (Rev. xix. 11-16.) And this, let it be observed, follows immediately after the marriage supper of the Lamb, and before the binding of Satan.

For now shall Daniel's wonderful vision become a fact: "I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of Days did sit, whose garment was as white as snow, and the hair of His head like pure wool, His throne was like the fiery flame, and His wheels as burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came forth from before Him, thousand thousands ministered unto Him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him "—the redeemed of all ages"the judgment was set, and the books were opened." This judgment must neither be confounded with the judgment-seat of Christ already past, nor with the post-millennial judgment, which of course is yet to come. This is expressly the judgment of the living nations gathered in hostility to Jehovah and His people at Jerusalem, represented to Daniel as "a horn having eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things." (Dan. vii. 8, 11, 12.) As to which he adds, "I beheld then because of the voice of the great words which the horn spake, I beheld even till the beast was slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame." (See also Rev. xix. 19, 20.) As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion taken away, yet their lives were prolonged for a season and a time." And now that the judgment is set, its process reveals the terror of that day of the Lord, before which prophets and men that had understanding in the visions of God have quailed with very fear and wonder at the ideas suggested by the spirit of prophecy. Isaiah said, "A grievous vision is declared unto me, therefore are my loins filled with pain, pangs have taken hold upon me as the pangs of a woman that travaileth; I was bowed down at the hearing of it, I was dismayed at the seeing of it; my heart panted, fearfulness affrighted me, the night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me." (Isa. xxi. 2-4.) Jeremiah said, "We have heard a voice of trembling, of fear, and not of peace. Ask ye now and see whether a man doth travail with child? wherefore do I see every man with his hands on his loins as a woman in travail, and all faces are turned into paleness. Alas, for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob's trouble; but he shall be saved out of it." (Jer. xxx. 5, 6, 7.) Daniel said, “I Daniel was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the visions of my head troubled me. As for me, Daniel, my cogitations

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much troubled me, and my countenance changed in me" (vii. 15, 28). Joel said, "Alas, for the day! for the day of the Lord is at hand, as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come" (i. 15). Habakkuk, at the sight of what he records in chapter iii. adds: "When I heard, my belly trembled, my lips quivered at the voice, rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble: when he cometh up unto the people, he will invade them with his troops." What would be the astonishment of these could they stand forth in our midst now, and witness the indifference of the religious bodies of our times, on the very eve of the fulfilment of their prophecies! For now at length-in the period under consideration, has come the day of the Lord described as a day of darkness, and of gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains: a great people (pest), and a strong, there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more like it, even to the years of many generations." (See their description, Joel ii. 3-11, agreeing with the judgment under the sounding of the fifth trumpet in Rev. ix. 1-12.) "The earth shall quake before them, the heavens shall tremble, the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining; and the Lord shall utter His voice before His army, for His camp is very great, for He is strong that executeth His word; for the day of the Lord is great and very terrible, and who can abide it ?" Whereto agree the words of our Lord, "Then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened there should no flesh be saved, but for the elect's sake (the elect nation of Abraham's seed) those days shall be shortened." (Matt. xxiv. 21, 22.) And again, "There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars, and upon the earth distress of nations with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth; for the powers of heaven shall be shaken; and then shall they see the Son of Man”— He has not been seen by the world hitherto-" coming in a cloud with power and great glory." (Luke xxi. 25, 26, 27.) And Paul to the Thessalonians: "The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence and from the glory of His power;-whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming." Here and now must be the opening of the sixth seal; "And lo, there was a great earthquake, the sun became black, and the moon as blood, the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, the heaven departed as a scroll rolled together, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men,

and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of His wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand ?" (Rev. vi. 12-17.) Whereof Isaiah also had visions. (See xiii. 6-13; xxiv. 1-6 and 19-23.) And finally, John "saw the beast and the kings of the earth, and their armies gathered together to make war against Him that sat on the horse, and against His army"-not that the kings of the earth and their armies will know that their war is against One in the heavenlies, but He comes forth to identify Himself with His people the Jews, against whom the nations are gathered, and to avenge Himself on the Antichrist. "And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone." (Rev. xix. 19, 20.) Thus will Jehovah assert His right not only to exist, but to rule in that creation from which man's best attempt has been made to exclude him.

Thus we have attempted in this section to give our readers as much as possible the words of Scripture, by simply linking them together in that order which commends itself to our judgment, as we trust it will do to theirs.

And now that the works of the devil have been destroyed by the Son of God, in pursuance of the Father's purpose in manifesting Him, we shall find Him dealing wiih the devil in his own person, God's enemy and man's from the beginning. For we read, “I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand; and he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil, and Satan "-four names denoting the same personality" and bound him" for "a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him. up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more till the thousand years should be fulfilled. (Rev. xx. 1, 2, 3.) He who came to our first parents in paradise, and in serpent-form assailed their innocence, and compassed their fall; after six thousand years of awful license, in which he has accomplished his infernal ends within the limit assigned him by Omnipotence, becomes at length by that same Omnipotence bound. We have already seen him conscious "that he had but a short time," and now that that time is concluded, we find him bound, bound and made a captive. The bottomless pit with its key and chain, its shutting up and sealing, are doubtless figures designed to convey the great fact, that the great enemy of God and man-and pre-eminently of the man Christ Jesus-will, with all his infernal allies, become so shut off from the earth, that their influence for evil will be withdrawn and withheld. We read elsewhere of "angels which

kept not their first estate, reserved in everlasting chains, under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day (Jude 6); a part in the judgment of which Paul anticipated in 1 Cor. vi. 3. The beneficial effect upon the world of men of this binding of Satan it is impossible to estimate. But we have here the fact accomplished, and its effects we propose to consider in future pages. That such a power for evil exists, and exists in a person called by our Lord, "Beelzebub, the chief of devils," we need not insist upon, as this testimony of our Lord should settle the fact in all devout and reverent minds. What is meant by the personality of spirit, should be accepted as understood without a quibble of words; but we confess to having no more difficulty in understanding the existence of an infernal than of a heavenly hierarchy, each having its ruling head. And such a dread person as we conceive Apollyon to be we are right glad to find at length a prisoner, and leave him there while we proceed to consider Millennial Glory, and Millennial Times. Hackney, London. E.

N. STARKEY.

(To be continued.)

HOW WE LEARN.

YREAT truths are dearly bought. The common truth,
Such as men give and take from day to day,

Comes in the common walk of easy life,

Blown by the careless wind across our way.

Bought in the market, at the current price,

Bred of the smile, the jest, perchance the bowl;
It tells no tales of daring or of worth,

Nor pierces even the surface of a soul.

Not found by chance,

Great truths are greatly won.
Nor wafted on the breath of summer-dream;
But grasped in the great struggle of the soul,
Hard buffeting with adverse wind and stream.
Not in the general mart, 'mid corn and wine;
Not in the merchandise of gold and gems;
Not in the world's gay hall of midnight mirth;
Not 'mid the blaze of royal diadems;

But in the day of conflict, fear, and grief,

When the strong hand of God, put forth in might,
Ploughs up the subsoil of the stagnant heart,

And brings the imprisoned truth-seed to the light.

Wrung from the troubled spirit, in hard hours
Of weakness, solitude, perchance of pain,

Truth springs, like harvest from the well-ploughed field;
And the soul feels it has not wept in vain.

H. BONAR.

THERE

ISRAEL IN BRITAIN.

THE "BERWICK LECTURES," BY C. M.

I. Interpretation of Holy Scripture anent Israel.

HERE was a time when our fathers saw in all things, in everything that happened about them, in all the events of history, the hand of the Lord of Hosts. We have got past all that. In these advanced days of scientific enlightenment, we are content to remember the Lord of Hosts for an hour or two on one day of the week, and during every hour of the other six we bow our shoulders to Mammon, and set up another God-the god of natural Evolution, which our fathers knew not. To such extremity have we come in the pride of intellect, and the conceit of human self-sufficiency, that a man is set down as a dreamer and a mystic, if he declare that the very springs and sources of political movement during all ages, and the entire course of history from the beginning to the very last syllable of recorded time, are set forth and precisely defined beforehand in the Scriptures of the Lord God. Having come-all of us, church and no church alike-to this pass, that we have not God in all our thoughts, we have completely deleted the action of the Divine Providence from the current affairs of life.

Pilate, you remember, asked-" What is Truth ?" The serious, sedate, and conscientious Roman had, no doubt, like the cultivated men of his time, sought amid the conflicting speculations of the philosophic schools of Athens and Alexandria for some satisfaction for the great yearning of mind and heart, which had overtaken the Gentile world on the decay of the ancient decrepit beliefs, before the coming of the Christ. And, doubtless, having found their speculations inane, and their conclusions futile, he had concluded that Truth was a chimæra, and a vain pursuit. So, having asked the question with ironic great contempt, he thought it folly to wait for an answer. There are many now, not only out of the church, but in the very bosom of it, who do likewise.

Nevertheless, there is the Word of Truth, living and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, potent to penetrate the manifold integuments of preconception, prejudice, self-sufficiency, and the false teaching of so-called "commentators," who have darkened counsel by words without knowledge, making the Word of God of none effect by their traditions.

The subject of our attention is not a matter to be met by doting about foolish and unlearned questions and strifes of words. This is not a matter of mere dilettante curiosity, of scholastic disquisition, of theologic casuistry, of fanatic phrensy conceived in folly and nursed in ignorance. This is a matter big with the destiny of not only this empire of Britain, but of the whole earth. It is the key to unlock the oracles delivered to the fathers, the light that shineth in a dark place. It is the very means ordained by the Divine Providence, and set forth in the Holy Prophets, to show to the nations of the earth the glory of the Lord of Hosts and of His Christ. Hear Jeremiah (iii.) At the recovery of Israel,

"They shall call Jerusalem the throne of the Lord; and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the Name of the Lord, to Jerusalem; neither shall they walk any more after the imagination of their evil heart. In