papal empires have now coexisted for more than twelve hundred years.*

In persecution and oppression of the pure church they are equal and similar-in the ultimate consequences of their hostility thereto they are essentially different. The one obscures—the other extinguishes, christianity. Popery, while it perverts the doctrines, disobeys the commands, and neglects the example, professes to honour the authority, of Christ -islamism openly gives another "name among men whereby we must be saved." (Acts, iv. 12.)

Within the pale of popery, abounding with the vain ceremonies of its ritual, and tainted with idolatrous and persecuting practices, a pure faith and tolerant spirit must be rare-but no spirituality of mind can possibly coexist with the ferocious and carnal creed of islamism. In the former church there is a spiritual famine—in the latter, a spiritual death.

The extension of the mahometan empire was amazingly rapid. Its origin is dated from the year 622, when Mahomet, with only one adherent, fled from Mecca, his native city, where it was intended to put him to death. Before he died, in 632, he had subjugated, to his regal and religious authority, all Arabia. In the following eleven years the arms of his votaries and subjects extended the faith of the koraun, and the dominion of the caliphs, over Syria,

* 622, the year of the hegira, or flight, (of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina) is the commencement of the Mahometan era; but, for some years before that, the impostor had been labouring to propagate his creed.

Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt.

"In the ten years

of the administration of Omar,* the Saracens reduced to his obedience thirty-six thousand cities or castles, destroyed four thousand churches or temples of the unbelievers, and edified fourteen hundred moschs for the exercise of the religion of Mahomet." (Gibbon, ch. 51.) Of those vast conquests, together with immense subsequent acquisitions, the creed and scimitar of islamism still retain possession.

The destruction of the Greek empire and the establishment of islamism on its ruins, having been the work of the same agency and of the same period, are comprised in one seal.

7. "And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth animal say, Come and see.

8. "And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and hell followed with him: And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."

The word pale is a mistranslation of XAwpos,-a word that properly signifies only, green.† It is true,

The second caliph-he succeeded to the caliphate two years after the death of Mahomet.

+ As a correct interpretation of the fourth seal depends materially on the import of the words χλωρος ιππος, I crave the reader's indulgence for trespassing at some length on his attention with a demonstration (which, I trust, he will find to be beyond all cavil) that the proper version of those words is, not a pale, but, a green horse.

The word xλwpos, derived from another word, xλwn, an herb, is the only word in Greek, copious as is that language, which signifies the colour green-a sense wherein it is, accordingly,

it sometimes signifies pale green, because it includes every shade or tint of green in the whole vegetable kingdom, from that of the tenderest vernal bud to the hue of the darkest evergreen- -but in the text there is nothing to indicate any particular shade.

The imputation of religious sanctity to the colour green is one of the distinguishing marks of Mahometanism. That absurd superstition is probably derived from green having been the colour of the dress usually worn by the impostor: "Flight was the

found in thousands of instances, in every dialect, and in every form of that tongue, Attic, Asiatic, and Byzantine. In the same language there are two words, ωχροος, and ακρους,either of which was at the service of the prophet, if he intended to represent an idea so vague as that of a pale horse; for each of those words signifies pale, or colourless, and never any thing else.

In that ancient version of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, commonly called the septuagint, the word xλwpos, in its several inflexions, occurs eleven times-in eight of which, Gen. i. 30, xxx. 37.—Exod. x. 15.—2 Kings, xix. 26.—Job, xxxix. 8.—Isa. xx. 6.-Ezek. xvii. 24, xx. 47, it is in the english version properly translated green: it occurs also, in the neuter gender xλwpov, unattached to any substantive, three times, Gen. ii. 5.—Num. xxii. 4.-Deut. xxix. 23, wherein, as it plainly relates to vegetable life, it is unobjectionably translated either herb, or grass ;the more strictly literal translation would be green thing.

In the new testament it occurs four times, Mark, vi. 39.—Rev. vi. 8, viii. 7, ix. 4, in all of which places also, except the passage under consideration, it is properly translated green. Why, then, may it be asked have translators of the bible departed, in this particular instance, from the translation which, in all other instances, they have shown that they knew to be the correct one? No reason whatever has been assigned by any of them for so doing, and their silence permits the conjecture that their only reason was a notion that a green horse must be a

only resource of Mahomet.-At the dead of night, accompanied by his friend Abubeker, he silently escaped from his house: the assassins watched at the door; but they were deceived by the figure of Ali, who reposed on the bed, and was covered by the green vestment of the apostle." Gibbon, ch. 50.

In the ottoman empire the use of the green turban is an honor rigorously confined to the reputed descendants of him and of his cousin Ali, the fourth caliph,the unprivileged assumption of it is an impiety punishable with the death of the offender. "The standard

strange animal-as if a mystic symbol, or hieroglyphical emblem, must necessarily be constructed according to the ordinary forms of animal physiology!

Surely a green horse is not more strange than many other symbols in the Apocalypse- -a lion, and a bull, having six wings, and eyes before and behind, and continually crying "Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God Almighty"—a lamb having seven horns and seven eyes, &c.

Lexicographers have, indeed, imagined that they have discovered some few instances wherein xwpos may signify pale. Now, all those instances, be it observed, relate to the colour of the human face—thus, it is used in the Iliad and in the Odyssey to describe the effect of fear on the countenance, and χλωρος dog has, accordingly, been translated pallidus timor, pale fear: but, of whom was Homer speaking?-of the natives of Asia Minor, and of ancient Greece (peopled from Asia or Africa) who were of a swarthy, or olive-green colour-a complexion wherein health is indicated by a certain ruddy, or copperish, tinge; the abstraction of which, whether by sentiment or by malady, must leave the residuum a pure green. Hence a malady, whereof one of the symptoms is a remarkable abstraction of all ruddiness from the face, is by greek medical writers denoted xλwpools, chlorosis, translated into english, green sickness: and hence also, Sappho represents herself, in her celebrated ode, as fainting, from exces

of the prophet," an object of peculiar sanctity in mussulmaun estimation, is of green silk. It is It is preserved in the ottoman treasury, whence it is never removed, except upon extraordinary emergencies. On one of these occasions Baron de Tott, who for above twenty years of the last century was attached to the French embassy to the Porte, was in Constantinople, and, in the third part of his memoirs, thus narrates the horrible circumstances that attended the solemn procession by which it was escorted.

"This banner of the Turks, which they name

sive emotion, to such a degree that she becomes greener than grass, χλωροτερη τῇ ποια.

That green, and not pale, is the colour which the Asiatic Greeks considered as symptomatic of malady is placed beyond all doubt by Hippocrates, a native of the island of Cos, who enumerates, in the second section of his treatise on Prognostics, among the indications of approaching death, all the colour of the facial skin being dark-green- -literally, green and blackτο χρωμα τε ξυμπαντος προσωπε χλωρον τε και μελαν εον.

Laertius, in a passage alluding to the human face, applies the term xλwpoo to gold—the colour of which, in its crude, or natural state, is of a greenish, verdigrease, hue- -it becomes of

a bright yellow only by being polished.

But if the lexicographers were right in their supposition (and I think I have shewn that they are not) that, in all of the very few cases which they have cited in support of that supposition, the word may signify pale, there is not a shadow of reason for assuming that in the passage under consideration it is used otherwise than in its proper sense of green-plain, simple, green.

Green being the prevalent colour of vernal vegetation, the word by which it is designated has in hebrew, greek, latin, english, french, and in many other languages, the signification of freshundecayed to that secondary, and figurative, signification, I shall presently have occasion to revert.