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in these days. It is somewhat remarkable, that one of the proofs of Satanic possession at Loudun was, that the devils could not speak SCOTCH. The gift of tongues seems the most complete puzzle to sceptics in all countries and ages: at one place it is held to be imposture because it is not understood; in another, because it is understood; in one, because it is not Latin; and in another, because it is Spanish. An Evangelical clergyman in London lately avowed his conviction of the whole being imposture, because one person was discovered to speak Hebrew. But, to return to our Scotch : La Supérieure, interrogée en Latin sur le parti qui étoit la cause de sa possession, répondit dans la même langue que c'étoit l'eau. Un Ecossois, nommé Stracan, principal du collége de Loudun, souhaita que la supérieure nommât en Ecossais l'eau: elle répondit, nimia curiositas, c'est une trop grande curiosité. Si ce diable eut été sincère, il auroit avoué son ignorance. Il ajouta, Deus non volo. On le conjura de la part de Dieu, de parler congruement; il répéta, Deus non volo. Il n'en savoit pas davantage. L'exorciste, toujours prêt à le secourir, sans le justifier de l'incongruité de son langage, dit que c'étoit un excès de curiosité de vouloir que ce diable répondit en Ecossois. Le lieutenant-civil lui répondit: Vous apprenez par le Rituel que vous avez à la main, que la faculté de parler des langues étrangères et inconnues est un des caractères de la possession; que le don d'annoncer des évènements qui arrivent dans les pays éloignés, dans le même temps qu'ils arrivent, en est aussi un autre caractère : donnez-nous donc, poursuivit-il, des signes de cette espéce. L'éxorciste, qui avoit prit ce diable sous sa protection repliqua que le démon savoit bien l'Ecossois, mais qu'il ne vouloit pas la parler." This account is taken from "Les Causes Célèbres."

It may appear at first sight extraordinary, that in every period, when persons have spoken by supernatural influence, whether that influence be Divine or Satanic, they have invariably warned the world of the coming of the Lord to judgment. When this has been done by evil spirits, it has been evidently in imitation of the Holy Spirit, whose testimony to the same truth had preceded theirs. In most instances we can trace obvious reason for this. The first revilers of the Spirit of prophecy denied also the inspiration of the Apocalypse: here, then, was clearly an occasion worthy of that Spirit's interference, whose office it is to testify of Jesus and the same persons who despised the Spirit of prophecy, and would have rejected the Apocalypse, calling it the forgery of an unclean liver named Cerinthus, were also the first spiritualizing philosophers who substituted the Elysium of the heathen for the New Jerusalem that cometh down from heaven. Passing by more difficult, because more obscure, passages of the Church's History, we find the voice of God in men

continuing at intervals to keep up a living testimony against the apostasy of the Church of Rome, until the grand and last persecution, by the eldest son of the church, at the revocation of the Edict of Nantz. Now again the same warning is heard, both in those who speak by the power of the Holy Ghost, and in those who speak by the power of the wicked one, who only warns in hypocrisy, that he may more readily be taken for an angel of light. The warning is given by God in mercy to a generation. which calls itself eminent for the extent of its religious knowledge and practice, while it treats the kingdom of the Son of God as a useless speculation, although every other kingdom is crumbling to its foundations before their eyes, in order that it alone may be seen to be permanent.

Enough has now been brought forward to enable us to form a decided judgment upon the contradictions declared between the holy lives and variety of gifts recounted of the French prophets in the Cevennes, and the unholy lives and poverty of gifts which shewed the persons under the same name in this country to have been impostors. There can be no doubt that the commencement of those manifestations were of the Holy Ghost, in order to comfort and support the martyrs under their dreadful persecutions. The affair, however, became partly political; civil war was mixed with it; the pastors were ignorant; Satan mixed up lying wonders among them: when the whole party was exterminated in France, some came to this country: probably one or two might have been possessed by the Spirit of God, but those. possessed by Satan greatly predominated; and the names of the French Prophets has made the whole subject of supernatural manifestations to be dreaded as an unclean delusion.

The most awful reflections arise out of the consideration of the extent of satanic possessions in the present day. Every circumstance has combined for many years past to eradicate from men's minds all idea of supernatural agency in the affairs of this world. The doctrines agitated at the time of the Reformation. have been elevated ever since to more than their due importance, and become at last to be the substitutes for Divine truth, rather than mere landmarks of so much that had been gained from the dominion of error. The abuses of the Popish Church led the successors of the Reformers into the opposite extreme, of denying all foundation for those abuses, rather than of reverting to the truth on which those abuses were built. Philosophy, and especially the increase of scientific discoveries, has tended to diminish men's notions of the marvellous, and lead them to suppose that all which is now unaccountable may still be understood by further exertions of the human intellect. Sir Walter Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft are expressly written to support this position. He speaks of the subject as one

"which the increasing civilization of all well-instructed countries has now almost blotted out;" and he resolves every possible case of supernatural vision into an organic derangement of the brain, the eye, or the ear. Verily, Paul of Tarsus would have obtained little credit for his comforting vision, which we have quoted above, and how few, sufficiently educated to read and write, would in these days believe his rapture to the third heaven! All the books intended for the instruction of the nursery and the school have been written on the avowed plan of letting children read nothing which is not intelligible to their reason; and the Arabian Nights, and Jack the Giant-Killer, and Tom Thumb, have been banished with as much anxiety as the legends of Popish saints. The faithless church has let go her witness for the indwelling of the Third Person of the blessed Trinity in every one of her members: so that the doctrine of the personality of the Holy Ghost has dwindled into the recognition of a mere Divine influence, and the person of the devil dwelling also in men has come to be considered an erroneous fancy of less enlightened generations. Thus the world and the church are alike unprepared, in every department of them, to resist the assaults of Satan, philosophers, infidels, men of science, men of literature, Evangelical professors of every grade, from the supra-lapsarian followers of Dr. Hawker down to the lowest Wesleyan. In the Established Churches, and amongst the Dissenters, nearly all are ridiculing the idea of the possibility of such a thing as the person of Satan taking possession of their bodies and souls. Still there is an active living conscience in men, which prevents their wholly casting away the belief in supernatural agency; and, now that we are bringing this subject before them, the doctrine of the possibility of such possessions will soon be admitted; and they will be then exactly in the condition best adapted to follow the leadings of Satan, mistaking them for, and calling them, the operations of the Holy Ghost. In this manner the manifestation of Antichrist, the last and most finished masterpiece of satanic delusion, is certain to carry the whole world along with it; and since we know, from the sure word of prophecy, that that manifestation is now on the point of being made, it is with feelings of unmitigated horror and grief that we perceive the whole world, moral and religious, prepared to be deceived by it.

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No language of exhortation can be so strong as the facts we have now presented to our readers, to urge them to pray instantly, and without ceasing, night and day, to be filled with the Holy Ghost, that Satan may have no room to enter. Let them beware of supposing they can contend against him by their prudence, their learning, their knowledge of the Scriptures, of religious doctrine, or by any other thing than by being themselves entirely filled with the Spirit of God.

REVIEWS AND MISCELLANIES.

FABER'S SACRED CALENDAR OF PROPHECY.

The Sacred Calendar of Prophecy; or a Dissertation on the Prophecies which treat of the grand Period of Seven Times, and especially of its second Moiety, or the latter Three Times and a Half. By G. S. Faber, B.D. Rector of Long Newton. ALTHOUGH the present work has been before the public since 1828, we are not aware that the chronological principles on which this revisal* of the author's whole interpreting system is professedly constructed, and by which he so peremptorily professes to determine every prophetic epoch, past, present, and future, have ever been strictly inquired into. It is almost unnecessary to apprise the reader, that the seven prophetic times of the four Gentile monarchies, which are clearly to be deduced from King Nebuchadnezzar's second vision (Dan. iv. 16, 23, 25, 32, 34, with vii. 25, 27, and xii. 7, and Rev. xii. 14) in its representative sense, and are as clearly bisected into periods of three times and a half each, in the predictions of Daniel and the Apocalypse (Dan. and Rev. ubi supra; and Rev. xi. 2), analogous to the bisection of the last seven years of the vision of the seventy weeks (Dan. ix. 27), form the basis and frame-work by which, as by a calendar, the author professes to fix and regulate the inferior prophetic periods. The reader has, therefore, every reason to expect that a standard or calendar put forth with such extensive pretensions to utility, would be found immoveably fixed, with regard to its primary epochs, upon a solid chronological basis; because, otherwise, it could have no pretensions to the distinguished title of a "sacred calendar" for the regulation and arrangement of the prophetic periods and epochs in general. Such, at least, was our own expectation from the favourite and matured work of so practised a commentator as Mr. Faber. How grievously the result of our investigation has disappointed us, we shall proceed briefly to detail to our readers; not, however, with the view of disparaging the labours of a zealous and able inquirer, and respectable divine, but in the hope of checking the progress of fundamental error upon the most important of all the topics to which human talent can be directed-error the more dangerous because sanctioned by so high and popular an authority as the writer of these volumes: error, moreover, which the

"My wish is, that it should be considered as superseding my dissertation on the prophecies relative to the period of 1260 years."-Preface.

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present imperfect state of chronological science probably renders less liable to detection than oversights in any other department of criticism.

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The great period in question (a prophetic time, or 360 natural years x 7 2520 years)-being the chronological measure of" the times of the Gentiles" (Luke xxi. 24, Rom. xi. 25), or of the four successive empires symbolized by the great metallic image and the vision of the four beasts in the book of Daniel (Dan. ii. vii.), and, in the author's opinion, likewise of the Apocalyptic dispensations down to the Millennial epoch-Mr. Faber dates from the birth of King Nebuchadnezzar, because that prince is declared by the prophet to be "the head of gold" (Dan. ii. 38); and proceeds to determine the epoch of that event as the radical æra of" the almanack of prophecy *.

* "

Before, however, inquiring into the chronological data advanced by Mr. Faber, let us remark that he dates "the breast and arms of silver," not from the birth of Cyrus, but from the Ptolemaic epoch of the second, or Persian empire, B. c. 538; "the belly and thighs of brass," not from the birth of Alexander, but from the Ptolemaic epoch of the third, or Macedonian, empire, B. c. 331; and "the legs of iron," not from the birth of Augustus, but from the Ptolemaic epoch of the fourth, or Roman, empire, B. c. 30+ to all which dates, perhaps, no objection can be made but if the three last-mentioned metals, of which the image is composed, must be chronologically referable to the last three empires, as the words and terms of the prediction require (Dan. ii. 39, 40), consistency of exposition equally requires that the same rule should be observed as regards the first metal, or golden head-a principle admitted by the author himself, who recognises a geographical or territorial import in all the four metals, in addition to the historical . Yet he identifies the æra of the gold, not with that of Nebuchadnezzar's empire, but with the birth of the individual prince-an event which has no concern with history; neither is it found on record. It is true, the words of the prophet are "Thou art this head of gold; " but that "king" is here, as in other predictions of Daniel, and the Apocalypse (Dan ii. 44; vii. 17, 23, 24; Rev. xvii. 10-12), as well as in Isa. xxiii. 15, and elsewhere, put to express "kingdom," is immediately determined by the interpretation of the other three metals, which follows (Dan. ii. 39, 40). Hence it follows, that, even on the author's own principles, the chronological root of the golden head, and of the seven times of the Gentiles, is the epoch of the first or Babylonian empire, and not that of the reigning monarch's birth. Assuming, however, the

* Vol. i p. 62, 63; vol. ii. p. 10, 25.

Vol. ii. p. 18-25.

Vol. ii. p. 14, 15.

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