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The PANDECTS, or digest, were composed from the 15th December, A. D. 530, to December 16, A. D. 533, in which year the INSTITUTES were also published. In the year 1790, or twelve hundred and sixty years subsequent to the former of these dates, (before which time the code of Justinian could scarcely have been proclaimed throughout all the Roman empire,)

"the Assembly had determined, that all prejudices apart, the property of the church should come under confiscation for the benefit of the nation, and decreed the assumption of the church lands. A motion was made for decreeing that the holy and apostolical religion was that of France, and that its worship alone should be permitted; but all who favoured it were insulted, beat, and maltreated by a large and furious multitude, and it was withdrawn in terror and despair. Any experiment on the church might be tried with effect, since the religion which it taught seemed NO LONGER to interest the national legislators. A civil institution was framed for the clergy, declaring them TOTALLY INDEPENDENT OF THE SEE OF ROME, and vesting the choice of bishops in the departmental authorities. To this constitution each priest and prelate was required to adhere by a solemn oath. A subsequent decree of the Assembly declared forfeiture of his benefice against whomsoever should hesitate."*

About four thousand five hundred religious houses were suppressed in France in the same year, 1790.

An incident recorded in the Memoirs of Lavallette supplies a curious, if not striking, illustration, as a note of the time.

"The events that preceded the grand drama of 1789 took me by surprise in the midst of my books and my love of study. I was then reading L'Esprit de Lois,' a work that charmed me by its gravity, depth, and sublimity. I wished also to become acquainted with the code of our own laws; but Dommanget, to whom I mentioned my desire, laughed, and pointed to the Justinian Code, the common law code of the kingdom," &c‡ "I thought I should do well to unite, with the

* Sir Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon, vol. i. pp. 221-224. Annual Register, ib. p. 101.

+ Brewster's Encycl. vol. vi, p. 455. Lavallette's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 4.

Chron. Table, 1790.

meditations of my closet, the observation of those scenes of disorder which were the harbingers of the revolution.”*

In the year 533 the INSTITUTES of Justinian were published. "The Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes, were declared to be the legitimate system of civil jurisprudence; they alone were admitted in the tribunals, and they alone were taught in the academies of Rome, Constantinople, and Berytus."+ And in the same year, in the case of an appeal by the emperor to the ecclesiastical decision of the pope, (which itself implies the supremacy of the pontiff,) he addressed the pope as the HEAD OF ALL THE HOLY CHURCHES. And as the recognition of the supremacy of the pope seemed thus to be complete in the year 533, on the part of the emperor who put the power into his hands, so, in like rapid and yet graduated progress, with the same appointed space intervening, the dominion of the papacy was destroyed and disannulled in that kingdom which had been its chief stay for ages, in the year 1793, the power was wholly taken out of the hands of the pope, and infidelity, or rather atheism, was proclaimed, and popery abolished.

"The churches were in most districts of France closed against priests and worshippers-the bells were broken, and cast into cannon-and the whole ecclesiastical establishment destroyed."

The papacy was to wear out the saints of the Most High for twelve hundred and sixty years; and the judgment was to sit and consume and destroy it unto the end. The papal power began to be destroyed; and the time was come for the last vials of the wrath of God to be poured out. From the last of the seven thunders to the first of the seven vials, a very brief space intervened; and there was then no longer delay.

* Lavallette's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 4.
+ Gibbon's Hist. vol. viii. p. 39, c. 44.
Scott's Life of Napoleon, vol. ii. p. 306.

Another link may, perhaps, thus be seen to conr the various prophecies, and to show the coherence the system.

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A tabular view of parallel predictions may pres to the reader at a glance,-Ist, The prophetic scription of the Roman empire as the papacy emerg from it. 2d, The rise of the papal power. 3d, exaltation. 4th, Its blasphemous assumptions. The persecution it inflicted on the saints. 6th, T change of times and laws which it introduced or e joined. 7th, The honouring of guardian saints, idolatry, which formed so large a portion of its wo ship. 8th, The gorgeous ornaments of its churche and rich offerings to the saints. 9th, Its miraculou pretensions. 10th, The period of the duration of it power. And, 11th, The consequent sitting of the judgment, to take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE SEVEN VIALS.

FROM the previous visions, both of Daniel and John, it may be inferred, in a manner neither doubtful nor indistinct, that a season of war and not of peace, succeeds to the termination of the twelve hundred and sixty years. After that period, as remains to be seen, there is a time for the sitting of the judgment, and also for the cleansing of the sanctuary. And that the appointed time of papal persecution was to be succeeded in like manner as Daniel

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sweat voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, eve your ways, and POUR OUT the vials of the wrath of God shoon the earth, xv. 4; xvi. 1.

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