of other empires there never were such circumstances accompanying it as in this. Other nations have fallen amid surrounding or indwelling real ignorance, in times of intellectual darkness in regard to the revealed knowledge of God; they have perished amid the wreck of their own idols, and the temple of some demigod, and the throne of their earthly potentate, have alike crumbled into a common ruin; or they have sunk amid proffered light to lighten their darkness, and the extinction of its latest glimmer synchronized with the people's fall. But when France became a wonder to the nations of the earth, in the vast concussion under which her ancient monarchy was hurled to the ground, and her tens of thousands lay deluged with their own blood, it was in times of light and knowledge; it was a people confessing, amid many errors, great and true things in religion, philosophy, and science; a people surrounded by cotemporary knowledge among the other nations of Europe; and living in the meridian of intellectual and moral light.

But that which marked with peculiar character the fall of France, as connected in its consequences with our own day, and therefore

as a "sign of" these "times," was the tone of feeling which seemed to pervade that whole people, save those who fled from it into other lands, of a deep and unshaken disbelief of all religion. When the Word of God expressly declares, that it is only "the fool that saith in "his heart, There is no God," we seem lost in the living record, as recorded in our own experience of such a day, that a whole nation have passed their legislative enactment that "there is no God:" that it should have been a common feeling among them that the principle of human life is but to subserve purposes of animal enjoyment, and intellectual evanescent pleasures; and that when these are ended, what follows is nothing but "an eternal sleep."

Never since the world began, under similar condition, was such avowal made. And yet was their mind seeking still for something directing and influential; something to be enthroned in the place of Deity; something to be the object of the common assent of man that there is above man what man is not: they needed a god, and an altar whereon to enshrine their own idol, and they set up the Temple of the Goddess of Reason: that which separates

man from brute, but which they had debased, they made an argument against their professed belief; and deifying reason, ignorantly acknowledged that the general feeling that some God there must be, is true.

This public renunciation of revealed religion was the more extraordinary as a "sign of the "times," inasmuch as it was made by a people all professing Christianity. That individuals in early periods of the history of the Christian faith should recant and forsake their creed, is a fact upholden in the temporary falling away of believers seeking for themselves the crown of martyrdom, and not waiting for God to give it; it is manifested in the denial of the faith in an apostate Julian, and evidenced in many a Demas loving this present world. But for a whole nation, calling itself Christian, and living in Christian times, and surrounded by Christian countries, at once and collectively to shake off all acknowledgment of revealed truth, is the most convincing argument that it was an awakening sign to the whole earth, that a strange anomaly had happened, and that it should call forth the anxious and trembling observation of the Christian world.

up

It would little serve the purpose I have before me to follow the immediate consequences of all this to the infatuated people themselves: to tell of those scenes of blood which followed up the murder of their king; the divided interests which separated the nearest ties of human nature, brother against brother levelling the accusation which brought him to the scaffold, or drawing the sword himself, and steeping it in his brother's blood; the harrowing deeds of man against man, better characterized as deeds of hellish fiends divided against each other; the cruel sufferings which many of the leaders herein afterward underwent, so agonizing to the body, under the still more agonizing condition of the soul, as to render them, fierce and bloody and murderous as they had themselves been, objects of the most touching pity and compassion. All these and similar results amid the confusion which invaded the order of their whole procedures, are not the immediate object I have in view, in drawing your attention to the picture of revolutionary France as the first of those " signs of the times" which we are, as I would argue, called upon to contemplate. It was the primary movement only in the great and mighty events which God was

sending, or overruling, for purposes of his moral government.

Were it not for the consequences, of which this mighty overthrow and wild chaos amid mind and matter were but the prelude, and from which they flowed as from their more immediate cause, there would not be a stronger call upon Christians to consider the revolution of modern France, than to contemplate the ruins of ancient Babylon or Palmyra. The ruin of an empire always speaks a lesson to mankind; but it is only when accompanied, as was the ruin of modern France, with consequences such as have been its manifest result, that we are justified in deeming it more than an ordinary sign, and fully characteristic as among "the signs of the times."

See, my brethren, how significantly these consequences now speak to us. If any thing were wanting to confirm the argument laid down in Scripture, and established in the experience of mankind, of the necessity of civil government, it was afforded in the manifestation of what followed from a whole people's first questioning, and then throwing off, the obligations of obedience to "the Powers that be.” It was the wide spread of the principles which