are the same everywhere, the priests and the sbirro. Does not this denote confederacy between the ecclesiastical and civil authorities for their joint domination? The catechism and the bayonet,-the Jesuit and the gendarme, the church and the army,—are in combined and vigorous action all over Europe. Look at Rome. Under Pius IV. the era of the worst Popes has been revived. The return from Gaeta formed the commencement of a policy as astute in its foreign relations, and more oppressive in its home administration, than even that of Hildebrand. Infallibility sits behind a hedge of bayonets; its assessors are described as 'assassins, galley-slaves and thieves;' and the subordinate agents of its government are undoubtedly spies and police. The patriot, the scholar, the constitutionalist, have all been swept off to prison, or sent into exile. Felons only are at large, who celebrate the saturnalia of license under the arch-felon of the Vatican. The fisherman's net is of steel, as its victims know. The keys are no mere symbol now, seeing Peter's successor has become a jailor. Rome, full of dungeons and desolate hearths, and cinctured with fresh graves, sits cowering beneath the baleful shade of pontifical despotism. The Word of God dare not enter those gates within which the vicar of God sits enthroned. An edition of Diodati's Bible, amounting to some thousands, which was commenced by the American mission under the Roman Republic, lies locked up in the vaults of the Quirinal. The incarcerated Bibles and the incarcerated Romans tell the same tale: they proclaim the unchanged and unchangeable hostility of Rome to religious and civil freedom.

"At Naples the same object is pursued by precisely the same methods. Whatever coercion, mental and physical, can do to make a people swallow down the doctrine that kings are divine and popes infallible, is now being done at Naples. The government is conducted by priests, police, and soldiers; the capital is full of spies; the confessional is worked to discover opinion, and the police to extirpate it. There, too, as in Rome, light, and, above all, Protestant light, is the object of profoundest dread. The press is locked, the Bible is prohibited, and the Jesuit labours in his special vocation as a propagator of ignorance, or of something worse. The few schools taught by British Protestants have all been closed, and the whole youth of the country are under Jesuit tuition." "Of the concordats with Spain and Germany we have already spoken. The object of these deeds is to bind these countries more firmly than ever to the Roman see. Claims are put forward, to which these governments would not have listened in ages termed less enlightened than our own; and, if granted, they will reduce the people to a pitch of vassalage unequalled by anything that obtained even in the dark ages. Of a kindred character is the concordat with Tuscany. This instrument establishes, for the first time since the existence of the Florentine state, the complete subjection of the state to the church, in all matters which the latter may choose to call spiritual: it empowers the Pope to send any number of bulls into the country, and the bishops to enforce them, subject to no control: it erects an ecclesiastical censorship over books and opinions; and it declares that the property of the church shall be disposed of, not according to the laws of the land, but according to canon law. Those sovereign rights which the Seignory handed down and the Medici defended, the secular power has conspired to surrender into the hands of the spiritual. Between the Croats of Vienna and the priests of the Vatican, liberty is extinguished throughout Italy. The Alps and the Pyrenees enclose a region where men walk about in chains. The Lucifer of this pandemonium is the Pope. If he can prevent it, never shall a single Bible cross the Alps, and eternal darkness must be the fate of Italy.

"France is not so retrograde, only because party and the press have still power there. Louis Napoleon has sold himself and his country to the Pope, that the Pope may make him president for life; he has gone to the Vatican, as Saul went to the witch of Endor, that he may obtain by sorcery what he cannot command by talent. Thus it is that European Yezideeism goes on. The Pope worships the devil, that he may give him the world; and Louis Napoleon worships the Pope, that he may give him France. Hence a great apparent revival of Popery in that country. The Jesuits being masters of the President, have their own way, and are uncontrolled, save by the Mountain and the Socialist masses. Pretensions which have lain dormant in France for twenty years, have been revived within the past twelve months. Congregations and confraternities are again springing up. Crosses and Calvaries are rising on every road. The Jesuits spend the night in hatching plots, and the day in running about to execute them: they get up, with equal adroitness, sermons and miracles; they enact the schoolmaster, and pull the string at a Madonna show ; they busy themselves in tracking and prosecuting the journalist and the colporteur; they haunt the clubs and the saloons, and introduce themselves into families, and into every sort of society. The Abbé Dauparloup and his associates could not be more bustling and important, though Charles X., in his character of a religious ascetic, had returned from the tomb. Everywhere Jesuitism is seizing on waxen youth, erecting new colleges, expelling liberal professors, dismissing the communal schoolmas

ters in thousands, and obliging those who fill their places to take the pupils to church and to all the services. The Jesuits are drawing their web over all the country, in the shape of friars of the Christian doctrine, and lay brothers. In most parts of Italy a confession-ticket is demanded as the passport to public office and private employment; and it is not improbable that it will soon be so in France. Louis Napoleon, whom the Jesuits endure as the mere locum tenens of the Bourbon, leans upon the church, and the church upon Louis Napoleon; and a powerful army in the hands of the President has given unexpected but fictitious strength to Romanism in France.

"In Austria, Prince Schwarzenberg has restored, in all their vigour, the twin-tyrannies of Jesuitism and absolutism. While all other religious bodies have had their privileges abridged, those of the Church of Rome have been fully restored. The placetum regium has been abolished, and the Pope now exercises in Austria uncontrolled power in the appointment of bishops. An association has been formed by the machinations of the Jesuits, called 'The Young Catholic Association:' its recruits are drawn mainly from the youth in the schools. Every member, on entering, must swear fidelity to the Pope, and promise to concur in the establishment of missions throughout Austria, and in the realisation of religious liberty,—a phrase which can mean only a right to extirpate Protestantism, seeing the Romanists already enjoy full liberty in Austria. During the summer of 1850, Jesuit intrigue had well-nigh precipitated Austria in a sanguinary conflict upon Prussia. War was averted only by the concessions and humiliations of the King of Prussia at Olmutz. Protestant congregations in Hungary have been sadly harrassed; and it was universally observed, that during the negotiations of 1850, the troops of Austria were quartered exclusively in protestant districts, after the approved modes of punishing nonconformity set by Ferdinand II. at the beginning of the thirty years' war,' and by our own Charles II. during the 'twenty-eight years' persecution.' And now the house of Hapsburg has fully returned to its traditionary maxims of rule, and has completed its re-action by its edict, in August of this year (1851), proclaiming the will of the Emperor the sole constitution of the country, and rendering the cabinet and the council of state accountable to the Emperor alone. Thus the last shred of constitutionalism has been swept away, and the naked fabric of pure unmitigated despotism has been set up in its room. Francis Joseph furnishes another example of the historical fact, that the vassals of the church are uniformly the oppressors of their subjects.

"The object of this league, avowed almost in so many words, is to undo the Reformation in both its political and spiritual effects. But success in this object is impossible, so long as Britain remains a free and protestant country. This the papal powers very clearly perceive. Their policy, therefore, is either to convert Britain to Romanism and absolutism, or, if that is impossible, to put it down. To convert Britain is the design of the papal aggression,—first, by the erection of the hierarchy; next, by introducing popish bishops into the House of Lords; next by taking into their own hands the whole ecclesiastical and educational machinery of Ireland; next, by bringing over England to Romanism by means of Tractarianism, aided by the multiplication of popish cathedrals, convents, and schools; and finally, by changing the coronation oath, marrying the heir-apparent to a popish princess, and, along with his conversion and accession to the throne, inaugurating their full domination in the country. But if we resist this aggression, we may prepare for one of a more physical kind. It is infallibility or the sword that Rome now offers to Britain. The exigencies of the times have forced this course upon the Papacy. Rome must advance. To stand still were, in her case, and in that of the absolutist powers, irretrievable ruin. They have an infidel democracy behind them; and, to conquer it, they must precipitate themselves upon protestant Britain; for such despotisms as they are now attempting to set up cannot co-exist on the same globe with British constitutionalism and the protestant faith. Self-preservation, then, dictates this course, and numerous and unequivocal indications point to it as resolved upon. When Cardinal Wiseman arrived in the country, all the papal powers sent him their congratulations. What was this but a defiance to Protestantism? Numerous hints have been dropped by Romanist preachers and organs, that if their rights are denied, the arms of the Catholic powers will enforce them. But the Univers has the merit of speaking frankly out. This is the leading popish organ in Europe, and doubtless expresses the sentiments of its friends, when it preaches, as it now does, a new crusade against Protestantism. 'A heretic examined and convicted by thechurch,' says L'Univers, "used to be delivered over to the secular power, and punished with death. Nothing has ever appeared to us more natural or more necessary. More than one hundred thousand persons perished in consequence of the heresy of Wicliffe; a still greater number by that of John Huss; it would not be possible to calculate the bloodshed caused by the heresy of Luther, and it is not yet over. After three centuries, we are at the eve of a re-commencement.' Such is the dreadful tragedy which is plotted, and the plotters are not at the pains decently to veil their enormously diabolical purpose. One great St Bartholomew in Britain, and the reign of absolutism will be established,

and the triumphs of the Vatican complete. From Naples, with its twenty thousand chained captives, to Austrian-garrisoned Hamburg, there extends a chain of political forts, linking together the various countries in one powerful confederacy, which converges ominously on Britain. Pelion is piled upon Ossa, and Ossa upon Pelion. Of this towering mass, which threatens alike the pandemonium of democracy below and the heaven of constitutionalism and Protestantism above, the base is Russia and the apex is Rome.

"The ghost of the middle ages,-for in this confederacy the political and religious dogmas of these ages live over again, the ghost of the middle ages, we say, which the world believed had been laid for ever at rest, has returned suddenly from its tomb of three centuries, and now stalks grimly through the awe-struck and terrified nations of Europe, with the mitre of the church upon its brow, and the iron truncheon of the state in its hand. Its foot is planted with deadly pressure upon the necks of its own subjects; and its mailed arm is raised to strike down, with one decisive blow, that one country which is the home of freedom and of Protestantism."

ZECHARIAH-THE OCCASION AND DESIGN OF HIS MISSION.

Zech. i. 1-6.-In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word of the Lord unto Zechariah the son of Barachiah, the son of Iddo the prophet, saying, The Lord hath been sore displeased with your fathers. Therefore say thou unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Turn ye unto me, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the Lord of hosts. Be ye not as your fathers, unto whom the former prophets have cried, saying, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Turn ye now from your evil ways, and from your evil doings: but they did not hear, nor hearken unto me, saith the Lord. Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not take hold of your fathers? and they returned and said, Like as the Lord of hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us.

It is our purpose to present the readers of the Magazine with a series of expository discourses on some characteristic passages in the book of Zechariah. This purpose, to many, may seem a bold one; and those who are most intimately acquainted with the structure of the prophecy, and the difficulties connected with its interpretation, will be foremost in regarding the attempt as not a little adventurous. All Scripture, however, is profitable both for instruction and correction; and the prophecy of Zechariah is eminently fitted for both. Let both writer and reader unite in the earnest prayer, that the Spirit which was in the prophet may enable the one so to set forth, and the other so to read, the exposition of this book, as to promote their mutual instruction and edifi

cation.

Very few particulars, in regard to the personal history of Zechariah, are known. He belonged to the family of Aaron. His father was Barachiah, the son of Iddo. The latter was one of the priests who returned from Babylon with Zerubbabel and Joshua.* He must have been born in Babylon during the time of the captivity; and was probably, but a youth at the time of the return. He was contemporary with Haggai; both received their commission in the second year of Darius Hystaspes, 520 years B.C.; but the latter began to deliver his message two months before the former; and the great purpose contemplated by both, was to encourage Zerubbabel and Joshua in the building of the Temple, which had been interrupted by the machinations of their enemies; and particularly by the selfish and worldly spirit of the returned exiles themselves.

If we would enter into the spirit of this portion of the holy oracles, we must endeavour to place ourselves amidst the scenes in which its predictions were originally delivered. We must realise the circumstances in which all the parties concerned were placed, and view the different messages of the prophets from their

Nehemiah xii. 4.

† See Hag. i. 1, compared with Zech. i. 1.

stand-point. We must conceive the period of the seventy years' captivity drawing to a close, and the Jews, in great numbers, returned to their father-land. The book of Ezra throws much important light upon their condition there, and ought to be carefully studied in connection with Zechariah. From it we learn that Jerusalem was one melancholy mass of ruins. Its houses were desolate, and its palaces overthrown. The walls were broken down. The site of the ancient Temple had been cleared; the foundations of the second had been laid, and the people had begun to build. But their enemies, on every side, combined against them. They hired agents, who misrepresented them at the court of the MedoPersian monarch. They wrote letters certifying the king, "that if the city were builded again, and the walls thereof set up, he would cease to have any portion on this side the river" (Ezra iv. 16.) They thwarted the Jews in every possible way. And these things, combined with the lukewarmness and selfishness of multitudes of the Jews, who preferred their own ease and comfort to the glory of God; "caused the work of the house of God which is at Jerusalem to cease. (Ezra iv. 24.) It was at this time, and in these circumstances, that Zechariah received his commission; and the predictions contained in this book were designed, at once, to rebuke them for their faithlessness, and encourage them to do the work of the Lord.

The book naturally divides itself into three parts. The first is contained in the first six chapters, and is the most remarkable portion of the whole prophecy. It consists of a series of visions, seen by Zechariah in one night; in which, by very striking symbolical representations, the dispensations of providence towards those who had oppressed his people-the entire removal of idolatry from the latterthe rebuilding of the city and Temple of Jerusalem-the re-establishment of the worship of God-the preservation of the church-and the certainty of the coming of the Messiah, are most impressively revealed. The second part is comprehended in the seventh and eighth chapters, which contain an answer to a question which had been proposed to the priests, respecting the duty of observing a certain fast; together with a variety of moral precepts connected with the duty of fasting; and a glorious prediction of Jerusalem's restoration. The third and last part, comprising the six remaining chapters, carries us forward to the period of the glory of the latter days. It contains a prediction of the memorable expedition of the Greeks, under Alexander the Great, towards the East, and especially along the west coast of Palestine to Egypt-the protection which God would afford to his own peoplethe advent, sufferings, and reign of the Messiah-the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans-the dissolution of the Jewish state, the dispersion of the Jews, and their sufferings during that long and dreary period-their conversion and restoration-the character of their worship after their recovery-the combination of the gentile nations of the north to hinder their settlement in Palestine—the utter destruction of that confederacy-the conversion of the Gentiles, and their union into one church with their Jewish brethren in the worship and service of God.

The style, and general structure, of the last six chapters of Zechariah, differ, in some important particulars, from the preceding portions of his prophecy. On these accounts, their authenticity has been called in question, and their authorship ascribed to various other writers. The celebrated Joseph Mede was the first who took this ground, and his opinion has been adopted since that time by many, both in our own country and in Germany. Their authenticity has, however, been maintained—and we think most successfully-by many able scholars and divines. The objection from the difference of style between the two portions of the book— and that is the principal objection-is not of much value. The difference is not so great, as that between the style of John in the gospel which bears his name, and the Book of Revelation. But no sound critic now doubts that John was the author of both. In the latter case, the difference of subject accounts satisfactorily for the difference of style. So is it in the case before us. The subjects of the prophetic oracles in the last six chapters are wholly different from those of the preceding portions. And if we admit, what is highly probable, that the last portion of the book was written late in the life of the prophet, while the former was written much earlier, we have sufficient reason for the difference of style. That difference is, in some points, too striking to be overlooked. But we are disposed to re

gard it as a beauty, rather than an objection to the authenticity of any portion of the book. As an able writer (Dr Henderson) remarks, "In point of style, our prophet varies according to the nature of his subjects, and the manner in which they are presented to his mind. He now expresses himself in simple conversational prose, now in poetry. At one time he abounds in the language of symbols, at another, in that of dread prophetical announcement. His symbols are, for the most part, enigmatical, and require the explanations which accompany them. His prose resembles most that of Ezekiel; it is diffuse, uniform, and repetitious. His prophetic poetry possesses much of the elevation and dignity to be found in the earlier prophets, with whose writings he appears to have been familiar; only his rythmus is sometimes harsh and unequal, while his parallelisms are destitute of that symmetry and finish which form some of the principal beauties of Hebrew poetry."

The first six verses of the first chapter form an appropriate and instructive introduction to the whole book. In these, the prophet describes who he was-intimates his divine commission, and the time when it was given to him-and then reminds his countrymen of the Divine displeasure towards their impenitent forefathers, with the evident purpose of leading them to consider, and beware lest, by following the same impenitent course, they should bring upon themselves similar judgments.

Zechariah was "the son of Barachiah, the son of Iddo." Iddo was probably the same person as is mentioned in Ezra viii. 17, and consequently belonged to the family of the priests. It is also not unlikely that he was the individual mentioned by our Lord in Matt. xxiii. 35, as having been slain between the Altar and the Temple, although the fact itself is nowhere recorded. Zechariah did not run unsent. "The word of the Lord came unto him." He received his commission from Jehovah, and all the messages which he delivered to the people were communicated to him from above. He was the messenger of the Lord of hosts. words which he spake were not his own words. They were God's words; and let this be remembered by the reader. When Jehovah speaks, it surely becomes all the inhabitants of the earth to hear.

The

The time when Zechariah received his commission, was "in the eighth month of the second year of Darius." The month specified is that of the Jewish, and not the Persian year, as is manifest from chaps. i. 7., vii. 1., viii. 19. The Darius mentioned, was Darius Hystaspes who, in consequence of an oracle, was raised to the throne of the Medo-Persian empire, on the death of Smerdis the usurper, 521 years before Christ, and 14 after the destruction of Babylon. There were other three MedoPersian monarchs of that name. But none of these could be the person named here, for Darius the Mede spoken of in Daniel v. 31, lived before the return of the Jews from Babylon; and of the other two, one flourished ninety-three years after the completion of the second temple; the other at a period later still. The Darius of the text is described by the Greek historian Herodotus, as a mild and benignant ruler. He cherished towards the Jews the most friendly feelings-protected them from their enemies-and gave full effect to the decree of Cyrus in their favour.

The

It has been already stated that the design of these verses was to warn the Jews of the captivity, lest, now, when they had returned to their native land, they should imitate the example of their impenitent fathers. Accordingly, the servant of the Lord reminds them that " Jehovah had been sore displeased with their fathers." This the people knew. The inference to be drawn is not directly stated, but is strongly implied; and it could scarcely be mistaken; while the very abruptness of the statement was well fitted to force it upon their attention. Lord has been very sore displeased with your fathers, and so will He be with you, if you cherish their spirit, and imitate their example!' Hence the argument, and inference. "Therefore, thus saith the Lord of hosts, Turn unto me, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the Lord of hosts," that is, 'Repent of your wickedness, change your minds in reference to your past conduct. In the exercise of faith and repentance, turn unto me, and then* I will turn unto

• The conjunction (, Vau) has, evidently, the sense given to it above.