ocalypse is
not improbably assigned to its obvious unfitness to be read in
churches. It is to be feared that a history of the interpretation of the
Apocalypse would not give a very favorable view either of the wisdom
or the charity of the successive ages of Christianity. Wetstein's
interpretation, differently modified, is adopted by most Continental
scholars.--M.]

Whilst the happiness and glory of a temporal reign were promised to the
disciples of Christ, the most dreadful calamities were denounced against
an unbelieving world. The edification of a new Jerusalem was to advance
by equal steps with the destruction of the mystic Babylon; and as
long as the emperors who reigned before Constantine persisted in the
profession of idolatry, the epithet of babylon was applied to the city
and to the empire of Rome. A regular series was prepared of all the
moral and physical evils which can afflict a flourishing nation;
intestine discord, and the invasion of the fiercest barbarians from
the unknown regions of the North; pestilence and famine, comets and
eclipses, earthquakes and inundations. [68] All these were only so many
preparatory and alarming signs of the great catastrophe of Rome, when
the country of the Scipios and Caesars should be consumed by a flame
from Heaven, and the city of the seven hills, with her palaces, her
temples, and her triumphal arches, should be buried in a vast lake of
fire and brimstone. It might, however, afford some consolation to Roman
vanity, that the period of their empire would be that of the world
itself; which, as it had once perished by the element of water, was
destined to experience a second and a speedy destruction from the
element of fire. In the opinion of a general conflagration, the faith of
the Christian very happily coincided with the tradition of the East,
the philosophy of the Stoics, and the analogy of Nature; and even the
country, which, from religious motives, had been chosen for the origin
and principal scene of the conflagration, was the best adapted for that
purpose by natural and physical causes; by its deep caverns, beds of
sulphur, and numero is volcanoes, of which those of Aetna, of Vesuvius,
and of Lipari, exhibit a very imperfect representation. The calmest
and most intrepid sceptic could not refuse to acknowledge that the
destruction of the present system of the world by fire, was in itself
extremely probable. The Christian, who founded his belief much less on
the fall