tical interest
in the question on their own account, there were new religious
denominations of such strange ways and tendencies, such unknown
relations to anything hitherto recognised as Orthodoxy or as Heresy,
that the poor Civil Magistrate, or even the coolest Abstract
Tolerationist, in contemplating them, might well be puzzled. The
following is a list of the chief of these new Sects that had sprung
up since 1644:--

FIFTH-MONARCHY MEN:--At first sight this does not appear a new sect,
but merely a continuation of the old MILLENARIES or CHILIASTS (Vol.
III, pp. 152-153), who believed that the Personal Reign of Christ on
Earth for a thousand years was approaching. The change of name,
however, indicates greater precision in the belief, and also greater
intensity. According to the wild system of Universal Chronology then
in vogue, the past History of the World, on this side of the Flood,
had consisted of four great successive Empires or Monarchies--the
Assyrian, which ended B.C. 531; the Persian, which ended B.C. 331;
the Macedonian, or Greek Empire of Alexander, which was made to
stretch to B.C. 44; and the Roman, which had begun B.C. 44, with the
Accession of Augustus Caesar, and which had included, though people
might not see how, all that had happened on the Earth since then. But
this last Monarchy was tottering, and a Fifth Universal Monarchy was
at hand. It was that foreshadowed in Rev. xx.: "And I saw an Angel
come down from Heaven, having the key of the Bottomless Pit and a
great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the Dragon, that great
serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand
years, and cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and shut him up, and set
a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the
thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed
a little season. And I saw Thrones, and they sat upon them, and
judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were
beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the worship of God, and
which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had
received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they
lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the
dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished." This
prophecy was the property of all Christians, and might receive
different interpretations. The literal interpretation, favoured by
some theologians