in past generations. While
every earthly potentate, usurping the place and prerogatives of the
Mediator, assumed to dictate the faith and worship of his subjects, all
dissenters and recusants must necessarily be subjected to penalties.
Such was the policy of the dragon for centuries, while in the heavens of
ecclesiastical and civil power. The nominal church established by the
state, _defined heresy_; and the heresy found by the church became
rebellion against the civil authority. Of course the saints were then
executed as _traitors_. Even a superficial view of the signs of the
times will result in the conviction, that a great change has taken place
in the policy of nations and churches. The dragon has now prevailed with
most politicians and statesmen, as well as with most professing
Christians, to demand a total "separation of church and state;" by which
demand they do not mean a divorce of the unscriptural and
_antichristian_ alliance only or chiefly, but a simple and absolute
rejection of religion, and especially the _Christian_ religion, from any
connexion with or influence upon _civil_ affairs. This is undeniably the
avowed aim and declared desire of the great body of the population of
Christendom at the present time, (1870.) And what is this but an open
denial of the authority of the Mediator as he is the "Prince of the
kings of the earth?" Thus has the dragon, since his ejection from heaven
become a terrible "woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea!"
And thus has the "earth opened her mouth and swallowed up the flood;" so
that the woman remains comparatively safe "from the face of the serpent"
in the very obscurity of her position. Some of her sons, from time to
time, venturing abroad from their secluded place in the wilderness,
becoming weary of sackcloth and aspiring to worldly distinction, have
been borne along by the waters of the flood, and _drowned in the general
deluge_. Against the force of this strong current of popular errors,
nothing will avail the seed of the woman but the "living water" which
Jesus imparted to the woman of Samaria. To him who partakes of this
water, those of the dragon will be distasteful; for "it shall be in him
a well of water springing up into everlasting life." (John iv. 14.)
Since the middle of the seventeenth century, when by the reformation in
Europe and the British Isles, the dragon was cast down from the symbolic
heaven, he has been assailing in "great wrath" all ran