and God has never left himself without witnesses against
defection and apostacy. This angel prepares the way for his successor,
who prosecutes the same work with increasing clearness and confidence.

8. And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is
fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine
of the wrath of her fornication.

V. 8.--"There followed another angel." Some expositors[8] interpret this
angel of Luther, some of Calvin; but no _individual_ is sufficiently
prominent in history to justify the application to him of so striking a
symbol in so concise a prophecy. Such restriction of a symbol to an
individual results from _prelatic_ habits of thought. In the mind of a
prelate the idea of a gospel ministry includes that of a _metropolitan_.
This angel is, in fact, as usual, simply the emblem of the ministry, not
excluding the social body of which they are the official guides.

This second angel carries forward the reformation effected by his
predecessor, reviving that cause when it began to languish under the
violence of Antichrist. "While the Roman pontiff," says Mosheim,
"slumbered in security at the head of the church, and saw nothing
throughout the vast extent of his domain but tranquillity and
submission, and while the worthy and pious professors of genuine
Christianity almost despaired of seeing that Reformation on which their
most ardent desires and expectations were bent, an obscure and
inconsiderable person arose on a sudden, in the year 1517, and laid the
foundation of the long expected change, by opposing with undaunted
resolution his single force to the torrent of papal ambition and
despotism." That individual was the heroic Luther, whose praise is in
all the churches till the present day. No individual is so famous in the
history of that eventful period as Martin Luther, for recovering the
doctrine of justification by the righteousness of Christ, to the
exclusion of all creature merit. This fundamental principle in the
economy of man's salvation he justly denominated _articulus stantis vel
cadentis ecclesiae_--"the hinge of a standing or falling church." By the
defence and propagation of this doctrine especially, the priestly office
of Christ was vindicated against the dogmas of penance, indulgence and
supererogation, inculcated by the "Man of Sin;" and by consequence, one
of the bulwarks of mystical Babylon effectually demolished. At the
famous Diet of W