a war-cry would be for the circumstances of the seventh century.
The simple sublimity of Oneness, as opposed to school-theology and
catholic demons: the glitter of barbaric pomp, instead of tame
observances: the flashing scimetar of ambition to supersede the cross: a
turban aigretted with jewels for the twisted wreath of thorns. As human
nature is, and especially in that time was, nothing was more expectable
(even if prophetic records had not taught it), than the rise and
progress of that great False Prophet, whose waving crescent even now
blights the third part of earth.

ROMANISM.

We all know how easy it is to prophesy after the event: but it would be
uncandid and untrue to confound this remark with another, cousin-germane
to it; to wit: how easy it is to discern of any event, after it has
happened, whether or not it were antecedently likely. When the race is
over, and the best horse has won (or by clever jockey-management, the
worst), how obviously could any gentleman on the turf, now in possession
of particulars, have seen the event to have been so probable, that he
would have staked all upon its issue.

Carry out this familiar idea; which, as human nature goes, is none the
weaker as to illustration, because it is built upon the rule "_parvis
componere magna_." Let us sketch a line or two of that great
fore-shadowing cartoon, the probabilities of Romanism.

That our blessed Master, even in His state as man, beheld its evil
characteristics looming on the future, seems likely not alone from both
His human keenness and His divine omniscience, but from here and there a
hint dropped in his biography. Why should He, on several occasions, have
seemed, I will say with some apparent sharpness, to have rebuked His
virgin mother.--"Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--"Who are my
mother and my brethren?"--"Yea--More blessed than the womb which bare
me, and the paps that I have sucked, is the humblest of my true
disciples." Let no one misunderstand me: full well I know the just
explanations which palliate such passages; and the love stronger than
death which beat in that Filial heart. But, take the phrases as they
stand; and do they not in reason constitute some warning and some
prophecy that men should idolize the mother? Nothing, in fact, was more
likely than that a just human reverence to the most favoured among women
should have increased into her admiring worship: until the humble and
holy Mary, with the swor