e world and
the final judgment. It was remarkable, too, as the year in which
oppression first compelled the Scotch Presbyterians of the reign of
Charles II. to assume the attitude of armed resistance, and as
forming, in the estimate of Burnet and other intelligent Protestants,
the fifth great crisis of the Reformed religion in Europe. And such
were the wonders of the _Annus_ _Mirabilis_ of Dryden: two bloody
naval engagements; a great fire; the appearance of a false Messiah; a
widely-spread fear that the end of the world and the coming of
Antichrist were at hand; the revolt from their allegiance to the
reigning monarch of a sorely oppressed body of Christians, maddened by
persecution; and a perilous crisis in the general history of
Protestantism.

The year now at its close has been beyond comparison more remarkable.
In the earlier twelvemonth, no real change took place in the existing
state of things. Its striking events resembled merely the phenomena of
a mid-winter storm in Greenland, where, over a frozen ocean, moveless
in the hurricane as a floor of rock or of iron, the hail beats, and
the thick whirling snows descend, and, high above head, the flashings
of aurora borealis lend their many-coloured hues of mystery to the
horrors of the tempest. Its transactions, picturesque rather than
important, wholly failed to affect the framework of society. That
floor of ice which sealed down the wide ocean of opinion retained all
its mid-winter solidity, and furnished foundations as firm as before
for the old despotic monarchies and the blood-stained persecuting
churches. But how immensely different the events of the year now at an
end! Its tempests have been, not those of a Greenland winter, but of a
Greenland spring: the depths of society have been stirred to the dark
bottom, where all slimy and monstrous things lie hid, and, under the
irresistible upheavings of the ground-swell, the ice has broken up;
and amid the wide weltering of a stormy sea, cumbered with the broken
ruins of ancient tyrannies, civil and ecclesiastical, the eye can
scarce rest upon a single spot on which to base a better order of
things. The 'foundations are removed.' A time of great trouble has
come suddenly upon the kingdoms of Europe--a time of 'famines, and
pestilences, and fearful sights, and great signs from heaven;' 'signs
in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth
distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves ro