Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/257

 prevailed in the councils; the arrogance, tyranny, and extortion of the legates; the unbridled licentiousness and enormous crimes of the clergy and monks of all denominations; the unrighteous severity and partiality of the Roman laws; and demanded publickly, as their ancestors had done before them, a reformation of the Church in its head and in its members." At the commencement of the sixteenth century, in which the Reformation was effected, Alexander the Sixth filled the pontificate. Of him Mosheim also writes, and in this other historians agree, that "Humanity disowned him; he is rather to be considered a monster than a man; whose deeds excite horror, and whose enormities place him among the most execrable tyrants of ancient times. The world was delivered from this papal fiend in the year 1503, by the poisonous draught which he had prepared for another."

These facts of history are no one-sided representations; they are concurred in by all parties, even by those who belong to the Catholic religion. They show very clearly the desperate condition into which the triumphs of a false principle had plunged that Divine Christianity which the Lord had planted and which His apostles taught. Thus true charity was abandoned, and as a consequence genuine faith was lost. These, then, were among the disastrous events to which the Lord referred as being the occasion for His second coming. Hence, of the temple, He said, "There shall not be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down." The temple was the Church, and the stones to be thrown down were the truths to be overturned. How clearly has this prediction been fulfilled.

But the progress of those painful events received a check by means of the Reformation. As yet,the Word had not come