Napoleon’s policies were anti-papal, and in many ways he sought to embarrass the Pope. In 1814, however, Napoleon was defeated, and in April of that year, banished to Elba, whilst Louis XVIII was placed on the throne of France. Meanwhile, in March of that year, the Pope was liberated and again entered Rome (from where he had been previously banished), and “paid his humble thanks to St. Peter”. On 1st March 1815, Napoleon, having escaped, landed in France, and was enthusiastically received by the French. He again organised an army against the European coalition, but was ultimately defeated at Waterloo on 18th June. The Congress of Vienna met to redraw the map of Europe. The victors — Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria — together with defeated France, balanced power and territory in Europe with the aim ofpreventing war, but often at the expense of tne national affinities of the peoples affected. The main territorial adjustments were: France lost little, except the Rhineland to Prussia, which also gained some of Saxony; the defunct Holy Roman Empire (destroyed by Napoleon) was superseded by the German Confederation, headed by Austria; and Austria received territories in north Italy. Poland was divided between Austria, Russia and Prussia; and the Papal States were restored in Italy. An important change took place in 1870 with the termination of the Papal temporal power, and the establishment of the Second Reich by Germany. Nevertheless, the essential provisions of the treaty lasted for almost a century, until disturbed by World War I — Publishers.
pled in the dust by the Moslem; yet in all this, they did not perceive the Deity’s repudiation of Catholicism; or, if they did, they would not be instructed and corrected by it. Thus, “the rest of the men who were not killed by these plagues,” the Latin Catholics of the West, “repented not of the works of their hands” (ch. 9:20,21).
From the killing of the Eastern Third by the capture of Constantinople, to the resettlement of Europe by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, three hundred and sixty-two years had elapsed; and notwithstanding the terrible plagues of the past twenty-five years, the Latins, both Romish and Protestant, showed themselves to be as unrepentant of their “works” as ever. These works and deeds are recited in ch. 9:20,21; such as idols or images of gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood, which their hands had made, as representatives of the demons, ta daimonia, the “disembodied spirits,” they worshipped as guardians, intercessors, ministers of grace, and mediators between Christ and men. The deeds of “the men who had the sign of the beast in their right hand, and in their foreheads,” and who served as priests of these idols, vulgarly styled “the clergy”, and of which they repented not, were murders, sorceries, fornication, thefts. And the people were like their priests. They continued to uphold and sanction all these abominations with the blindest veneration and devotion, till the exhausted patience of the Deity gave place, in 1796, to the terrible outpouring of the third vial, at the hand of his servant Napoleon, who, as “his servant Nebuchadnezzar” on a former occasion, gave the worshippers of images “blood to drink”, and “scorched them with great heat”. But, the events of the third, fourth and fifth vials have not brought the idolators to repentance; so as to cast their idols which they have made to worship, to the moles and to the bats (Isa. 2:20); and to abandon their murders, and their sorceries, and their fornication, and their thefts. We have seen how that the restored Pontiff evinced his incurable stupidity and idolatry in “solemnly crowning” a Madonna at Ancona, for incorrigible fools to worship. Demons and their images again became the fashionable objects of adoration. They repented not from these; but, in the words of Ranke, “the restored governments of Southern Europe repented of their former insubordination to Rome. They thought they had thus unchained the tempest by which themselves had been overthrown; and beheld in the Pope their natural ally.” Thus, they failed to see the truth; that, instead of this, it was their fellowship with Rome in its villanies, superstitions, and blasphemies, that brought upon them all the evil by which they had been so dreadfully scorched. In France, the infatuated and demented Bourbons, after their restoration, dedicated their kingdom most especially to the disembodied nonentity, or daemon, they call the Virgin Mary, as its patroness;
they introduced those thieves and murderers, the Jesuits, whose society Pope Clement XIV declared to be a public nuisance; and in his Bull dissolving it, says, that “he who endeavoured to let it loose upon society would be chargeable with high treason against the common interests and happiness of his species”. Of this treason the Bourbons were guilty; and by their oppression of antipapalists, showed that the murderous spirit of their ancestor Charles IX, of St. Bartholomew renown, was not yet extinct in them. But, the seed of evil doers is doomed to confusion and contempt. The indignation of the Deity descended upon their incorrigible dynasty, in 1830, and in 1848. The revolution of the former year abolished the elder branch; and the more remarkable one of the latter date, the younger branch of the Capets; to make room for the developments of the Second Napoleonic Empire, whose mission is, not like Napoleon “the Great’s”, to darken the kingdom of the Beast and his Image, but to create by its policy such a situation as is prefigured in ch. 16:13,14, preparatory to the thieflike coming of the great Napoleon’s antitype, Yahweh Tz’vaoth, who will resume his work, and refuse peace to the world until the Beast is slain, and his body destroyed; and, with his False Prophet whom he upholds, is given to the burning flame, never more to insult the habitable with their accursed presence.
In Spain, also, “they repented not of their works”. Ferdinand, when restored to the throne, re-established both the Jesuits, and the popish “Hell”, styled the Inquisition; and “heretics” were again murdered at the burning stake. The subsequent civil wars, and continually recurring insurrections there, sufficiently indicate the indignation of heaven; and, as an earnest of what is to come, is measurably retributive of the blood of the innocent shed by the “reverend” assassins and thieves of Rome.
In Sardinia the King, to whose tender mercies the Waldenses were made over by the treaty of Vienna, for no other reason than because they were Antipapists, revoked their privileges, and multiplied vexations and oppressions upon them. In after years, the king of Sardinia was defeated at Novara, and died an exile in a foreign land; and his son, Victor Emmanuel, now reigns king of Italy, a confederate of the Revolution, and a terror to the Pope.
In Austria, so terribly “scorched with fire, ” they repented not. By concordat with Rome, they assumed their former relationship to the “Name of Blasphemy” on the Seven Hills. The Austrian kingdom of Lombardo-Venetia, being adjacent to the Pope’s temporal kingdom, the Austrian Government became the pillar and support of the papal throne — an alliance always fatal, and full of misfortune, to the power so connected. In Austria, the Jesuits became as active as ever in propagating popery, with all its lies and blasphemies. Thus, when the Jesuit Sorcerers in Hungary made any proselytes from Protestantism, they made them say that “the Pope cannot err; and that he has full power to forgive or retain sins, and to cast men into hell; that all he that he has established, whether out of the Bible or not, is true; that he ought to be honored with similar reverence to that paid to Christ himself; that those who oppose his authority ought to be burned at the stake, and to perish body and soul in hell; that the reading of the scriptures is the origin of all factions and blasphemy; that each priest is greater than the Virgin Mary because she was the parent of Christ but once, but the priest creates him anew again and again”. Such was the “sorcery” sanctioned by Austria in 1828. Her misfortunes had failed to make her rational and the fruit of her folly and idiocy has been reaped in the wrath that has revisited her, and the False Prophet, her ally, upon the Seven Hills, under the judgments concomitant with the outpouring of the Sixth Vial, by which she has been dried up, and her protectorate of the Pope virtually dissolved.
Lastly, in Naples and Tuscany, in short everywhere throughout Roman Antichristendom, the “lying miracles” which had ceased during French ascendancy, were renewed. Such is the testimony of the author of “Rome in the Nineteenth Century”. He remarks that “not one miracle happened during the whole reign of the French. It was not until the streets were purified with lustrations of holy water, on the return of the Pontiff, that they began to operate again”. When he reappeared in the city, miracles revived. “Within this little month” (April, 1817), says he, “three great miracles have happened in Rome. The last took place yesterday (April 20); when all Rome crowded to the Capitol to see an image of the Virgin open her eyes”. And where is Naples now whose guardian daemon is a nonentity they style “St. Januarius?” And where is Tuscany and its kindred duchies? All swallowed up in the revolutionary kingdom of Italy; and their former demented rulers refugient exiles in foreign lands. Yet have they not eyes to see, that the Hand that smites them is Divine.