That the mystical Babylon emblematically represented the complex systems of civil and ecclesiastical corruption and despotism organized in Christendom, was in some degree understood by the reformers in Europe; but the work of this second angel was carried on successively by men of piety and learning, who were eminently qualified for systematically arranging the doctrines of grace as deduced from the word of God. Their pious labors we still have in the forms of Bodies of Divinity and Confessions of Faith, in both which the unscriptural and antiscriptural dogmas and heresies of Rome are condemned and solidly confuted by the Scriptures. There is a wonderful "harmony of confessions" framed by those who separated from the fellowship of the Romish church; which harmony can be accounted for only by the fact that those who framed them drew their materials from the Bible. But it was by their public _covenants especially_, that the reformers lifted a testimony against the heresies, immoralities and tyrannies of the church of Rome. And among all the churches of the Reformation, that of Scotland is justly entitled to the pre-eminence. In no nation or state in Christendom did the witnesses of Christ,--the second angel, attain so nearly to a scriptural model of organized society in church and state as in that land, whose mountains and valleys were "flowered with martyrs" for a "Covenanted Work of Reformation." As Zuingle the Swiss-reformer excelled Luther, Calvin and others in Europe in the application of the divine moral law, as revealed in Scriptures, to civil society, so John Knox in Scotland was equally clear, that royal personages are amenable to the body politic, and both to the Mediator.