instance of a nation that has continued to be Christian, that has perished. We believe the thing to be impossible. While great Rome has gone down, and Venice sits in widowed glory on the Adriatic, the poor Waldenses are still a people. The world tried but could not extinguish them. Christianity is synonymous with life: it gives immortality to nations here, and to the individual hereafter. Hence Daniel, when unfolding the state of the world in the last age, gives us to understand that, when once thoroughly Christianized, society will no longer be overwhelmed by those periodic lapses into barbarism which in every former age has set limits to the progress of States. "And in the days of those kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed." Unlike every preceding era, immortality will then be the chief characteristic of nations. But must it not strike every one, in connection with this subject, that in proportion as Romanism developes itself, the nations under its sway sink the deeper into barbarism? This fact Romanist writers now see and bewail. What stronger condemnation of their system could they pronounce? For surely if religion be of God, it must, like all else that comes from Him, be beneficent in its influence. He who ordained the sun to irradiate the earth with his light, and fructify it with his warmth, would not have given a religion that fetters the understanding and barbarises the species. And yet, if Romanism be divine, He has done so; for the champions of that Church, compelled by the irresistible logic of facts, now tacitly acknowledge that a decaying civilization is following in the wake of Roman Catholicism in every part of the world. Listen, for instance, to the following confession of M. Michel Chevalier, in the _Journal des Debats_:--