But if we will not "hear the voice, if we receive not correction, if we refuse to return," if we persist in maintaining, at the national charge, "that image of jealousy provoking to jealousy," then, after the repeated and ever INCREASING strokes that the justice of God has laid on us, we have every reason to fear that the calamities that have fallen so heavily upon our countrymen in India, may fall still more heavily upon ourselves, within our own borders at home; for it was when "the image of jealousy" was set up in Jerusalem by the elders of Judah, that the Lord said, "Therefore will I also deal in fury; mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity; and though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet will I not hear them." He who let loose the Sepoys, to whose idolatrous feelings and antisocial propensities we have pandered so much, to punish us for the guilty homage we had paid to their idolatry, can just as easily let loose the Papal Powers of Europe, to take vengeance upon us for our criminal fawning upon the Papacy. 3. But, further, if the views established in this work be correct, it is time that the Church of God were aroused. Are the witnesses still to be slain, and has the Image of the Beast only within the last year or two been set up, at whose instigation the bloody work is to be done? Is this, then, the time for indifference, for sloth, for lukewarmness in religion? Yet, alas! how few are they who are lifting up their voice like a trumpet, who are sounding the alarm in God's holy mountain--who are bestirring themselves according to the greatness of the emergency--to gather the embattled hosts of the Lord to the coming conflict? The emissaries of Rome for years have been labouring unceasingly night and day, in season and out of season, in every conceivable way, to advance their Master's cause, and largely have they succeeded. But "the children of light" have allowed themselves to be lulled into a fatal security; they have folded their hands; they have got to sleep as soundly as if Rome had actually disappeared from the face of the earth--as if Satan himself had been bound and cast into the bottomless pit, and the pit had shut its mouth upon him, to keep him fast for a thousand years. How long shall this state of things continue? Oh, Church of God, awake, awake! Open your eyes, and see if there be not dark and lowering clouds on the horizon that indicate an approaching tempest. Search the Scriptures for yourselves; compare them with the facts of history, and say, if there be not reason after all to suspect that there are sterner prospects before the saints than most seem to wot of. If it may turn out that the views opened up in these pages are Scriptural and well-founded, they are at least worthy of being made the subjects of earnest and prayerful inquiry. It never can tend to good to indulge an uninquiring and delusive feeling of safety, when, if they be true, the only safety is to be found in a timely knowledge of the danger and due preparation, by all activity, all zeal, all spirituality of mind, to meet it. On the supposition that peculiar dangers are at hand, and that God in His prophetic Word has revealed them, His goodness is manifest.