making way for the introduction of the millennium. That which they had set their hearts upon was to bring it to pass that Christ and His religion should no longer be remembered upon the earth. The French republicans were so many infernals who had broken loose from the pit below. 1 Their profession of principles of liberty and philanthropy were deceptive in the highest degree. They sought to fraternize with other nations merely to seduce them. Their emissaries employed the arts of intrigue and corruption, they were charged to stir up factions, seditions, rebellions, so as to disorganize established governments and make them more readily the prey of the infamous French government. 2
That these were not the pulpit utterances of men of peculiarly morbid dispositions, who stood apart from the main currents of thought and life in their day, would seem to be proved by the following instances of formal declarations issued by associations of churches.
On the 1 7th of May, 1798, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, then in session in the city of Philadelphia, issued an address to the members of its various congregations scattered throughout the country, urging attention to the extraordinarily gloomy aspect of affairs. The situation was interpreted as follows:
- 1 This estimate of the case appealed to Osgood's mind and satisfied his fancy. A year later he was heard on the following subject: The Devil Let Loose; or The Wo occasioned to the Inhabitants of the Earth by His Wrathful Appearance among Them. For lurid rhetoric Osgood outdid himself on this occasion. " Not in France only, but in various other countries, is the devil let loose; iniquity abounds; unclean spirits, like frogs in the houses and kneading-troughs of the Egyptians, have gone forth to the kings and rulers of the earth, . . . the armies of Gog and Magog are gathered together in open hostility against all unrighteousness, truth and goodness." (The Demi Let Loose, etc. Illustrated in a Discourse, delivered on the Day of the National Fast, April 25, 1799, Boston, 1799, pp. 13 et seq.)
- 2 Some Facts Evincive, etc., pp. 13, 16 et seq.
