Revelation 16:3

THE SECOND VIAL.

And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of. dead man: and every living soul died in the sea."--16:3.

Another vial follows swiftly. Another blow is aimed in some way at the walls of the great city Babylon. The first calamity has been upon the earth; the second is upon the ocean. The second angel pours his vial upon the sea. Then the waters become red as blood and in the great mortality that follows it seems to John as if every soul in the sea was dead. Again we ask if, in this series of calamities, there is one that smites the Catholic powers from the sea?

Under the second trumpet. great and burning mountain Cell into the sea. The Vandal power swept the Mediterranean, destroyed the Roman navy and then laid siege to the old imperial Rome. From the sea spiritual Rome, under the second vial, is weakened. The symbolism is fulfilled in the mightiest naval strife ever known.

In 1780 France and England, upon the ocean, were nearly equally matched. Along the shores of the struggling colonies of the United States sometimes the English, sometimes the French fleets, rode in triumph. At Yorktown, the superiority of the French at sea cooped Cornwallis in until Washington compelled his surrender. With 1793 begins another contest for the mastery of the seas. It continues after Napoleon sits on the imperial throne, and did not end for twenty years. France, again. Catholic power by Napoleon's concordat with the Pope, rallies under the imperial flag with herself, Catholic Spain, Portugal and Italy, in the struggle. Protestant England and Catholic Europe strive together upon the ocean. From the Indian ocean to the Nile, the Atlantic, the North sea and the the waters are reddened with blood. The Catholic flag is dipped into the sea. The old Catholic powers, those which in the past have been the vile instruments of papal wrong, the nations whose kings have committed fornication with the great spiritual harlot, suffer the loss in this long and deadly struggle of six hundred ships of the Line, the largest war vessels that go to sea, besides thousands of ships of war of smaller size. At the close of the contest, the naval power of Catholic Europe had been swept from the ocean. Spain, the discoverer of America, once the first naval power of the world; Portugal; France, long the rival of England on the seas, did not have. ship left that dared to hoist its flag upon the open seas. The destruction was the mightiest and the most complete recorded in modern annals. The earthly powers which supported Rome had been swept from the ocean.