doms; has invented new doctrines, or borrowed the cast-off abominations of paganism. A more subtle method of undermining the gospel of Christ has never been devised; but still the Papacy is not the apostasy,' any more than any one of the others mentioned. The Papacy does not, which the apostasy must do, abjure and cast off Christ. The power of Christ's Spirit, however thwarted by its systematic violation and perversion of truth, lives in its system, and works, by means of the sacred Word, on the hearts of its members. To deny this is to shut our eyes to the most manifest and blessed facts.

In a word, the apostasy is yet to be manifested. Its form cannot be doubtful; its preparations are going on, and have long been, among the nations of Christendom. It is not any corrupt form of Christianity; it is not Mahommedanism, with its firm hold on the unity and sovereignty of God; but it is the spread of secular unbelief, which denies, and casts off, God: which sets up nature above God, physical law above personal will. It is the idolatry of material force and of human genius, as opposed to the revelation of the divine and supernatural. That each of the lesser apo.

stasies has ministered and is ministering to the preparation of this great one, is manifest: and none more signally than the Papacy, with its speaking of lies in hypocrisy, and its universal debasement of the sense of truth and of moral feeling. Any one need but mingle in continental society in any country, to see how completely Romanism has subserved unbelief, and how its exaggeration of claims on submission has issued in universal contempt for its dogmas.

THE APOSTASY, then, as we understand it, will be the open and general casting off of Christianity in favour of secular unbelief. How long it will be delayed, God knows; but it is assuredly that to which, sooner or later, the present state of things is tending. What dimensions it will assume, again God knows. It will not carry away, it will not silence, the Church. Rather will the cloud blacken as the sun brightens, and the testimony to Christ among the faithful will be clearer and purer in words and deeds, as the denial of Christ waxes wider and bolder.

But the apostasy will come to a head. The more men cast off God, the only Master of the human spirit, the more they become the prey of man.

And not only this. In proportion as the general standard of mental cultivation is raised, and man made equal with man, the ordinary power of genius is diminished, but its extraordinary power is increased; its reach deepened, its hold made more firm. As men become familiar with the achievements and the exercise of talent, they learn to despise and disregard its daily examples, and to be more independent of mere men of ability; but they only become more completely in the power of gigantic intellect, and the slaves of preeminent and unapproachable talent.'*

This being so, there seems nothing improbable, à priori, in the apostasy culminating in the person of some one personal representative. Every one of its partial manifestations which we have already seen has done so from time to time. And with this idea the plain words of the prophecy completely tally. The 'lawless One' here spoken of, is most naturally understood, not as a dynasty, or an official succession, but as an individual man. Thus the early interpreters always understood the expression.

There was nothing in their peculiar

I quote from the Introduction to my "New Testament for English Readers," vol. ii. p. 92.

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circumstances or temperament which prevented them from interpreting all that is here said as a personification, or from allegorising it, as others have done since. This fact gives their interpretation an historical weight, the inference from which it is difficult to escape. The subject of the coming of Antichrist must have been no uncommon one in preaching and writing, during the latter part of the first, and the second century. That no echoes of the apostolic sayings on the matter should have reached thus far, no savour of the first outpouring of interpretation by the Spirit penetrated through the next generation, can hardly be conceived.'

We assume then that this Man of sin, or of lawlessness, is an individual, who shall arise out of the apostasy, and gain to himself the power over its component elements. Let it surprise none that such things as sitting in the temple of God and showing himself that he is God,' are predicated of him. From unbelief comes lawlessness; contempt of moral restraint which rests on divine sanction ; and from casting off of men's legitimate Ruler and Guide, united to the degradation of man's soul consequent on immorality, comes gross supersti

tion; fetish worship, under the guise of derision of worship; readiness to bow down to any usurper, when the rightful monarch has been dethroned.

But there was a hindrance to the manifestation of this Man of sin when the Apostle wrote; and that hindrance is still unremoved; and there was a hinderer, in whom that hindrance was embodied. The Fathers, in early times, took these respectively as being the Roman Empire, and he that ruled it. I believe they were right. But they judged for their own times; we must judge for ours. That empire, in the form which they witnessed, has past away. But its hindrance' has been continued, in other forms. It has given place to other empires and kingdoms, by whose means the Christian churches have been maintained, and the reign of law and order has been ensured. As often as the partial outbreaks of lawlessness have taken place, these temporal powers have given way before them; and when human society again returned to its usual course, it has been by the knitting up again, in new combinations, of the fabric of state governments. Their power, wherever the seeds of evil are most plentiful, is strictly a coercive power;