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and there only is its restraining hand able to be relaxed, where the light and liberty of the Gospel are shed abroad. And this temporal power has ever been especially in conflict with the Papacy, restraining its pretensions, modifying its course of action, witnessing more or less against its tyranny and its lies.

If this interpretation be correct, 'he that hindereth' will be that person, whoever he might be, then at the head of the hindering power. At the time when the Apostle wrote, this was the Roman Emperor, supreme over the known world: at other times the hindering power might be split up into various portions, and governed by many persons. It would seem from the prophecy that this system of lawful and law-observing power is gradually to be dissolved before the end. The wild excesses of unbelief will then break forth over the Christian world, as they did partially break forth in the suspension of lawful government during the first revolution in France. How long the predestined Man of lawlessness will be in power, is not declared to us. But one thing is certain; that his antagonism against our Lord and his Church will be cut short by the appearing of the Lord himself,

which will be his destruction.

Thus we are

carried on to the time of the end; apparently to the same great conflict of which we read in other parts of the prophetic Scriptures, which shall be terminated by the personal victory of Christ himself over his banded enemies.

That there are many objectors to this interpretation I am well aware; but I cannot say that their objections have great weight with me, as against the consent of the early interpreters, and the general analogy of the language of prophecy. The favourite interpretation of Antichrist is, that it is the Papacy, or the Pope for the time being. But this signally fails to fulfil any of the requisite conditions of the prophecy. For in the first place the Papacy has been, according to these very interpreters, in power for 1260 years, and the Lord is not yet come; a fact which, though it may, by forcing the meaning of words, be reconciled with the language of our prophecy, yet is manifestly, to the fair-judging observer, at variance with its natural acceptation, according to which the manifestation of the Man of sin is immediately to precede Christ's coming. And secondly, so far is the Papacy from answering to the description of 'set

ting itself up above all that is called God, orworshipped,' that its characteristic is to multiply objects of worship, and to bow down to canonized men and women, to sacred images and winking pictures; in a word, it can never have gods enough nor lords enough; it is an example, not of atheism, but of pleistotheism; Olympus was nothing to the Paradise of Vatican-made deities. Some curious arguments have been used to show that, notwithstanding the Pope's devotion to multitudes of gods, he yet answers to the description here given; because he makes gods, he must be greater than the gods he makes. But this is the merest fallacy, arising from an equivocal use of the verb 'to make.' The making in this sense is not creation, but simply an act of investiture, or conferring a title or office. It would be about as sound an argument to infer that the archbishop who crowns a king is greater than the king; or that a tailor is greater than he who employs him. The Pope gives the most emphatic denial to this character of him, at the very time when he is supposed most to exemplify it. On the occasions when he enters St. Peter's, borne in state on men's shoulders, with his peacocks' fans, and his silver

trumpets, he is always set down at the chapel on the right hand as the nave is entered, and spends some time in 'adoring the blessed Sacrament.'

It will excite no surprise in the mind of any believing Christian to read that this Man of lawlessness shall come 'in the power of Satan,' and with the accompaniment of 'signs and wonders.' Those who regard the operations of nature as the mere results of laws independent of personal spiritual agency, may treat such an announcement with contempt; but those only. We of Christ's Church believe that the present course of things is the conflict, on the broad stage of the world, between our Captain, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the great Foe of God and man-the conflict which in person He waged and won when He trod the earth, but which remains to be fought out by them whose souls He has redeemed, and to whom He gives the power of His finished victory for aid. They in their own persons, His Church in her collective capacity, must follow out that victory which He has won: and then when it is about to be finally and gloriously consummated, will the power of evil culminate and do its worst. Then shall the Foe himself try by his agents all his arts,

and illude the world with signs and wonders, wrought by permitted power.

And when this reign of darkness is at its height; -when all worship and faith and service of good and of God shall have been abandoned, and the little flock, despised, and perhaps persecuted, shall have dwindled down to the lowest ;-when unbelief shall have given way to scorn ;-when the very name of Christian shall be held the badge of idiotcy, and the falsehood of the Gospel shall have become clear by a hundred demonstrations :— then shall there arise in the heavens the brightness of His presence whom we love; then shall the 'new day risen upon the day' wax brighter and brighter, till all but they whose eyes are purified to behold it, shrink back, baffled and dazzled. Then shall the foes of light wither away, and be as though they had not been; and He whose name is Light shall stand revealed upon our earth. 'Amen, even so come, Lord Jesus.'

The varieties of the sacred text in this Epistle, deserving attention, are but few.

In chapter i. ver. 2, for 'our Father,' some of our oldest MSS. read 'the Father'; ver. 10, 'believe' should be 'believed:' as so often, the

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