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As for the peculiar nature of the apostacy with which this church is stigmatized, it is very largely described by the Apostle in the course of his prophetic vision. The church in question was to be notorious for persecuting the saints of God; for making all nations drunken with the cup of her spiritual fornication or idolatry; for working pretended miracles; for compelling the whole world to worship an image; for laying such as presumed to dissent from her under the severest interdicts; and for carrying on an iniquitous traffic in all sorts of valuable commodities, and (what distinguishes her from common traders) in the souls of men.

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This same ecclesiastical power is likewise described by St. Paul, and its deflection from primitive Christianity is expressly styled by him an Apostacy. "Now we beseech you, brethren," says he to the Thessalonians, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter, as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come an Apostacy first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth, that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work only he, who now letteth, will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power, and signs, and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish: because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they

all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." *

The nature of this apostacy, which should be upheld by the man of sin, he also, like St. John, elsewhere sets forth at large. "Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall apostatize from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines concerning demons, through the hypocrisy of liars,† having their conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.-Refuse profane and old wives' fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness. For bodily exercise profiteth little but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come." Here we learn, in addition to the marks of the apostate church given us by St. John, that it should be noted for the worship, not only of idols, but of demons or canonized dead men for its prohibition of marriage to certain classes of men; for its superstitious injunctions to abstain from particular kinds of food; and for its attachment to vain traditions and bodily mortifications, which have no warrant from scripture, and which are very far from being conducive to real godliness.

Though I have cited the prophecies relative to the man of sin and the Apostacy, I shall purposely refrain from discussing the character of that arch enemy of sound religion, because I have nothing to add to Bp. Newton's excellent Dissertation upon the subject. I am aware that some great modern names have applied the prophecy of the man of sin to French Infidelity; but I have not yet seen any arguments which convince me of the propriety of such an application. In every particular, as

* 2 Thess. ii. 1.

+ The ingenious Mr. Whitaker conceives the word fair to be an adjective, and translates the passage "giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of wretched men speaking lies in hypocrisy." How far such a translation be allowable according to the general idiom of the inspired writers of the New Testament, I will not take upon me to determine. It certainly accords very well with the context of the passage. General View of the Prophecies, p. 231.

‡ 1 Tim. iv. 1.

Bp. Newton hath fully shewn, the prediction answers to Popery and the Pope: in several particulars it by no means answers either to French Infidelity or the French Republic. Hence I conclude, that Bp. Newton's interpretation is the true one.*

The period, assigned both by Daniel and St. John to the tyrannical reign of the man of sin or the little horn of the Roman beast, and the dominance of the great western Apostacy, is three times and a half or 1260 years. Here, therefore, we must define the proper mode of dating that period.

In prophecies, which are strictly chronological, the overt acts of communities, or the heads of communities, are necessarily alone considered in the fixing of dates; because it would be impossible for us to know how to date any particular period from the insulated and unauthorized acts of individuals. But in prophecies, which are not strictly chronological, the scope is much more wide, and much less definite; extending, not merely to communities and their heads, but to every individual whose actions the prophecies may describe. On these grounds there are two entirely different dates to the Apostacy. The first is its date, when considered as relating to individuals: the second is its date, when considered as relating to that community over which the man of sin presides. St. Paul describes the Apostacy in its first, or individual character Daniel and St. John specify its triumphant duration in its second, or general character. Now it is manifest, that the date of the Apostacy, when considered individually, is the very day and hour when any single Christian individual was first guilty of any one of those acts which characterize the Apostacy; and it is equally

In one point, however, I certainly think his Lordship mistaken. He singularly confounds, as it appears from his citations, the man of sin, whom he rightly judges to be the first little born mentioned by Daniel, both with the second little born, and with the king who magnified himself above every god. Thus he makes the two little horns and the king to be all one and the same power; herein being inconsistent even with his own scheme of interpretation, which had previously represented the second little born as the Roman Empire invading the East by way of Macedon. Mr. Kett, agreeably to his favourite plan of double accomplishments of the same prophecy, fancies, that the man ef in is at once both the Papal and the Infidel power. (Compare Hist. the Interp. Vol. ii. p. 23, 24. with Vol. i. p. 381.) I shall hereafter shew, that such a plan is altogether untenable.

manifest, that this date never can be ascertained by man, but is known unto God alone. We can say, indeed, in general terms, that monkish celibacy, and a superstitious veneration of saints and angels, were creeping fast into the Church during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries; but we shall find it impossible to point out the precise year of their commencement. Such being the case, Daniel and St. John, in their chronological prophecies, consider the Apostacy only in its public and authorized capacity; and teach us to esteem the 1260 years, as being the period of the public dominance of the Apostacy, not of its individual continuance. Accordingly they both specify, with much exactness, the era, from which those years are to be computed. Daniel directs us to date them from the time when the saints were by some public act of the state delivered into the hand of the little horn: and St. John, in a similar manner, teaches us to date them from the time when the woman, the true Church, fled into the wilderness from the face of the serpent: when the mystic city of God began to be trampled under foot by a new race of Gentiles, or idolaters; when the great Roman beast, which had been slain by the preaching of the Gospel, revived in its bestial character, by setting up an idolatrous spiritual tyrant in the Church, or, as Daniel expresses it, by delivering the saints into the hand of such a tyrant; and when the witnesses began to prophesy in slackcloth. A date, which will answer to these concurring particulars, can certainly have no connection with the mere acquisition of a temporal principality by the Pope. It seems most probably to be the year, in which the Bishop of Rome was constituted supreme head of the Church with the proud title of Universal Bishop for by such an act the whole Church, comprehending both good and bad, both the saints of the Most High and those who were tainted with the gentilism of the Apostacy considered individually, were formally given by the chief secular power, the head of the Roman Empire, into the hand of the encroaching little horn. This year was the year 606, when the reigning Emperor Phocas, the representative of the sixth head of the beast, declared Pope Boniface to be Universal Bishop: and the

Roman church hath ever since shewn itself to be that little horn, into whose hands the saints were then delivered, by styling itself, with equal absurdity and presumption, the Catholic or universal Church. The year 606 then seems to be the date of the 1260 years, and the era of what St. Paul terms the revelation of the man of sin. The Apostacy, in its individual capacity, was already in existence previous to such revelation; hence he represents it as commencing before it: but, as soon as the man of sin was openly revealed by having the saints delivered into bis hand, then apparently commenced the 1260 years the Apostacy in its public and dominant capacity.*

of

Hitherto I have spoken only of the western Apostacy of the Romish church, predicted by St. Paul, and represented by Daniel under the symbol of a little horn springing up out of the fourth or Roman beast, which should exercise a tyrannical authority over the saints during the period of 1260 years; I must now notice the contemporary eastern Apostacy of Mohammedism.

In the Apocalypse, St. John describes the origin of this false religion at the beginning of the first woe-trumpet ; the blast of which introduces, in the self-same year 606, the universal episcopacy of the Roman prelate, and the commencement of Mohammedism. From the description, which he gives us of the rise of Mohammedism, it appears, that we are to consider it in the light of an apostacy no less than Popery, though an apostacy doubtless of a very different nature. A star which had fallen from heaven, or an apostate Christian minister, is said to open the bot

*I with pleasure strengthen myself with the concurring opinion of Mr. Whitaker, relative to the proper mode of dating the 1260 years; and the more so, because my own sentiments on the subject were decidedly formed, so far as we may be allowed to form sentiments on such a subject, previous to my knowing what he had written respecting it. "When then were they (the saints) thus given into his (the little born's) hand; and any authority, that may be called universal, granted to the Pope? Was it not, when he was first acknowledged Universal Bishop? Then did he become a monarch diverse from the first. Then were the souls of men, an article of merchandize in the mystic Babylon, given into his hand. And so well was this title deemed to merit the reproach of speaking great things, that Mr. Gibbon has made the following remark on Gregory. In bis rival the Patriarch of Constantinople, be condemned the Antichristian title of Universal Bishop, which the successor of St. Peter was too baughty to concede, and too feeble to assume. Yet, within a few years, in the year 606, did Boniface assume the title of Universal Bishop, in virtue of a grant from the tyrant Phocas." General and connected View of the Prophecies, p. 207, 208,