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LECTURE XXXII.

THE VICAR OF CHRIST.

"He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus."-Revelation xxii. 20.

"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, showing himself that he is God."-2 Thessalonians ii. 4.

You will recollect the explanation that I gave in my introduction of this remarkable prophecy. I showed you what must precede, and what it seems to me probable will succeed, the personal advent of our blessed Lord: and one of my designs was to prove that it is utterly impossible, taking the whole Scripture in order to illustrate it, that a Millennium can precede; it is all but certain that a Millennium must succeed the personal appearing of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. I showed you, in evidence of this view, that memorable prophecy which relates to the downfall of Jerusalem, and to the signs, as enumerated by our Lord, that should precede his own second appearance. I showed you also, by several texts which I quoted, that the great hope of the Christian church is not the expansion of the measure of Christian light that now is into an everlasting or a millennial noon, but the falling of the light that now is into darkness; and in the midst of the terrible eclipse there shall burst upon the world, like the lightning that gleams from one end of the sky to the other, the brightness of the coming of the Son of Man. I showed you, too, that this was confirmed by this remarkable prophecy of the apostasy which is here predicted, if so be that this apostasy can be identified with the Romish system, which is to stretch, like a dark and terrible cloud, from the commencement of the apostle's days to the very close of this dispensation. Hence, this passage proves that if Popery bogan 1800 years ago, and if it is not to be de

stroyed, broken up, and swept away, except by the brightness of the Redeemer's zapovcía, personal appearance, then the Millennium cannot precede, but must succeed the personal advent of the Son of God. I explained to you last evening the general introduction of this passage. I showed you that the impression prevailed among the Thessalonians that the day of the Lord, as it is translated in verse 3, "was at hand." On first reading this passage, one would suppose it is a contradiction to others. For instance, the apostle says, "The day of the Lord is at hand," try: and here the apostle says, you are not to be led away with the delusion that the Lord is at hand; but when you open your Testament, and read the passage in the original, you will find that when one apostle said, "The Lord is at hand," ¿yyùs totì, or èrriet, the word is perfectly distinct from that used here: the word here used is that which is translated in Romans "things present;" and again, the same word is translated in 1 Cor. iii. 22, “All things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, all are yours; and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." Therefore the meaning of this is, you are not to be deceived as if the Lord were actually in the midst of you; you are not to believe when they say, "Behold here he is! or, Lo there! go forth to meet him." You are not to believe that the Lord is actually to come in the course of this very year; but you are to notice that there is, first of all, to intervene a dark and terrible eclipse, a fearful wonder-working apostasy. After that apostasy has grown to its height of pride, and blasphemy, and sin, it shall be destroyed by the Redeemer's coming; so that his coming, which you think is now, will not be till he comes to destroy the apostasy, which is its seminal state now, and shall be in its full development then. I then said, that if I can identify this prophecy with the Romish system, I not only show a remarkable evidence of God in history, fulfilling what God has written in prophecy, but I also show you the point from which I set out, that the apostasy, not the Millennium, is to stretch to the very eve of the Redeemer's personal advent. then pointed oat to you several words, not mistranslations, but renderings deficient in conveying the full force of the original. For instance, in verse 3, we read, "Let no man deceive you by

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any means; for that day shall not come, except there come àñestasía," not an apostasy, but the apostasy, the falling away. I showed you that the word here used, àñoσtasía, but especially a neuter form of it, àñosτasívv,* is applied by our Lord to a divorce; and if there be one branding feature by which the pope is characterized more than another, it is this, that the bride belongs to the Lamb, and the adulterous woman is the bride of antichrist; and just as we have Christ in the midst of his people constituting the true church, so we have antichrist, and those that bear his mark, constituting the Apostasy. This is the divorcement of the body from Christ, and its union to him who sits in the place of Christ. I showed, in the next place, how truly he is described as "the man of sin." If you take his doctrinal distinction of sin into venial and mortal sin, it is calculated to foster sin; if you take sin in its narrowest sense to denote idolatry, he is emphatically the man of idolatry; for the system is full of idolatry from first to last. If you take sin, again, in its other sense, to signify the encouragement of sin, by the pretended absolution of it, we have the very same feature brought out. There is not a church in Rome in which there are not inscriptions, offering absolutions and indulgences for devotion at its altars, or for prayers addressed to particular saints. I showed you that the frauds which are called pious, the ends that justify the means, the robber that repeats the creed, and goes forth to plunder, the cathedrals and monasteries that have been raised by spoil, treachery, and tyranny; the principle that makes the kissing a crucifix greater merit than speaking the truth; that canonizes a freebooter or a crusader to the Holy Land, and degrades or burns an honest man-the head of a system that exalts the ceremony to the skies, tramples morality to the earth, may be called emphatically the Man of Sin. I forbore to allude to the personal character of popes; unfortunately there have been bad Protestant ministers whom the Papist can refer to; we can quote dark catalogues of bad men in every communion under the sun; but still some of the popes have been criminal to excess: their gigantic

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The apostasy cannot mean an infidel power. See Septuagint version of i. 15; Jer. ii. 5; Isa. xxx. 1; Dan. ix. 9.

power has been followed by more gigantic sins; and I would even risk the identity of the prophecy on the personal character of the popes alone; but I did not do so: so strong is the other proof of identity, that we can afford to omit this proof. I then showed you in what respect he may be called "the son of perdition;" and also in what respect he is called the "antichrist."* I explained to you the misapprehension that prevails in supposing that are generally means opposed to; and I showed you that in composition with substantives it means, generally, and here unquestionably, put in the room of: thus àvri-ßacted is not one opposed to the king, but one that takes the place of the king; àvoúñaros is not one opposed to the consul, but the vice-consul that takes the place of the consul; àvriléwv does not mean one opposed to a lion, but equal to a lion. So we read that, in the Middle Ages, there were three infallible popes, each excommunicating the other, and each pronouncing his decrees to be fallible; one called the other the antipope, not meaning that he was opposed to the popedom, for so did he love the popedom that he strove to possess it; but meaning that he assumed the office, and pretended to discharge its functions. So this antichrist, the Man of Sin, the àvizétμevos, does not mean one who is opposed to Christ professedly, for he is not; he pretends to be the advocate, the vicegerent of Christ; and therefore, professedly, he is not opposed to him. If you tell a Roman Catholic he is against Christianity, he will repeat to you the Apostles' Creed. If you say he is opposed to Christ, he will sign himself with the cross, and say that he glories in it; if you tell him that the pope is opposed to Christ, he will show you that he is so far from it, that he sits in the very temple of God, and assumes to represent God. The apostle, therefore, does not mean that the pope will be professedly opposed to Christ, but that he takes the place of Christ, supersedes him, acts as his representative, or, as he calls himself, the Vicar of Christ, i. c. the Vice-Christ, the avтtypistos. I now proceed to show you that he "exalteth himself above all that is called God."

In answer to those who say "the man of sin," the "antichrist," must mean a single person, I observe that the woman clothed with the sun, (Rev. xii.,) the woman on the beast, (Rev. xiii. 3,) cannot be, never have been, interpreted by any as single persons.

Now here again the objection has been raised, that the feature of the Thessalonian Antichrist here predicted is not developed in the Roman Antichrist. But this supposes that God means Deity. But wheresoever in this very passage the word God is used with this signification, as for instance, "He sitteth in the temple of God," there the article is used (¿ Ocòs ;) but here the article is not used; and if we open the Bible to ascertain what is meant by this, we shall find that the name commonly given to magistrates and chief rulers is that of gods: for instance, the apostle, in 2 Cor. viii. 6, says, "There is but one God the Father;" but then he adds farther on, "There be that are called gods." Now mark the expression, "He exalts himself above all that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth." "There be gods many and lords many," referring plainly to magistrates and rulers. Then, again, if I open the book of Exodus, xxii. 28, "Thou shalt not revile the gods," evidently the magistrates; Ps. lxxxii. 6, "I have said ye are gods;" and our blessed Lord said, John x. 35, "If God called them gods unto whom the word of God came," plainly meaning church-magistrates, kings, and rulers, and not the Supreme Deity; or, if deity at all, it must mean the gods, the daovía or titular gods of the heathen. Now it is matter of history that the pope exalts himself above all magistrates, kings, and rulers, above all authority, and rule, and law. Hear facts, facts that I have gathered from original resources, and facts on which you may implicitly rely.

In the eighth century, Pope Gregory II. boasted to the Greek emperor, "All the kings of the earth reverence the pope as God." Charlemagne received his title and his empire as a donative from the pope. In the coronation oath of the Western emperors, they swore that they would be submissive to the pope and to his Roman successors. The emperors Otho and Radolphus both received their imperial crowns as a grant from the pope. John of England received his crown as a vassal of the pope. Adrian IV., (A. D. 1155,) on King Henry's petition, permitted him to subjugate Ireland, on condition of his giving to the Roman see a quitrent of a penny for each house in it. On the discovery of America, Prince Henry of Portugal applied to the pope to grant to the Portuguese every country they might discover. A bull