III. There is a second prophecy of St. Paul which seems to bear upon the same point in foretelling the corruptions of the Papal Church. It is as follows: "Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, "that in the latter times some shall depart from the "faith*, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doc"trines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; 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." The following of seducing spirits, in forged visions and miracles, and other pious frauds, the gross casuistry, an insult to Scripture morals; and an avowed practice, a seared conscience, governed by that immoral casuistic code; the compulsory prohibition of marriage to her clergy; a rigorous ritual of fasts, and an operose distinction of meats,

is of the greater weight, as it was prior to the event, and must have been founded, either upon the probable sense of the text, or upon a received tradition of that knowledge of its sense, which the Thessalonians are said to have had. And indeed the expectation which prevailed in the ancient Church that the fall of the Roman Empire would be followed by the rise of Antichrist may well be thought to have had its origin in this very passage of St. Paul. It is enough, however, for my purpose, that this obscurer part of the prophecy is not inconsistent with that general interpretation of it which I have argued upon, and that it is a neutral, if not a favourable, element in the argument.

* ἀποςήσονται. 1 Tim. iv. 1, 2, 3.

enjoined to all her members; these are the reproaches deeply ingrained in the Roman See in her worst age, and truth forbids us to say that the pollution of them is even now purged away. But each mark of the fraudulent superstition is figured in the prophecy; and the mixt and motley garb was long worn in the eye of the world, without any sense of its shame, by the disfigured Apostate Church.

t

It is true there is no other evidence in the terms of this prophecy, whereby to appropriate it to its subject, excepting the essential and internal characters of the apostacy foretold. But those characters are of themselves the conclusive indication. The mixture of licentiousness and formality; the licentiousness expressed in "the speaking of lies in hy“ "pocrisy," and in "the seared conscience;" the other, the formality in the prohibition of marriage and meats; the subtilty and system of art with which the fabric of imposture is sustained, denoted by "the seducing spirits," the particular and positive signs contained in the institution of a forced celibacy and a spurious Judaic ritual; compose equally the specific form of the prophecy, and the actual lineaments of the depraved religion, into which the Roman Hierarchy perverted the Gospel. The prediction is of an apostacy from the faith to take place "in the “latter times;” in the latter times it came: prominent in the fact, and palpable in its agreement with the letter of the prophecy. And as the inordinate

66

ambition and spiritual pride of the apostacy is prefigured in the former prediction of St. Paul, its spirit of deceit and doctrinal immorality, together with its superstition, are delineated in this. These two predictions united find their joint completion in the one historical subject, and thereby the confirmation of their sense and the evidence of their truth.

To foretell that a religion, pure and excellent as that of the Gospel, would in some future time be depraved, was to foretell nothing improbable. For what is there so sacred in Truth which the wickedness and the mistakes of men, or the love of novelty, or the spirit of enthusiasm, or unlearned rashness, or policy and interested designs, will not model anew, and distort from its original rectitude. Error and heresy are nearly coeval with Truth. They began to work as soon as Christianity was taught, and they may be expected to attend it to its latest day of trial. But in the predictions of the corrupted state of the Christian Faith which we are now considering, there are definite signs of a foreknowledge very different from the deductions of probability, calculated on the general principles of human weakness or human depravity. The prophetic criteria are precise; and they are such as must be thought to have militated with all rational probability, rather than to have been deduced from it. For that the doctrines of celibacy and of a ritual abstinence from meats, against the whole genius of the Gospel, by

is

an authority claiming universal obedience, should be set up in the Christian Church; that "a man of sin" should exist, exalting himself in the temple of God, and openly challenging the rights of faith and honour due to God; that he should advance himself by signs and lying wonders, and turn his pretended miracles to the disproof and discredit of some of the chief doctrines, or precepts, of Christianity; and that this system of ambition and falsehood should succeed; that it should be established with the submission, and indeed with the deluded conviction, of men still holding the profession of Christianity, which is the prophecy of St. Paul*, a paradox of prediction which must be allowed to surpass the ordinary limits of human observation, and almost to exceed the power which man has to corrupt the best gifts of God. The natural incredibility of it is, not that such errors and abuses should be established in the world, but that they should be grafted on the Christian Faith, in opposition to, and in outrage of, its genius and its commands, and take a bold possession of the Christian Church. There, however, they have been grafted; and there they have had possession. And the strength of the improbable fact is the proof of the prophetic inspiration. Nor is it strictly necessary to this proof, that a formal connexion be shewn to exist in their very terms between these prophecies of St. Paul and the

2 Thess. ii. 10, 11.

particular Apocalyptic vision of St. John. It is a strange event, that such flagrant perversions of Christianity should break forth, and grow into credit, and pass for a Christian, or a Catholic Faith at Rome, or any where else. The locality of the corruption is a circumstance indifferent to the prodigy of it. The fact that it has had its reign in a particular Church, to which the Apocalyptic vision is by more positive notes directed, is a coincidence not necessary to be demanded in the argument, though the event has been in that order.

To conclude then-I shall revert to the substance of the prophecy in St. John. It supplied these circumstances of description: a tyrannical power, of a Christian race, to be seated at Rome; dressed in a robe of gaudy decoration; spreading its abuses and errors over the kingdoms of the earth, persecuting the Church of Christ, and deeply stained with its blood, especially the blood of its martyrs, its public witnesses and confessors; that same state holding a number of dependant kings under its yoke; and turning their strength and power, with their consent, to the furtherance of its designs. The complexity of things in this single piece of prophecy is sufficiently manifest. And since the complex whole has, point by point, been fulfilled; and that not in an obscure corner, but in the heart of Christendom, and in the most conspicuous station of the Christian