CHAPTER V.

The Lawless One.

2 THESSALONIANS ii. 8.

And then shall that WICKED be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and destroy with the brightness of his coming.

THE name Wicked, by which the Man of Sin is here characterised, properly signifies in the original, the LAWLESS ONE,* and is wonderfully descriptive of the pretensions of the Papacy. The Pope claims an exemption from all law, natural and revealed, human and divine; and in this respect Popery is even worse than heathenism itself. "The Gentiles, who had not" the revealed law * ὁ ἀνομος.

of God, felt bound by their own consciences, to do much "that was contained in the law." But Popery uproots at once the law of nature, and the law of the Bible, and substitutes the mere will of the Pope in its stead. While every soul is bound to obey the Pope, the Pope is bound by no law, either of God or of man. This the Popes and their parasites have asserted again and again. Pope Innocent III., for instance, declared that "he could dispense above the law of God, and of injustice could make justice."* "If the Pope," said Boniface VIII. "regardless of his own salvation, and of the salvation of his brethren, should be found unprofitable, and carry with him innumerable people in troops to the devil, no mortal is to presume to reprove his faults, for he being to judge all, is to be judged by none."+ Cardinal Bellarmine, one of the highest authorities in the Papal Church, does not hesitate to say, "that the Pope doth whatever he listeth, even things unlawful,

* Gr. Decret. ix. c. 3.

+ Bon. Mart. ap. Decret. Distinct. 40. cap. 6.

and is more than God." And again, "Though the Pope should err in enjoining vices and prohibiting virtues, yet would the Church be bound to believe the vices to be virtues, if it would avoid sinning against its own conscience."* These are no random or inconsiderate expressions. They are the necessary assertion of the power which the Pope is well known to exercise. It is unquestionable that the Pope has directly annulled some of the acknowledged laws of God. He has had the daring presumption to lay his hand on the decalogue, and to erase from it the second commandment. Even in catechisms published within the British Islands, the second commandment is altogether expunged. In Dr James Butler's, for instance, the two first commandments are literally given thus: Q. Say the ten commandments of God? A. 1. I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me. 2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God

* Bellarm. De Pontifice, lib. iv., cap. v., published at Rome by authority, in 1842.

in vain."* He has treated the fourth in an He has abrogat

equally sacrilegious manner. ed the holy rest of the Sabbath, and appointed other sacred times of his own. In the catechisms published by authority in Italy, "Remember to keep the feasts," is substituted for the solemn injunction of the Lord, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy," thus identifying himself with the little horn, that "thinks to change times and laws.”+

In the matter of consanguinity he claims power to forbid what God permits, and to permit what God forbids. "If any one shall say," says the Council of Trent, "that those degrees only of consanguinity and affinity, which are expressed in Scripture, can hinder marriage from being contracted, or render it void when it has been contracted, or that the Church has not the power of dispensing in some of those degrees, and determining that others shall hinder or destroy, let him be ac* Butler, p. 37. 1843.

+ The Pope's claim to dispense with the solemn obligation of an oath, we have already seen, Chap. I.

cursed."*

Who but the Lawless One could assert such a doctrine? And not only does the Man of Sin give his sanction to incestuous marriages to those who can afford to pay for them, but the ground on which such base transactions are defended, stamps him with additional infamy. "A dispensation," says Dens, "is granted for certain reasonable causes which are styled sine causa (without cause), namely, when a noble person, or one of honourable family asks a dispensation without stating the particular ground, and then a greater pecuniary tax is imposed, to be converted to pious uses. St Thomas observes, that this implies no respect of persons; because the public safety depends more on the powerful than on the common people; and it specially concerns the Church, to have the more powerful not opposed to her, but favourable and under obligations to her."+ It has been often represented as a calumny against the Church of Rome, to say that it maintains the principle that the "end sanctifies the means," but here, * Sess. xxiv. can. 2. + Dens., vol. viii. p. 295.