and research which may well command the attention of theological students, with a spirit of candour and forbearance most important to be preserved in all religious controversy, but especially at the present day. The writer, not only one of the inost learned men of whom the University of Dublin can boast, but an earnest and consistent defender of the Church of England and opponent of Popery, has protested in it against the popular application to Popery of the Scripture prophecies of Antichrist; and it must have required as much courage as honesty to risk such a protest at a period of excitement like the present, and in a country, the circumstances of which must render the suggestion peculiarly startling to a large body within the church.

The argument from prophecy has long been adopted as one of the strongest and easiest modes of condemning the errors of Popery. It has been drawn out by high authorities, and presents, at the first sight, a singular array of probabilities; and confidence in the strength of this position having perhaps led to a neglect of others, the mere thought that it is untenable must naturally alarm those who are thus threatened with being left defenceless in the face of a formidable antagonist. It must probably take some little time for this alarm to subside, and with it the misrepresentations to which it has given rise. But after calm consideration the question will take its place on the wide neutral ground of private opinion, carefully fenced off from the great summaries of Christian faith which contain the truths necessary to salvation, and from the outlines of doctrine which the Church has drawn up for her own teachers-that ground on which doubt may be admitted without sin, and even opposite conclusions may meet in peace. Meantime, in the same spirit which those who differ from the author of the Lectures, ought, as Christians, to exercise towards him, he, we are assured, will permit us to differ in some points from himself.

In one point we entirely agree with Dr. Todd.

'The labours and learning of our Protestant theologians have been expended in the vain attempt to reconcile a large and mysterious branch of prophecy to a preconceived interpretation, the offspring of controversial rancour and polemical debate; the sacred text has been handled in the belligerent spirit that counts all artifices lawful, all means of victory justifiable and right; historical facts have been misrepresented, the words of Scripture have been allegorized and irreverently explained away; and in the attempt to exaggerate the Papal errors, in order to bring them more apparently within the terms of the prediction, their true character has been overlooked, and the legitimate arguments, which can alone silence or convince the advocates of them, have been for"gotten or abandoned.'-Lect. v. p. 28.

What

What these arguments are Dr. Todd has alluded to in a quotation from an admirable work to which we gladly refer.*

"The Papacy,' says Mr. Palmer, 'is a grievous evil to the Christian Church. The continuance of errors and corruptions, the decay of wholesome discipline, the divided state of Christendom, are all, in a great measure, attributable to the usurpations and ambition of the Roman see. But God forbid that we should rest our arguments against the errors of Rome on so sandy a foundation as these modern interpretations of the prophecies. We have a much simpler and surer way in proving that those errors are unauthorized by the word of God, and inconsistent with it; that they are mere human inventions, and productive of consequences practically which are injurious to Christian faith and piety.'

If it is asked why prophecy must be a sandy foundation of argument against Rome, one answer may be drawn from the very nature of prophecy. The Church is placed by Providence to find its way through a valley of darkness, beset with temptations and enemies. That she may not be fascinated by the one nor dismayed by the other-that when evils are gathering near, her faith may not be shaken-that she may be able throughout to recognize one great overruling hand stretched over and protecting her, and behold all things subdued to one will-for these, and it may be, for other reasons, God has been pleased to provide her, as it were, with a faint chart and outline of her own history. She bears a lamp which throws a light dimly before her (for she must walk by a light within the light of faith), but less dimly at her side, and strongly on her track behind. As each fearful shape in her destiny comes and glares close upon her, she may discern sufficient to be assured that it has been in some degree anticipated in the description previously given. But that which presses close on the senses can seldom be seen in its true proportion and magnitude. To assume these, it must be contemplated in a certain focus, at a given distance; and not till it is past, and has fallen into the ranks of by-gone events, is it possible to compare it accurately with the words of that prophecy, which sees all things in their relations to the whole course of time, and as linked together by a chain of causation thoroughly discernible only by that Eye, to which the past, present, and future are all alike co-existent.

Again, in strict analogy, as the prophecy of reason in the 'natural world enables us to penetrate so far only into the future as to discern its general outline, without enabling us to fix the limits of either times, or localities, or circumstances-to foresee, for instance, that evil will spring from evil, and good from good, and

*Supplement to the Treatise on the Church by the Rev. W. Palmer, Worcester ·College, Oxford, pp. 23, 24.

to

to determine this unerringly, though the dates, and seasons, and modes, and degrees of retribution are kept in another hand-in the same manner, and, it may be, for the same reason, the prophecy of revelation is content to call up the shadows of coming events without definitely pourtraying them. The shadow is sufficient to warn, or to encourage, or to console: the definite pourtraiture would overawe or overjoy, and would stifle that freedom of moral action which can move only in an atmosphere of uncertainty.

1

Again, in the events themselves of the world there is a striking similarity of appearance. All things move in a circle. Human nature is throughout the same, and produces and reproduces the same forms in succession; and if a difference is observable in these forms, it is rather in their magnitude and degree than in their kind. The human will is struggling against the rule of its maker in the first century as in the nineteenth. Human reason is systematizing and scrutinizing among the Gnostics as in the Socinians. Human ambition is the same, whether it assumes the disguise of a monk, of a pope, of a demagogue, or of a Jesuit. The laws within which it works are the same, except that as the world becomes old they seem to grow old with it, to be permitted to lose their strength, and to give way beneath the repeated attacks made on them by rebellious man. And it is the same in the various resuscitations of good which at intervals occur in the world. The final evil may be worse than the first: the last good more perfect than the earlier; but the evil and the good themselves must appear in somewhat the same shape

and the line, lengthened as it is, 'stretches to the crack of doom.' And thus the voice of prophecy must be uncertain, when it is brought to decide on a particular event; unless, indeed, that event be so marked out that it cannot be repeated. It may pronounce, satisfactorily and indisputably, on the arrival of the Christian dispensation, because but one fulfilment of this could take place, and the facts of the fulfilment have been so constructed as to render mistake to an honest mind morally impossible. And the appear ance of the great and final Antichrist' also can have but one perfect fulfilment; but this is marked out by the date in the last days,' and which are the last days can scarcely be known until they are come to an end.

It therefore involves no opinion that Popery is not Antichrist, even if a writer remonstrates against the use of prophecy to substantiate the charge. Nor does it impugn the soundness of Dr.

Todd's

Todd's advice, to differ from him, in some degree, on the application of such prophecies to Popery. In one respect, few but must agree with him-that one and the final stage of the Antichristian power is still to come-its appearance in the last days, in the form of an individual being, and with all those remarkable circumstances of success, cruelty, and sudden destruction, which are to precede the coming of our Lord. But if the spirit of the Antichrist, which will arise in the last days, is the same evil spirit which has been working in the heart of man and in the Church, since the beginning-if it is, then, to be new only in the completer success of its struggles, and in the fuller development of its powers, we may expect to find the same spirit throwing out imperfect and abortive shapes of a similar character in many other periods of the world. Their outward forms may differ; but a comparative anatomist will discover the same principle of growth and action even in the most varied organization. What sprung up in the first centuries in a heresy or fanaticism, may have thriven later on another soil in the form of an ecclesiastical usurpation. And when this body was becoming old and weak, the same soul may have entered into one of its chief members, and raised up successive growths of ascetic enthusiasm, each widened and strengthened in its powers of evil, and adapted to the exigencies of circumstances; from a simple monasticism passing into the Mendicant Orders, and from the Mendicant Orders into Jesuitism. And when these became paralyzed and unserviceable, it might leave thein apparently dead, and enter, where it was sure to find a ready welcome, into the licentious self-willed bodies, which rationalism and democracy create; occupying them only for a time, until their own violence should destroy them, and scope be given for the resuscitation of some system more perfectly organized, more durable, and more powerful. In this point of view, with which history fully accords, there would be no difficulty in reconciling those passages of Scripture, which seem to speak of one Antichrist, and of many of an Antichrist working even in the times of the Apostles, and of one which should not be revealed till the last days; and the repeated application of one and the same prophecy to a number of successive events, each as it advances more perfectly and minutely realizing it, would be in harmony with a general law, which may be traced through many other parts of the prophetical system.

The assumption that Popery is Antichrist will thus resolve itself into an opinion that, as a system, it bears upon its face certain marks which indicate, if they do not fully develope, the features which will be stamped on the final manifestation of the Man of Sin-that it takes its place as one of the forms into

which the spirit of Antichrist is to throw himself, and may be perhaps the womb from which he will be ultimately evolved.

And such a view may be entertained as a private opinion, without hazarding the evil consequences which have ensued from endeavouring to force the words of prophecy into too close and literal correspondence with the facts of Popery. And this leads to another important use of such a view. It enables us to carry on the melancholy struggle against Popery in a spirit of charity and meekness. We are no longer arrayed against a body, every limb of which is contemplated as part of a deadly power, alien from God and foe to man: but against a temper of mind and habit of thought, which, to a certain extent, exists in all of us, more or less fatally developed. It is not the individual person, or the teacher, or the nation, whom we oppose and condemn, but vice and error in the abstract; and at the very moment that we feel bound to pronounce the condemnation, as if we were sitting on a seat of judgment, we may in heart be kneeling side by side with the condemned before the same bar of Heaven, accusing ourselves of the same offences. If anything can disarm controversy of its bitterness, it must be this humbling confession; and it is the more needful at a time when the controversy cannot be carried on against the system of Popery with soft words and palliating apologies.

No one can have honestly engaged in the Popish controversy without feeling that he is grappling with a most powerful and subtle antagonist. It is easy to multiply hard words, and to hold up to reproach its grosser forms of corruption; and to attack it with bold generalizations and contradictions. But Popery laughs to scorn such opponents; and makes use of them only to draw her own members more closely to herself, or to entangle the rash and thoughtless aggressor in her own net of sophisms. He seizes on some vulgar popular superstition, and Popery meets him with the popular errors which prevail under every creed; and demands to be tried by the character of her educated classes. He fixes on doctrinal errors even among them, and she refuses to be committed by anything but the authorized expositions of her Church. These are produced; and in the mass of multiplying and conflicting decisions, of which her teaching is composed, and in the varying and even contradictory opinions which are artfully permitted respecting the rightful expositors of Church doctrines, and the degrees of confidence to be reposed in them, it is easy to appeal from Pope to Pope, and to array Council against Council, each culprit escaping in turn under the wing of the other, until all vanish and are lost. Even when he grasps at last some definite authorized declaration which cannot be repudiated

(and