high pontiffs in this church. Every day of the year there are 1230 years of indulgence." On the inner wall of St. Sebastian, on marble: "Whosoever shall have entered it shall obtain plenary remission of all his sins, through the merits of 174,000 holy martyrs, and 46 high pontiffs, likewise martyrs interred here." I will not attempt the subtle explanations that may be given; but I ask, must it not be the tendency of such inscriptions to create a license for sin, and to lead the people to indulge in it? To kiss a crucifix is greater virtue than to speak truth; to go a pilgrimage to Jerusalem is higher merit than to be a good husband or a good wife. Have you not heard of frauds that are called pious? of ends that justify the means? of robbers that repeat the creed before they go forth to seek their booty? Have you not read of cathedrals, monasteries, and episcopal palaces built from the spoils of the widow and the orphan? of the greatest lies told, the greatest wickedness perpetrated in the name of religion?

I have touched on one or two points only; yet these are sufficient to show that the Man of Sin-one whose principles, whose patronage, whose system, encourage sin-is a burning brand of the pope. His next characteristic is, "the son of perdition;" i. e. as Judas is called the son of perdition, so he is destined to be destroyed-he is one who is fixed by God for destruction. I have mentioned already some signs of the approach of that destruction; the consumption is now going on; his utter destruction, I believe, soon will be.

I find that, though I have tried to speak as rapidly as possible, I have not been able to say all I had intended to say: I must therefore reserve the sequel for the next lecture. In the mean time, let me add, the great cry that sounds from heaven at this moment to all God's people who may be within reach of her contagion, is, "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her plagues." You are called upon at the present day to lay aside every rag of the popedom, every element of that system that may cleave to your heart, or may tend to corrupt your practice. The great cry is, "Come out of her!" escape from her pollution, that you may escape from her judgments. The day comes when the Man of Sin, and all his priesthood and his church, shall be cast like a millstone into the depths of ruin.

We shall have no tears to weep over the spectacle; we shall not grieve at it. If any one should be so sensitive as to feel an emotion of pity or regret, all his recollections will rush back to Smithfield, and to the Sicilian Vespers, and to St. Bartholomew's day, and to all the slaughters which have been perpetrated in the name of Christ by the Vicar of Christ; and, charged with indignation, these sympathies and sensibilities will return again to the scene of judgment, and, in common with the angels and the choirs that are in heaven, they will say, "Salvation, and glory, and honour be unto the Lord our God, for he hath judged the great whore, and hath avenged the blood of his servants:" and again they will say, Hallelujah! and her smoke will rise up for ever and ever. Till that system be consumed, man will not come to himself, and God will not receive all his glory. Let us pray, like the martyrs and the saints of old, for its destruction; let us pray also for that bright and glorious advent, in the midst of which it shall be destroyed. "Come, Lord Jesus; come quickly." Amen.

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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.

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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 began 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 naрovcía, 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," trist: 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,” èyyùs èorì, or ryst, 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. I then pointed out 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

any means; for that day shall not come, except there come àrostasía," not an apostasy, but the apostasy, the falling away. I showed you that the word here used, àñocracia, but especially a neuter form of it, àñosтasio,* 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

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