it must be by delegacy." 1 According to the Romanists, there- fore, these prophecies, relating to Christ and his kingdom, refer to the papacy. It is the stone cut out of the mountain without hands, which is to break in pieces and consume all other king- doms ; which is to stand forever ; which is to fill the whole earth ; to which is given dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve. If this be not to put itself in the place of God, it is hard to see how the prophecies concerning Antichrist can ever be fulfilled.
No more conclusive argument to prove that the papacy is Anti- christ, could be constructed, than that furnished by Dr. New- man, himself a Romanist. According to him the prophecies respecting the glory, the exaltation, the power, and the universal dominion of Christ, have their fulfilment in the popes. But who is Antichrist, but the man that puts himself in the place of Christ ; claiming the honour and the power which belong to God manifest in the flesh, for himself ? Whoever does this is Antichrist, in the highest form in which he can appear.
6. Another argument to prove that the Antichrist described by the Apostle is an ecclesiastical power is that his appearance is the consequence of a great apostasy. That the apostasy spoken of is a defection from the truth is plain from the Scriptural usage of the term (Acts xxi. 21), and from the connection in which it here occurs. When God brought the heathen upon the people as con- querors, in punishment of their idolatry, their sufferings were a judicial consequence of their apostasy, but it cannot be said that the power of Chaldean or Egyptian oppressors was the fruit of their defection from the truth. In this case, however, Antichrist is represented as the ultimate development of the predicted apos- tasy. If a simple minister should claim to be a priest, and then one priest assume dominion over many priests, and then one pre- late over other prelates, and then one over all, and then that one claim to be the ruler of the whole world as vicar of Christ, clothed with his authority, so that the prophecy that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve the Son of Man, is fulfilled in him, then indeed we should have a regular development, from the first step to the last. Bishop Ellicott, though believing Anti- christ to be " one single personal being, as truly man as He whom he impiously opposes," and that he is to be hereafter re- vealed, still admits that Antichrist is to be "the concluding and
1 Essays Critical and Historical By John Henry Newman, formerly Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. London, 1871. The Protestant Idea of Antichrist, vol. ii. pp. 173-175.
820 PART IV. Ch. in. — the second advent.
most appalling phenomenon " of the great apostasy. But if so, lie must be an ecclesiastical, and not a worldly power.
7. Again the Apostle says that " the mystery of iniquity doth already work." That is, the principles and spirit had already begun to manifest themselves in the Church, which were to culmi- nate in the revelation of the Man of Sin. How could this be said of a person who was to be a worldly prince, appearing outside of the Church, separated, not only chronologically by ages from the apostolic age, but also logically, from all the causes then in operation. If Antichrist is to be a single person, concentrating in himself all worldly power as a universal monarch, to appear shortly before the end of the world, as is assumed by so many expounders of prophecy, it is hard to see how he was to be the product of the leaven already working in the times of the Apostles.
If however, as Protestants have so generally believed, the pa- pacy is the Antichrist which the Apostle had in his prophetic eye, then this passage is perfectly intelligible. The two elements of which the papacy is the development are the desire of preem- inence or lust of power, and the idea of a priesthood, that is, that Christian ministers are mediators whose intervention is neces- sary to secure access to God, and that they are authorized to make atonement for sin ; to which was added the claim to grant absolution. Both these elements were at work in the apostolic age. The papacy is the product of the transfer of Jewish and Pagan ideas to the Christian system. The Jews had a high priest, and all the ministers of the sanctuary were sacrificing priests. The Romans had a " Pontifex Maximus " and the ministers of religion among them were priests. Nothing was more natural and nothing is plainer as a historical fact than that the assumption of a priestly character and functions by the Christian ministry, was one of the earliest corruptions of the Church. And nothing is plainer than that to this assumption the power of the papacy is in a large measure to be attributed. And as to the desire of preeminence, we know that there was, even among the twelve, a contention who should be the greatest. The Apostle John (3 Epistle 9) speaks of Diotrephes, " who loveth to have the preeminence ; " and in all the Epistles there is evidence of the struggle for ascendancy on the part of unworthy ministers and teachers. The leaven of iniquity, therefore, was at work in the apostolic age, which concentrated by degrees into the portentous system of the papacy.
8. According to this view, the difficult passage in verses 6 and