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And now to the message of tape number
one from The Papacy is the Antichrist.
We pray that the Lord Jesus Christ will
greatly bless you as you listen.
The Papacy is the Antichrist, a demonstration by
Reverend J.
A.
Wilde, LLD, author of History of Protestantism, History
of the Scottish Nation, etc.
Published by George McKibben in 1888.
The dedication is to the Reverend Ministers of
the Church of Scotland with Mr. John Hope's
compliments.
Preface The following demonstration is rested on no
narrow basis.
Its two postulates, like two posturns, admit us
into the edifice, but they are not its
foundations.
The whole economy of redemption and the whole
course of history are the broad substructions on
which the argument is based and built up,
and the author humbly submits that it cannot
be overturned or the conclusion arrived at set
aside without dislocating and shaking the structure of
both revelation and providence.
The same line of proof which establishes that
Christ is the promised Messiah, conversely applied, establishes
that the Roman system is the predicted apostasy.
In the life of Christ we behold the
converse of what the Antichrist must be, and
in the prophecy of the Antichrist we are
shown the converse of what Christ must be
and was.
And when we place the Papacy between the
two and compare it with each, we find
on the one hand that it is the
perfect converse of Christ as seen in his
life, and on the other that it is
the perfect image of the Antichrist as shown
in the prophecy of him.
We conclude, therefore, that if Jesus of Nazareth
be the Christ, the Roman Papacy is the
Antichrist.
Chapter 1 The Term Antichrist We shall not
go far afield in this discussion, nor is
it in the least necessary to do so.
The materials for a right decision on the
question before us lie close at hand.
The Apostle John, speaking of the great apostasy
to arise in Christendom, calls it the Antichrist,
and the Pope has taken to himself as
the name that best describes his office the
title Vicar of Christ.
All we shall ask as the basis for
our argument are these two accepted facts, namely,
that John styles the apostasy the Antichrist, and
that the head of the Roman system styles
himself Christ's Vicar.
The Papacy holds in its name the key
of its meaning.
We shall make use of that key in
unlocking its mystery and true character.
The Papacy cannot complain, though we adopt this
line of interpretation.
We do nothing more than use the key
it has put into our hands.
The Apostle John, we have said, speaking of
the apostasy, the coming of which he predicts,
styles it the Antichrist.
And we have also said that the Papacy,
speaking through its representative and head, calls itself
the Vicar of Christ.
The first, Antichrist, is a Greek word.
The second, Vicar, is an English word.
But the two are in reality one, for
both words have the same meaning.
Antichrist, translated into English, is Vice Christ, or
Vicar of Christ.
And Vicar of Christ, rendered into Greek, is
Antichrist, Antichristos.
If we can establish this, and the ordinary
use of the word by those to whom
the Greek was a vernacular, is decisive on
the point.
We shall have no difficulty in showing that
this is the meaning of the word Antichrist,
even a Vice Christ.
And if so, then every time the Pope
claims to be the Vicar of Christ, he
pleads at the bar of the world that
he is the Antichrist.
Moreover, this will clear our way and simplify
our discussion.
For let it be noted, if Antichrist signifies
a Vice Christ, that is, one who comes
in the room of Christ, deception, dissimulation, counterfeit,
must be an essential element in his character.
In whatever persons or systems that fundamental characteristic
is lacking, we fail to find the Antichrist,
whatever may be their general opposition to Christ
and to Christianity, or whatever other features of
the Antichrist they may bear.
They may have every other characteristic by which
prophecy had described this noted adversary of Christ
in his gospel, yet lacking this fundamental one,
their claim to this pre-eminently evil distinction
cannot be admitted.
This enables us to dismiss summarily and at
once a host of Antichrists which have been
conjured up by persons who have drawn upon
their imagination, rather than followed any sound principle
of prophetic interpretation.
The cause of the papacy is served by
the false glosses and mistaken interpretations of Scripture,
which interpose a pseudo-Antichrist between it and
prophecy, which unfolds against it so black a
record, and suspends above it so terrible a
doom.
We shall suppose that an atheist or an
infidel has been put to the bar to
answer it to a charge of being the
Antichrist.
He has manifested a satanic malignity against the
gospel, and has labored to the utmost of
his power to destroy it.
He has blasphemed God, execrated Christ, and derided,
vilified, and persecuted all who profess his name,
and on these grounds he has been assumed
to be the Antichrist.
The case is no imaginary one.
Atheists and scoffers in former ages, Voltaire and
Paine in later times, Communists and Pantheists in
our own day, have all been arraigned as
the Antichrist.
Well, let us suppose that one or other
of these notoriously wicked personages or systems has
been put to the bar on the charge
of being the adversary predicted by John.
Who are you?
says the judge.
Are you a vice-Christ?
So you make a profession of Christianity, and
under that pretext seek to undermine and destroy
it?
No, replies the accused, I am no counterfeit.
Christ and his gospel I hate, but I
am an open enemy.
I fight under no mask.
Turning to the likeness drawn by Paul and
John of Christ's great rival and opponent, and
finding the outstanding and essential feature in the
portrait absent in the accused, the judge would
be constrained to say, I do not find
the charge proven.
Go your way.
You are not the Antichrist.
Mohabitanism comes nearer than any of the other
opposing systems to the Antichrist of the Bible.
Yet it falls a long way short of
it.
Mohammed did not disavow the mission of Jesus.
On the contrary, he professed to hold him
in honor as a prophet, and in much
the same way do his followers still feel
toward Christ.
But Islam does not profess to be an
imitation of Christianity.
Any counterfeit that can be discovered in Mohammedanism
is partial and shadowy when placed alongside the
bold, sharp-cut counterfeit of Romanism.
It requires a violent stretch of imagination to
accept Mohammedanism, or indeed any other known ism,
as a vice-Christ.
Of all systems that ever were on the
earth or are now upon it, Romanism alone
meets all the requirements of prophecy and exhibits
all the features of the vice-Christ.
And it does so with a completeness and
a truthfulness which enables the man who permits
himself to be guided by the statements of
the Word of God on the one hand
and the facts of history on the other
to say at once, this is the Antichrist.
What we have said is meant to indicate
the lines on which our demonstration will proceed.
We must trace the parallelism between their respective
chiefs, Christ and the Pope, along the entire
line of their career.
In this parallelism lies the essence of anti
-Christianism and, of course, the strength of our
argument.
It is this counterfeit, so exact and complete,
which has misled the world into the belief
that this is Christianity, to the waste of
ages, not a few, the unsettling and overthrowing
of kingdoms, the stunting of the human understanding,
and the loss of millions of immortal souls.
Chapter 2.
Antichrist Portrayed Before His Birth It is somewhat
remarkable that the clearest, fullest, and most lifelike
description of Antichrist we possess is that which
was given of him before he arose.
The papacy, if we may be allowed to
anticipate what it will be the object of
the following pages to demonstrate, the papacy has
been twelve hundred years in existence, and during
all these centuries it has been one of
the main actors in the world.
Neither time nor opportunity has been lacking to
it for the display of its spirit and
aims.
The record of its deeds lies open to
the world, and he that runs may read
it, and after so long, and, we may
add, so dismal an acquaintance with it, it
might be supposed that we should now be
able to give a fuller and truer description
of it than any that could possibly be
given before it had come into existence.
Yet no, incomparably the most lifelike portrait of
the papacy that exists is that which was
given by Paul in the first century when
writing to the Thessalonian Christians, and which we
give below.
Paul's is not the only painting of popery
on the page of the Bible.
Daniel, centuries before, had foreshadowed the rise of
this system in imagery of graphic vividness and
dramatic grandeur.
A little while after Paul, John, in symbols
equally majestic and awful, foretold the advent of
the same power.
The vision was doubled because the thing was
sure.
Paul comes in between these two prophecies, two
yet one, as their inspired interpreter.
He employs neither figure nor symbol, but in
words, plain yet solemn, he lifts the veil
and lays bare the infernal origin and satanic
character of that power, which, when he wrote,
was so near that the Christians to whom
he addressed his epistle might almost hear the
sound of its approaching footsteps and see the
shadow which it had already begun to project
upon the church and the world.
We quote the passage, 2 Thessalonians 2, verses
1-11.
Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our
gathering together unto him, that ye be not
soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither
by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter
as from us, as that the day of
Christ is at hand.
Let no man deceive you by any means,
for that day shall not come, except there
comes a falling away first.
And that man of sin be revealed, the
son of perdition, 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.
Remember ye not that when I was yet
with you I told you these things?
And now ye know what withholdeth that he
might be revealed in his time.
For the mystery of iniquity doth already work,
only he who now letteth will let, until
he be taken out of the way.
And then shall that wicked be revealed, whom
the Lord shall consume with the spirit of
his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness
of his coming, even him whose coming is
after the working of Satan, with all power,
and signs, and lying wonders, and with all
deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish, because
they receive not the love of the truth,
that they might be saved.
And for this cause God shall send them
a strong delusion, that they should believe a
lie.
Chapter 3 Antichrist, an Enemy Under a Mask
In order to introduce ourselves to our subject,
we have taken it for granted that the
system described by Paul in the passage we
have just quoted is the papacy.
This is the thing to be established.
We now proceed to prove this, and provided
we shall show on good and conclusive grounds
that the system depicted by Paul is the
Roman apostasy, and that this is the same
system which Daniel and John have portrayed under
symbolic imagery, it will follow that one who
admits the Bible to be the word of
God, and that Paul wrote by the inspiration
of the Holy Ghost, must believe that the
papacy, that is the Roman apostasy, is the
Antichrist of Scripture.
This is not point of mere speculation.
It is a question that has attended upon
it great practical issues.
This inquiry has for its object the ascertainment
of the true meaning of an important part
of the word of God, even the better
half of its prophecies.
Moreover, on this question must rest the verdict
we are to pronounce on that society which
calls itself the church, as also the revelations
in which we are to stand to it.
And on it too must depend whether we
shall abandon, or whether we shall continue to
occupy the ground which we have been accustomed
to regard as our divine central position in
our war with popery, or rather whether we
ought not to end this war, and confess
that we have been fighting all along under
a mistake.
Who is Antichrist?
It will help us to the right answer
to this question if we shall first determine
what is Antichrist.
Antichrist is an enemy who makes war with
the Son of God.
Of that there is no doubt.
But what is the form of this war?
And under what character does Antichrist carry it
on?
Does he wage it openly?
Or does he fight it under a mask?
Does he take the field as an open
rebel and a declared foe?
Or does he come as a friendly adherent
who professes to bring support and help to
the cause, which in reality he seeks to
undermine and destroy?
To determine this point, let us look at
the meaning of the word Antichrist as employed
in Scripture.
The reader sees that the term is a
composite one, being made up of two words,
Anti- and Christ.
The name is one of new formation, being
compounded, it would seem, for this very enemy,
and by its etymology expressing more exactly and
perfectly his character than any older word could.
The precise question now before us is this.
What is the precise sense of Anti-
in this connection?
Does it designate an enemy who says openly
and truly, I am against Christ?
Or does it designate one who says plausibly,
yet falsely, I am for Christ?
Which?
To determine this, let us look at the
force given to this prefix by writers in
both classic literature and Holy Scripture.
First, the old classic writers.
By these, the preposition Anti- is often
employed to designate a substitute.
This is, in fact, a very common use
of it in the classic writers.
For instance, Anti-Basilis.
He who is the locum tenens of a
king, or as we should now say, a
viceroy.
Anti- having in this case the force
of the English term vice.
He who filled the place of council was
Anti-Opatus, pro-council.
He who took the place of an absent
guest at a feast was entitled or styled
Anti-Depnos.
The preposition used in this sense of the
great substitute himself, Christ is said to have
given himself as an Anti-Lutron, a ransom
in the stead of all.
Classic usage does not require us to give
only one sense to this word and restrict
it to one who seeks openly and by
force to seat himself in the place of
another and by violent usurpation bring that other's
authority to an end.
We are at liberty to apply it to
one who steals into the office of another
under the mask of friendship and while professing
to uphold his interests labors to destroy them.
This leaves us free to turn to the
use of the word in Scripture.
The Antichrist comes first into view in our
Lord's discourse recorded in Matthew 24.24 and
Mark 13.22 For false Christs and false
prophets shall arise and show signs and wonders
to seduce, if it were possible, even the
elect.
Our Lord does not indeed use the word
Antichrist but what is almost its synonym, Pseudo
-Christ or False Christ, Pseudo-Christos in the
Greek.
Nevertheless, the persons whose coming he foretells are
in the line of Antichrist.
They belong to the same family and their
grand characteristic is deception.
Manifested, they are not open enemies but pretended
friends.
They are false Christs and false prophets and
as such are forerunners of that great Antichrist
who is to succeed them and in whom
they are to find their fuller development and
final consummation.
They shall seek by signs and wonders, false
of course, to obscure the glory of Christ's
true miracles to weaken the evidence of his
messiahship arising therefrom and to draw men away
from him and after themselves.
The other place in the New Testament in
which reference is made to Antichrist is the
first and second epistles of John.
The idea which John presents of the Antichrist
is quite in harmony with that of our
Lord.
John looks for him in the guise of
a deceiver.
Little children, says John, from his first epistle,
chapter 2, verse 18, It is the last
time, and as ye have heard that Antichrist
shall come, even now there are many Antichrists.
After this announcement of a special and great
Antichrist to follow in the wake of those
minor Antichrists that were already arrived and were
urging their claims on the attention of the
world, he comes to look more closely at
the giant who was to stand up after
these dwarfs had passed away.
He notes prominently one characteristic of him, and
it is his falsehood.
Antichrist, says John, is to be a liar,
verse 22, 1 John chapter 2.
Quote, Who is a liar but he that
denieth that Jesus is the Christ?
He is Antichrist that denieth the Father and
the Son.
Unquote.
St. John's words, says Archbishop Trench, seem to
me decisive on the matter that resistance to
and defiance of Christ, not the false assumption
of his character and offices, is the essential
mark of Antichrist.
Unquote.
That is from Synonyms of the New Testament
by R.C. Trench, B.D., page 120,
published in Cambridge and London in 1854.
Such is Dr. Trench's opinion, but he gives
no grounds for it, and we are unable
to imagine any.
We draw the exactly opposite conclusion from the
Apostle's words, even that the false assumption of
his character and offices is an essential mark
of Antichrist.
He is a liar, says John.
But if he comes boldly and truthfully avowing
himself the enemy of Christ, how is he
a liar?
If he avows without concealment his impious design
of overthrowing Christ, with what truth can he
be spoken of as a deceiver?
But such is the character plainly ascribed to
him by John, in the second epistle, verse
7, For many deceivers are entered into the
world who confess not that Jesus Christ has
come in the flesh.
This is a deceiver and an Antichrist.
Unquote.
Plainly the exegesis, or rather supposition, of Dr.
Trench is inadmissible.
Dr. Chalmers had no difficulty in seeing the
Roman system in the apostasy predicted by Paul.
We find him saying in his scripture readings,
Save us, O Lord, from falling away, lest
we share in the perdition that waiteth on
the great apostasy.
We hold the usurpation of Rome to be
evidently pointed at, and therefore let us maintain
our distance and keep our resolute protest against
its great abominations.
That is from Dr. Chalmers' Sabbath Scripture Readings,
Volume 1, page 310, as published in Edinburgh
in 1848.
Archbishop Trench was misled, it may be, by
the strength of the term deny.
Quote, He is Antichrist that denieth the Father
and the Son.
But he who does not confess when he
is called to do so denies.
Such is the use of the word in
these applications all through the New Testament.
Such is the use John makes of it
in this very passage.
Quote, For many deceivers are entered into the
world who confess not that Jesus Christ is
come in the flesh.
It is clear that Antichrist, as depicted by
our Lord and by his Apostle John, is
to wear a mask and to profess one
thing and act another.
He is to enter the church as Judas
entered the garden, professedly to kiss his master,
but in reality to betray him.
He is to come with words of peace
in his mouth, but war in his heart.
He is to be a counterfeit Christ, Christ's
likeness stamped on base metal.
He is to be an imitation of Christ,
a close, clever, and astute imitation, which will
deceive the world for ages.
Those only accepted who, taught by the Holy
Spirit, shall be able to see through the
disguise and detect the enemy under the mask
of a friend.
Antichrist, then, is a counterfeit.
But this one mark is not alone sufficient
to identify the person on whom it is
found as the great apostate.
All deceit in religion is anti-Christian.
The other marks must come along with this
one to ward us to say that we
have found that pre-eminently wicked one and
that portentous combination of all evil that is
to form the Antichrist.
Yet this one mark enables us to test
certain theories which have been advanced on this
subject.
If Antichrist must necessarily be a deceiver, a
false Christ, then no atheist or body of
atheists can be Antichrist.
No pantheist or body of pantheists can be
Antichrist.
They are not deceivers.
They are open enemies.
They make war in defiance of God and
Christ and under the protestation that there is
no such person as the Bible affirms filling
the office of the world's mediator and savior.
They hold the whole affair to be an
invention of priests.
Antichrist dared to make no such avowal.
It would be fatal to him.
Were he to affirm that Christianity is a
fable, an out-and-out imposture, he would
cut away the ground from under his own
feet.
He would deny the very first postulate in
his system for there must first be a
Christ before there can be an Antichrist.
And not less does this mark shut us
up to the rejection of the theory which
has been advanced with much earnestness and some
plausibility that Antichrist is a political character or
potentate, some frightfully tyrannical and portentously wicked king
who is to arise and for a short
space devastate the world by arms.
This is an altogether different Antichrist from that
Antichrist which prophecy foreshadows.
He may resemble, may surpass him in open
violence, but he lacks the profound dissimulation under
which Antichrist is to commit his atrocities.
The rage of the mere tyrant is indiscriminately
vented upon the world at large.
Antichrist's rage is concentrated on one particular object
and cause.
Nor with any propriety can such a one
be said to sit in the temple of
God, the seat on which the mock Christ
specially delights to show himself.
Prophecy absolutely refuses to see in either of
these theories the altogether unique and overtopping system
of hypocrisy, blasphemy, and tyranny which it has
foretold.
So far we are helped in our search.
When we are able to put aside some
of the false Antichrists, we come more within
sight of the true one.
We turn now to the prophecy of Paul,
and we shall be blind indeed if, after
the study of it, we shall be in
any doubt as to whose likeness it is
that looks forth upon us from this remarkable
prediction.
The name Antichrist, it is true, does not
occur in this prophecy.
It is not needed.
John had given the name.
Paul presents us with his portrait.
He says the Antichrist has power, a truth,
an accuracy, and a fullness, which has left
nothing for the eighteenth centuries which have since
rolled past to supplement, much less to correct
or amend.
The strokes with which this portrait is drawn
are few, but each is a lightning flash,
and every member and feature of the terrible
colossus stands revealed.
Paul did not paint this portrait and leave
it as a riddle to perplex and baffle
future ages.
With history in our hands, there is no
room for a moment's doubt about it.
Since Paul wrote, there has been only one
system to which this portrait can apply.
It applies to it in every particular, as
the photograph agrees in every liniment with the
living face from which it is taken.
But it will agree with no other system
that now is or ever was on the
earth, even as the photograph will not agree
with any countenance but that which stamped itself
upon the plate of the artist.
So clearly did the spirit of prophecy foresee
the coming of Antichrist, and so truthfully did
he enable Paul to depict him.
The key of this prophecy is in the
seventh verse.
For the mystery of iniquity doth already work.
The mystery of iniquity.
The phrase is a striking one.
It is not simply iniquity.
It is the mystery of iniquity.
Since the time when the first transgression in
Eden opened the door for its entrance, iniquity
had never been absent from the earth.
History is little else than a sorrowful recital
of iniquities.
But now a new epoch was to be
opened in the career of evil.
A hitherto unexampled and unthought of organization of
iniquity was about to appear.
The phrase mystery of iniquity suggests a secret
and terrible conspiracy to sin amongst beings of
various ranks and faculties, and perhaps also of
various natures.
Not a mere series of isolated acts, but
a skillfully constructed system, the several parts nicely
adjusted to one another, and their joint working
inducing a product of tremendous evil character surpassing
what any former age had witnessed.
That mystery was as yet undivulged.
But it was, even now, when Paul wrote,
traveling towards the light and would be revealed
in due time.
The mystery of iniquity.
This is our true standpoint, once we may
look around over the whole passage.
When surveyed from this position, Paul's prophecy will
be seen to have an amplitude of meaning
and a depth of import as profound as
its range is vast.
We venture to think that the height and
depth of this prophecy have not yet been
very accurately measured or its meaning fully fathomed.
What is the mystery of iniquity?
The phrase suggests another, the mystery of godliness.
Paul writing to Timothy says, in 1 Timothy
2.16, without controversy great is the mystery
of godliness.
These two phrases stand alone in the Bible.
We read but once of the mystery of
godliness, and but once of the mystery of
iniquity.
They are the two preeminently grand mysteries of
revelation.
They stand over against each other.
The mystery of iniquity, fashioning its outward character
and semblance upon the mystery of godliness, making
it its pattern, till at last the mystery
of iniquity presents itself to the world a
perfect imitation and counterfeit of the mystery of
godliness.
Seeing the two mysteries stand so related to
each other, the one mystery interprets the other.
We must give the same height and depth,
the same length and breadth to the one
as to the other, so far as the
diverse origin and character of the two will
permit.
We ask then, what is the precise idea
of the Holy Spirit in the phrase the
mystery of godliness?
Does the phrase denote simply that system of
spiritual truth which God has been developing during
the successive ages of the world, which now
at last stands fully manifested in the gospel?
No doubt this is part of the mystery
of godliness, but it is not the whole,
nor indeed is it the principal part of
it.
The mystery of godliness is not the development
of a system only, it is the development
of a person.
So does the apostle define it.
Without controversy, says he, great is the mystery
of godliness.
God was manifest in the flesh.
It was the gradual development of certain great
and supernatural principles and truths through symbols, prophecies
and typical persons, till at last they attained
their completed development and full manifestation in the
person of the Son of God.
The mystery of iniquity, which stands over against
the mystery of godliness as its parallel and
counterfeit, must be like it, like it in
having its source outside the world, like it
in its slow and gradual development, and like
it in its final culmination.
Of it too, we must say, it is
not the development of a system only, it
is the development of a person.
It is the gathering together of all the
principles of evil and the marshalling of them
into one organization or host and their embodiment
at last in a representative person or head.
Antichrist.
He was to be the grand outcome of
the apostasy, not its mere ornamental head, but
its executive.
He was to guide its councils, inspire its
policy, execute its decrees.
In short, he was to be the organ
through which its terrible powers were to be
put forth.
This we take to be the ruling idea
in the passage.
Just as the mystery of godliness is not
merely the manifestation of the system of godliness,
but the manifestation of God himself, so the
mystery of iniquity is not merely the manifestation
of the system of iniquity, but the manifestation
of the person or author of iniquity.
The prophecy brings us two mysteries, the one
the counterfeit in all points of the other.
We have an invisible agent, even God, beneath
the one.
We have an invisible agent, even Satan, beneath
the other.
We have the one mystery culminating at last
in an incarnation, God manifest in the flesh.
We see the other in like manner culminating
in an incarnation, in a loose sense, for
all its principles concentrate themselves in and show
themselves to the world through its living head
on earth, Antichrist.
We may go even farther and say that
there is as real an incarnation of the
spirit and mind of Satan in the mystery
of iniquity as there is of the spirit
and mind of God in the mystery of
godliness.
And, as in Christ, God and man meet,
so in Antichrist, his counterfeit and rival, the
human and the superhuman meet and act together.
Earth-born man and archangel fallen.
Chapter 6, Unfolding of the Two Mysteries The
apostle, having brought these two mysteries upon the
stage and shown them to us standing face
to face, goes on to trace the parallel
between the two.
This parallel is distinctly discernible in every stage
of their career.
The apostle traces it first in their rise,
second in their coming, and third in their
full and completed development.
Let us follow the parallelism step by step
and stage by stage.
In their rise, for the mystery of iniquity,
doth already work.
It was already in existence.
Its energies were all astir, but it worked
in secret and was inaudible to the world.
It worked as leaven doth in the meal,
which keeps silently fermenting in the mass till
the whole has been leavened.
It worketh as the seed does in the
soil, which, germinating in the darkness, pierces the
clod, bursts into the light, and, receiving an
accession of strength from the sun and air,
shoots up in the stem and at last
culminates in flower and fruit.
The mystery of iniquity worked as treason works.
The conspirators meet in secret conclave.
They concert their plans unknown to the world.
They speak in whispers, but their schemes at
length ripen, and now they come abroad into
the light of day and proclaim in the
housetops what they had hatched in darkness.
So did the mystery of iniquity work.
So too did the mystery of godliness work.
Even at this initial stage of the two
mysteries, we trace a resemblance between them.
Let us think how long the gospel worked
before it issued in the incarnation of the
Son of God.
For ages and for generations, Christianity was a
hidden mystery.
The redemption of men by means of the
incarnation of the Son of God was a
secret, profoundly hidden in the counsels of God
in eternity, and even after time had begun
its course, it long remained a secret unknown
to the world.
Bit by bit, this mystery revealed itself.
First, the idea of incarnation was dimly made
known.
In the first promise, mention was made of
the seed of the woman, and on this
obscure intimation was built the hope of a
deliverer, and that hope descended the ages with
the race.
The idea of expiation was next revealed in
the appointment of sacrifice, which also with the
hope which is expressed and sustained came down
the stream of time.
Next, a complete system of ceremonial worship was
instituted to reveal the coming redemption in the
amplitude of its blessings.
Still the veil was upon it.
It stood before the world in type.
There arose an illustrious series of august personages
who were forerunners or types of Christ.
They exhibited to the church the offices which
her incarnate Savior was to fill and the
work He was to execute.
There stood up an order of prophetical men
who prefigured Him as the Great Teacher.
There stood up an order of sacrificial men
who prefigured Him as the One Priest.
There stood up an order of kingly men
who prefigured Himself as a monarch, and a
monarch who was to be higher and mightier
than any of the monarchs of earth.
The kings of the house of Judah foreshadowed
Him as sprung of a royal stock and
the heir of a throne, which all nations
should serve and before which all kings should
bow.
Thus did the mystery of godliness work, unfolding
and still unfolding itself as the ages passed
on, the type growing ever the clearer and
the prophecy ever the fuller, till at last
the mystery stepped out from behind the veil
and stood before the world, perfected, finished, and
fully revealed in the person of Jesus of
Nazareth, the Christ, God manifest in the flesh,
and centering in His person and flowing out
from it through His life and ministry and
death as raised from the sun were all
the glorious doctrines of the gospel.
In like manner the mystery of iniquity kept
traveling by the same stages towards the day
of its final revelation.
It was not the production of one, but
of many ages.
The fashion of the world changed.
Great empires, which had filled the earth with
their glory and burdened it with their oppression,
went down into the grave.
Worships arose with their powerful hierarchies and grand
ceremonials, and when their day was over, passed
away, leaving only ruined fanes and deserted altars
to tell that they had ever been.
But the mystery of iniquity, as if deathless,
like the being which inspired it, refused to
succumb to these shocks.
It kept on its course over broken thrones
and desecrated altars, ever reaching forth to that
high goal where it should show itself to
the nations and be the wonder of all
that dwell upon the earth.
Silently and stealthily, this mystery pursued its course.
For ages and for generations, it too was
a hidden mystery.
Paul tells us that it was working in
his day.
This warrants us to say that Antichrist was
then born and was making trial of his
infantile powers.
The world did not hear his working, but
Paul, by the spirit of prophecy, did so
and sounded an alarm to the church.
The Gnostics and other teachers of error that
had gone forth into the world so early
as Paul's day were Antichrists, and those in
a special who propagated the delusion that it
was a phantom which the Jews seized and
crucified on Calvary.
They seemed to admit the mission of Christ,
yet they subverted the great end of his
coming by denying his incarnation and, by consequence,
the whole work of redemption.
But though these teachers were Antichristian, they were
not the Antichrist.
After them, Paul gave warning that there should
come one far mightier than they, the lachet
of whose shoes they were not worthy to
loose.
They were misgrown and misshapen Antichrists.
Their system of error was immature and their
power of attack contemptible compared with that full
-grown Antichristianism which would stand up on after
days and say to the world, I am
Christ, and under that color make war upon
the true Christ.
Nay, even before the apostles' day, the mystery
of iniquity had begun to work.
From the beginning, Satan had made the line
of error to run parallel with the line
of truth.
He had been a close observer of God's
plan from the first, and he made it
the model on which to form his own.
Never was the divine plan advanced a stage
without Satan making a corresponding advance in his
plan, as like to the other as it
was possible to make it in all outward
respects, but essentially antagonistic to it in principle
and spirit.
Satan has been a counterfeit from the beginning.
Even in the times of paganism, he never
showed himself as an avowed adversary or waged
open war.
He nowhere established a system of atheism.
He permitted the great idea of a god
to be received in the pagan world, but
he took care to intercept the influence of
that great truth in the heart and life
by seducing men to the worship of many
gods, and these gods in man's own likeness.
He set up altar against altar, priesthood against
priesthood, and sacrifice against sacrifice, and he enlarged
and beautified his ritual in the heathen world
till it seemed no unworthy rival of the
divinely instituted ceremonial on Mount Moriah.
Moreover, he sent forth pioneers to keep alive
expectation in the pagan world of some great
one yet to come.
He showed to the world a colossal picture
of the Antichrist, while yet he was at
a distance.
For what were the Caesars, king and priest
of the Roman world, but types of that
more terrible power, temporal and spiritual, that was
to center in the chair of the popes?
That colossal image he kept full in the
world's view till the fullness of the time
for Antichrist's appearance had arrived, and then he
withdrew the image and brought forth a great
reality, the man of sin now come to
his full birth, though not as yet to
his full stature, and he found for him
a seat and throne on the seven hills.
Chapter 7 THE PASTOR BECOMES A MONARCH TEN
CENTURIES OF CLIMBING Beginning his career in the
days of Paul, it was not till the
thirteenth century that the man of sin reached
his maturity and stood before the world full
grown.
During all these ages, he kept stretching himself
higher and higher, piling assumption upon assumption and
prerogative upon prerogative, till at last he raised
himself to a height from which he looked
down not only upon all churches, but upon
all kings and kingdoms.
He claimed to be the world's one bishop
and world's one monarch.
In the first century, he is seen as
the humble pastor whose only care is to
feed his flock and who looks for no
crown save that which the chief shepherd may
be pleased to give him at his appearing.
In the thirteenth, he is beheld as a
mighty potentate who stands with his foot planted
on every throne and realm of Christendom.
He writes himself a king of kings and
he claims by divine right to administer all
the affairs of earth.
If we accept Christianity, there is no similar
example in history of what was at first
so small becoming in the end so great.
Three hundred popes and more are seen one
after the other steadily prosecuting this idea without
once relaxing in their efforts or turning aside
from the pursuit.
Each in succession takes up the plan at
the point where his predecessor had left it
and carries it a stage nearer its consummation.
For thirteen hundred years on end, we see
the enterprise pushed forward with an undeviating constancy
and an unflinching courage with a perseverance and
a subtlety.
In short, a combination of powers never before
seen working together for the realization of any
other project.
There is more than man here.
The spirit who conceived this plan, who inspired
the actors and kept them working century after
century on the same lines till at last
the goal was reached was more than human.
Paul tells us that its author was Satan.
A great apostasy was to precede the rise
of the Antichrist.
In truth, the man of sin was to
grow out of that apostasy.
Be not troubled or alarmed, says the apostle
writing to the Thessalonians, as if time were
to be wound up and Christ were to
return.
Thessalonians 2, verses 2 and 3 says, that
day shall not come except there come a
falling away first and that man of sin
be revealed.
Not a falling away, but the falling away
as it is in the original Greek.
Some great and notable apostasy.
The church must pass through a dark and
terrible shadow before Christ shall return.
The prophets had spoken not obscurely of that
evil time.
It was a burden of Daniel's prophecy.
It was repeated in the symbolic pictureings of
John.
Paul in his other writings had referred to
it, portraying with brief but vivid touches the
essential characteristics of the power which at that
era was to cast his dark shadow on
the world.
Hardly had the early persecution ceased till that
falling away set in.
Jerome lifts the veil in the fourth century
and disclosed a truly melancholy picture.
In vain we look for the humility, the
simplicity and the purity of the early church.
The gold refined in the furnace of ten
persecutions is waxing dim.
The vine which Paul planted at Rome is
being transformed into the vine of Sodom.
The pastors of the church are becoming inflamed
with the love of riches and are striving
with one another for preeminence.
Rome daily sees her bishop ride forth in
a gilded chariot drawn by prancing steeds.
Her clergy show themselves attired in robes of
silk.
The members of their flock crowd alternately the
church and the theater and rush with indecent
haste from superstitious rites performed at the tombs
of the martyrs to the games and sports
of the circus.
The apostasy has fairly set in.
The corruption grows with the current of the
centuries.
It shapes itself into system.
It builds error upon error and buttresses itself
all around with assumptions and falsehoods.
The organization in which it enshrines itself necessarily
and naturally finds for itself a chief or
head.
Now comes the pope and his hierarchy.
The man of sin has appeared.
He is seen to rise out of the
earth of a paganized Christianity.
Like the soil from which he sprung, he
is pagan in essence, though a Christian in
appearance.
Several notable events helped him to attain his
full stature.
We must indicate a few, not all of
these, for it is impossible to write the
history of thirteen centuries in one short chapter.
The first event which contributed and contributed essentially
to the development of the papacy was the
removal of the emperor from Rome.
Had Caesar continued to reside in his old
capital, he would, as the phrase is, have
sat upon the pope, and this aspiring ecclesiastic
could not have shot up into the powerful
potentate which prophecy had foretold.
But Constantine, A.D. 334, removed to the
new Rome on the Bosphorus, leaving the old
capital of the world to the bishop of
Rome, who was henceforth the first and most
influential personage in that city.
It was then, probably, that the idea of
founding an ecclesiastical monarchy suggested itself to him.
He had fallen heir, by what must have
seemed a lucky accident, to the old capital
of the world.
He was, moreover, possessor of the chair of
Peter, or believed himself to be so, and
out of these two, the old town of
the Caesars and the old chair of the
apostle, it might even be possible, so doubtless
he reasoned, to fabricate an empire that would
one day rival and even overtop that of
the emperors.
These, it might have been thought beforehand, were
but slender materials to bear the weight of
so great an enterprise, yet with their help,
and aided doubtless by deeper than mere human
counsel, he projected a sovereignty which has not
had its like on earth, which survived the
fall of the Roman Empire, which lived through
all the convulsions and overturnings of the Middle
Ages, and which has come down to our
day and has the art, when men believe
it about to expire, of rallying its powers
and coming back upon the world.
About this time, moreover, the equality which had
reigned among the pastors of the church in
the primitive age was broken.
The bishops claimed superiority above the presbyters, nor
was their equality even among the bishops themselves.
They took precedence not according to their learning
or their talents or their piety, but according
to the rank of the city in which
their see was placed.
Finally, a new and loftier order arose overtopping
the episcopate.
Christendom was partitioned into five great patriarchs, Rome,
Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem.
These were the five great cities of the
empire, and their bishops were constituted the five
great princes of the church.
Now came the momentous question, for a while
so keenly agitated, which of the five shall
be the first?
Constantinople claimed this honor for her patriarch on
the ground that it was the residence of
the emperor.
Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem each put in its
claim, but to no effect.
Constantinople found, however, a powerful rival in the
old city on the banks of the Tiber.
Rome had been the head of the world,
the throne of the Caesars.
Around it was still the halo of a
thousand victories, and that gave it a mysterious
influence over the imaginations of men who began
to see in its bishop the first ecclesiastic
of the Christian world.
The popular suffrage had pronounced in favor of
the Roman bishop before his rank had received
imperial ratification.
He was installed as the first of the
five patriarchs in A.D. 606.
The emperor Phocas, displeased with the bishop of
Constantinople, who had condemned the murder of Maurice,
by which Phocas opened his way to the
imperial dignity, made Boniface III universal bishop.
The imperial edict, however, gave to the Roman
bishop only the precedence among the five patriarchs.
It gave him no power or jurisdiction over
them.
Mere rank, the bishops of Rome held to
be but an empty honor.
What they coveted was substantial power.
Their policy was now shaped with the view
of reducing the whole clergy of the church
into obedience to the Roman chair and exalting
the popes to supreme and absolute sovereignty.
Centuries passed away, in the course of which,
by the help of many an artifice and
under cover of many a pretext, the Roman
bishops slowly extended their power over the West.
The darkness, which accompanied the descent of the
Gothic nations, favored their project in a high
degree.
Bad wares, says Puffendorf in his introduction to
the history of Europe, are best vended in
the dark, or at least in a dim
light.
Some of the wares vended in these dark
times were sufficiently remarkable.
Out of many, we give but two examples.
The emperor Constantine, by his last will and
testament, was made to bequeath to Sylvester, bishop
of Rome, the whole Western Empire, including palace,
regalia, and all the belongings of the master
of the world.
A goodly dowry, verily, for the poor fishermen.
Then came another windfall to the papacy, in
the shape of the decretals of Isidore.
This last showed the church to her equal
surprise and delight that her popes from Peter
downwards had held the same state, lived in
the same magnificence, and promulgated their pontifical will
in briefs, edicts, and bulls in the same
authoritative and lordly style as the grand popes
of the Middle Ages.
Both documents, it is unnecessary to say, were
sheer forgeries.
They are acknowledged by Romanists to be so.
They could not have stood a moment's scrutiny
in an enlightened age, but they were accepted
as genuine in the darkness of the times
that gave them birth, and vast conclusions were
founded upon them.
The fabrications of Isidore were made the substructions
of canon law, and that stupendous fabric of
legislation is still maintained to be of divine
authority, despite that it is now acknowledged to
be founded on a forgery.
The northern nations arrived in southern Europe in
the fifth and succeeding centuries ignorant of Christianity.
This was another cause that favored the advancement
of the man of sin.
These nations, on their arrival in Italy, beheld
a great spiritual potentate seated in the chair
of Caesar.
He told them that he was the successor
of Peter the Apostle, whom Christ had constituted
his vicar on earth, with power to transmit
all his prerogatives, spiritual and temporal, to his
successors in his office.
This was the only gospel the Pope ever
preached to the barbarian tribes, and they had
no means of testing the legitimacy of these
mighty claims.
In the Pope himself, they recognized no very
distant resemblance to their own archdruid.
The rites of the Roman temples were not
unlike the worship they had practiced in their
pagan homes.
They had easy access to the baptismal font,
their pagan beliefs and manners forming no impediment.
Nation after nation entered the Roman pale, the
Franks leading the way, and earning for themselves
the title of the eldest son of the
Church.
The Gothic nations had found in the Pope,
before whose chair they now bowed down, a
common spiritual father.
Thus was accomplished another notable stage in the
development of the papacy.
His dignity enhanced by this vast accession of
new subjects, the Pope himself set to strengthen
his power within the Church by completing the
subjection and vassalage of the clergy.
He let slip no opportunity that offered to
compass this end.
Since the fifth century, the bishops who lived
on this side of the Alps used to
go to Rome to visit the sepulchres of
the apostles Peter and Paul.
This journey was a voluntary one being undertaken
to gratify the devout or superstitious feelings of
the pious excursionist.
In no long time it was made obligatory,
and those who failed to present themselves at
the apostolic threshold were subjected to rebuke as
lukewarm in their devotion to the Holy Chair.
It was next interpreted in the sense that
the itinerant bishops had sought confirmation at Rome
and that all bishops ought to go there
for that end.
Thus there came another accession of prerogative and
dignity to the papal chair.
Further, it was a usual practice of churches
and bishops to ask the advice of the
Roman church in matters of consequence and difficulty
or crave the right interpretation of particular canons.
When they at Rome perceived that their advice
was taken as a decision, they began to
send their decrees before they were demanded on
pretense that Rome, being the first sea of
the Christian world, her bishop ought to take
care that the canons and ecclesiastical laws were
duly kept.
Hence another encroachment upon the liberties of churches
and pastors and another accession to papal dignity
and jurisdiction.
And further, when differences or quarrels arose between
bishop and bishop or between church and church,
nothing was more natural that for the parties
it varianced to solicit the mediation of the
bishop of Rome.
The pope willingly undertook the task of composing
their contentions, but the price he exacted was
a still further surrender of the liberties of
the church.
He thence took occasion to assume the office
of a judge and to represent his chair
as a tribunal to which he had a
right to summon parties.
At times, he came in between the metropolitan
and his diocesan, and on one pretext or
another deposed the latter to the waking of
the jurisdiction of the former.
Moreover, it sometimes happened that parties who had
been condemned before provincial tribunals were encouraged to
appeal to Rome, where the cause was reheard
and the provincial sentence that might be revoked.
By these stealthy and persistent steps, the pope
contrived to keep on the ascending grade.
There followed other most ingenious devices all for
the same end.
Among these was the pall of consecration.
The pall was sent to all bishops from
the pope at first as a gift.
It was next represented as indispensable, and that
without it no bishops could discharge the functions
of his office.
Thus a new hold was obtained over the
clergy, and a new method invented of replenishing
the papal coffers, for a high price was
put on this mystic article of dress, which
was woven of the wool of the lambs
of St. Agnes.
To the same end were annats imposed.
This was the sum paid by bishops when
they changed from one sea to another, a
practice allowed by the pope for the gain
it brought him.
The multiplication of monks and friars tended to
the same end.
The pope summoned into existence the core of
the regular clergy to play them off against
the army of the seculars.
He acted on the maxim divide and conquer.
The monks were a check upon the bishops.
They watched their proceedings and carried their report
to Rome.
They had acquired a vast reputation for holiness
and the direction of consciences through the confessional
was mainly in their hands.
They had discovered the secret of amassing riches
by the arts of mendicancy.
They swarmed over Europe and were thoroughly devoted
to the interests of the papal sea.
And if any bishop set himself in opposition
to the pope, they raised such a clamor
against him as speedily convinced him that he
had no alternative but submission.
Especially did the English monk Winfred, who changed
his name to Boniface, enlarge the papal dominion.
This man is commonly but erroneously credited with
the first Christianization of Germany.
Invested with the authority of the pope's legate,
he traversed the countries on the east of
the Rhone, rooting out the schools and churches
of the evangelical faith, which had been numerously
planted in that region of Europe by the
cul-de-missionaries of the Irish and Scottish
nations, substituting in their room Roman monasteries and
cathedrals.
This was the work of Boniface, a work
well-pleasing to Rome inasmuch as it greatly
widened the bounds of the pontifical sway.
Among the events of these disastrous ages contributing
to the growth of the papal power, not
the least influential were the crusades.
They evoked a mighty outburst of enthusiasm around
the papal chair.
They placed powerful kings, vast treasures, and countless
soldiers at the service of the pope.
He took it into his own management the
estates of those who went to fight for
the recovery of the Holy Land, exempting their
owners from the jurisdiction of the civil power
in both civil and criminal causes.
When the fury of the crusades had spent
itself, it was found that the spirit of
princes was broken, their resources dried up, their
realms impoverished by the loss of their subjects,
and the only institution that had profited by
the frenzy was the papacy, which now, every
other interest abased, rose aloft in greater grandeur
than ever.
Nor was this the end of the matter.
The fanatical fury which had found its first
fearful discharge on the plains of Syria was
diverted back to the land whence it had
come, and there it vented without exhausting itself
in those bloody persecutions and wars against heretics
which raged for centuries in Christendom.
Chapter 8 The King with the Three Crowns
The Vicar The crusades have carried us into
the 13th century.
We must turn back to the 8th and
9th centuries and note certain political changes that
occurred in those ages which contributed material aid
to the papacy in fulfilling its destiny.
It was the deep aim of the Pope
to plant his seat in a place where
he should owe no subjection to any civil
power.
He desired to have a country of his
own, such as might be sufficient to maintain
his grandeur, and whence he should reign as
a temporal king as well as a spiritual
sovereign.
For a business like this much time and
labor were needed.
The project was manifestly unattainable so long as
an emperor reigned in the West or the
Gothic monarchy subsisted in Italy.
But strange to say events conspired to make
empty and void a place where the Pope
might set up his combined spiritual and temporal
sovereignty so long his cherished but unavowed aim.
The first step was the overthrow of the
Gothic power in Italy by Justinian.
Italy and Rome now became a province of
the Eastern Empire.
The jurisdiction of the absent emperor was henceforward
shadowy and weak, but even that slight restraint
was impatiently borne, and Pope Gregory II began
to plot how to be rid of it
altogether.
The conflict between the Eastern and Western churches
on the subject of image worship was then
raging.
The Romans zealously maintained the cause of images.
The emperor with the Eastern church were ranged
in opposition.
Pope Gregory instigated the Romans to refuse the
tribute to the emperor.
The revolt was successful.
The imperial representative at Ravenna was slain, and
the last vestiges of the emperor's jurisdiction over
Roman Italy were annihilated.
It is worthy of note, by the way,
that the Romans, by their revolt against their
lawful emperor, put their necks under a yoke
that continued to gall them for twelve centuries.
They did not succeed in breaking it until
1870.
The Pope was now in sight of independent
temporal sovereignty, but he had not yet fully
achieved it.
Tidings out of the North troubled him.
The Longobards had crossed the Alps and were
already at Ravenna.
There was no power in the spiritual artillery
to arrest the victorious advance of these hardy
warriors.
In his extremity, Pope Zachary turned his eyes
to Pepin, who, from Grand Marshal, had become
king of France.
The Pope did not supplicate in vain.
Pepin first, and his son Charlemagne next, A
.D. 774, conquered the Longobards and endowed the
papal chair with all the cities and lands
in Italy which had been subject to the
jurisdiction of the Greek rulers.
The Pope was now a crowned monarch.
This was the third intervention by arms in
the Pope's behalf and the third Gothic power
which had fallen before him.
First, the Vandals established themselves in the diocese
proper of the Pope, occupying his predestined domain
and hindering his predestined development.
The arms of Justinian, under his general Belisarius,
swept them off.
Second, the Ostrogoths planted themselves in Italy, and
their near neighborhood overawed the Pope and prevented
his expansion.
They too were rooted out by the arms
of Justinian.
Last came, as we have said, the Longobards,
pressing onwards to the gates of Rome.
The sword of France drove them back.
Thus a field was kept clear on which
the Pope might develop both his spiritual and
temporal sovereignty.
And thus was fulfilled what Daniel, in chapter
7, verse 8, had foretold, that of the
ten horns or dynasties of the modern Europe,
three should be plucked up before the little
horn or papacy.
Their kingdoms and crowns were given to the
Pope, and it is probable that it was
in memory of these events that it became
customary for the Pope in the following centuries
to array himself in a tiara.
The pastor of the Tiber had become a
monarch with a triple crown.
Was the Pope now content?
He sat amid the princes and kings of
earth as their equal.
But to be simply their equal he held
to be an affront to his superhuman office
as God's vice-regent.
He aspired to plant his throne among the
stars and thus look down upon all the
dignities and princedoms of earth.
And to this dazzling height he at last
climbed up.
There arose in the eleventh century a Pope
of vast capability, of inflexible resolution, and towering
pride, Gregory VII Hildebrand.
He put before the world with a precision,
a boldness, and an argumentative force, never till
then brought to its support the claim to
be the Vicar of Christ.
This was the foundation stone on which he
rested his scheme of pontifical jurisdiction and grandeur.
As Christ's vicar he claimed to surpass all
earthly monarchs in glory and power as far
as the sun surpasses the moon in brightness.
He claimed in short to be God upon
the earth.
There followed a series of Popes who struggled
through two dreadful centuries of war and bloodshed
to convert Gregory's theory into fact.
The struggle was successful in the end, the
miter triumph over the empire.
The scheme of Gregory VII in all its
amplitude of jurisdiction and magnificence and, we may
add, in all its amplitude of despotism and
blasphemy was exhibited to the world in the
person and reign of Innocent III in the
thirteenth century.
The history of the world does not show
another achievement of equal magnitude.
The glory of the pharaohs, the state and
power of the kings of Babylon, the victories
and magnificence of the Caesars all pale before
this great conquest of the Popes.
Now had come the noon of the papacy.
But, as we have remarked elsewhere, the noon
of the Popedom was the midnight of the
world.
The career, both of Christ and of Antichrist,
was to end on a throne, though each
was to reach his destined elevation by a
very different road.
Not till we find them on their respective
thrones shall we see the parallelism perfected and
completed.
This we must reserve for a subsequent chapter.
Meanwhile, we pursue the parallelism through its successive
preparatory stages till it reaches this great climax.
This ends tape one of the Papacy as
the Antichrist by the Reverend Dr. J.
A.
Wiley, read by W.
J.
Mankaro, and produced by S.
Stillwater's Revival Books.
Thank you for listening, and we hope you
will go on to the next tape in
this series.
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