declares himself to be a god, that he sitteth in the seat of God in the midst of the seas, that he sets his heart as the heart of God. The papal man of sin sitteth as God in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God; he is worshipped by his cardinals on the day of his inauguration, proudly seated on the altar of the Lord; he styles himself the Lord God, another god upon earth, king of kings, and lord of lords; he places himself, as it was predicted his symbol the little Roman horn should do, by the side of the most High, affecting an equality with God; he sits in the seat of God, claiming to be his vice-gerent upon earth; he sits upon many waters, or rules by the influence of a tyrannical superstition over peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues-The prince is told by the Almighty, in a strain of lofty and contemptuous irony, that he is wiser than Daniel, that there is no secret which they can hide from him, The Pope is wont to boast of his infallibility, and therefore claims a degree of knowledge equal to inspiration-The prince amasses vast riches by his wisdom, and his traffic. No set of men have been so distinguished for their policy as the Popes, by which they gradually acquired the astonishing influence which they once possessed in Europe and they have been equally distinguished for their infamous spiritual trade in relics and indulgences, and in masses to deliver souls out of purgatory, by which an immense revenue accrued to them from

every country under their controul-The heart of the prince was lifted up because of his riches and power. The little papal horn had a mouth speaking great things'; and his insolence arose to such a pitch, that he would not have even kings to be familiar with [him, but boasted that he possessed the power of deposing both kings and emperors, bestriding like some huge colossus the globe itself in the plenitude of his power-The prince is said to be an anointed cherub. If a cherub mean one of the superior order of angels, the import of the expression will be, that the person typified by the prince should be a chief-bishop, an angel in the language of symbols denoting a bishop or principal minister of religion; nay, that he should be more than a chief-bishop, that he should be a prince-bishop, one that united in his own character the two functions of temporal and spiritual sovereignty. If, on the other hand, there be any truth in the opinion of some learned men, that a cherub is an hieroglyphical representation of God himself, and that the word signifies a resemblance of the mighty One*; then the person typified by the prince will be some one who holds himself forth as the resemblance and representative of the Deity. In either case, it is obvious how accurately the character of the Pope is delineated by the term an anointed cherub. He is a chief-angel, or a me

See Parkhurst's Hebrew Lexicon, Vox 27.

D 4

tropolitan

tropolitan in the church; he is an anointed chiefangel, or a prince-metropolitan; he claims to be the representative of the Deity: he is exhibited in paintings as God; and, when the Romanists impiously depict the Almighty, he appears as an old man with a triple crown on his head *.-The prince is further said to be an anointed cherub that spreadeth a veil. The word, here used by the prophet to describe the action of the anointed cherub, is the same as that which Isaiah uses, when he declares, that, in the last days, at the period of the restoration of Israel, God will destroy in his holy mountain the face of the covering that is cast over all the peoples, and the veil that is spread over all the nations †. The veil therefore, which God will then destroy, is the veil, which the anointed cherub had long been employed in spreading; that is to say, it is the veil of gross ignorance which the Popes had long and successfully been labouring to spread over the face of all men. Finding Scripture altogether against them in their controversies with the protestants, "the Popes," says Mosheim, permitted their champions to indulge themselves openly in reflections injurious to the dignity of the sacred writings, and, by an excess of blasphemy almost incredible (if the

* See the plate opposite p. 413 of the Breviarium Romanum Antverpiæ 1698. A full account of it is given in the Supplement to Burton's Essay on the numbers of Daniel and St. John p. 96, 97. † Isaiah xxv. 7.

passions

"passions of men did not render them capable "of the greatest enormities), to declare publicly, "that the edicts of the pontiffs, and the records "of oral tradition, were superior in point of authority to the express language of the Holy Scriptures." And, in perfect accordance with such impiety, the church of Rome, the mystic Tyre of which the Pope is the prince, obstinately affirms, as the same historian observes, that the "Holy Scriptures were not composed for the use "of the multitude, but only for that of their spi"ritual teachers; and, of consequence, has or"dered these divine records to be taken from the "people in all places, where it was allowed to exe"cute its imperious commands."—The prince was full of violence by reason of the multitude of his merchandise, and defiled his sanctuaries by the multitude of his iniquities and the iniquity of his traffic. The Pope is drunken with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, who protested against the scandalous spiritual trade which he was carrying on: and even his chief sanctuary, the church of St. Peter, was polluted by the same vile traffic, Leo having recourse to an unlimited sale of indulgences to raise money for the erection of it-Yet was the prince once perfect in his ways from the day that he was created; he was once in Eden the garden of God; he was once in the holy mountain of the Lord; and, the prophet adds, speaking as a Jew in allusion to`

the precious stones of Urim and Thummim on the breastplate of the high-priest, he once walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire *. The Popes fell by degrees from the purity and perfection of primitive Christianity to their present state of depravity and apostasy. Clemens, one of the earliest Bishops of Rome, is declared by an apostle to have his name written in the book of life. The Popes then were once in the holy mountain of God, in the inclosed garden of his Church, till iniquity was found in them, till their hearts were lifted up because of their beauty, till they corrupted their wisdom by reason of their brightness, till they wandered into the wilderness of ignorance and error and worldly-mindedness and heresy .After the prince had fallen from his perfection, he exhibited himself as one of the great ones of the earth. Every precious stone was his covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, the carbuncle, and gold. Instead of making melody in his heart to the Lord, he delighted himself in a pompous pageantry of worship, in the sound of tabrets and pipes. And the prophet adds, that

* "Such was thy eminent distinction, that thou wast, as it

were, placed in the temple of God on his holy mountain. "Thou wast, as it were, conversant among the twelve precious "stones on the breast-plate of the high-priest, which shone "like fire." Mr. Lowth in loc.

+ Rev. xvii. 1, 2, 3.