I can neither admit the justness of his rule, nor the conclusiveness of his reason; for by its adoption, “of making many books there would be no end; and the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”  To deduce the truth from any portion of God’s word, it is by no means necessary that the expositor shall undertake the Herculean task of refuting all the heresies and vagaries which “men of corrupt minds” have pretended or attempted to wring out of it.  But as Mr. Faber is not to be reckoned in this category, I shall pay him so much deserved respect as to apply to himself his own rule in some following particulars:—­

By a formal syllogism Mr. Faber proposes to overthrow the generally received interpretation of the term Antichrist, that it means, the Papacy, or, the Church of Rome.  Thus he reasons:—­“He is Antichrist that denieth the Father and the Son:  but the Church of Rome never denied either the Father or the Son:  therefore the church of Rome cannot be the Antichrist intended by St. John.”  Now, in this argument, which seems to be so clear and conclusive, there is a latent sophism, an assumption contrary to the Scriptures.  The false assumption is, that the word denieth is univocal; that is, that it has in the Bible, and on this doctrinal point in particular, only one sense; whereas this is not the case.  The Church of Rome does indeed “profess to know” the Father and the Son, but “in works denies” both, (1 Tim. v. 8; Tit. i. 16.) Therefore Mr. Faber’s conclusion is not sustained by his premises, and the Church of Rome might be the Antichrist for any thing that his syllogism says to the contrary.

Mr. Faber imagined that “Republican France,—­infidel and atheistical France,”—­was the Antichrist; and he labored with much ingenuity to sustain his position by applying to revolutionary France the latter part of the eleventh chapter of Daniel, together with the prophecies of Paul, Peter and Jude.  I presume that most divines and intelligent Christians are long since convinced, by the developments of Providence, that he was mistaken.  The commotions of the French Revolution and the military achievements of the first Napoleon, however important to peninsular Europe, were on much too limited a scale to correspond with the magnitude and duration of the great Antichrist’s achievements.  They were, however, owing to their proximity to Britain and their threatening aspect, of sufficient importance to excite the alarm and rouse the political antipathies of the Vicar of Stockton upon Tees!  Mr. Faber’s Antichrist is an “infidel king, wilful king, an atheistical king, a professed atheist,” of short duration, and his influence of limited geographical extent.  He is not in most of these features the Antichrist of prophecy, whose baleful influence is co-extensive with Christendom, and whose duration is to be 1260 years.  Mr. Faber’s erudition is to be respected, his imagination admired, but his political feelings to be lamented.  Indeed, his very ecclesiastical title of office,—­“Vicar,” is itself partly indicative and symbolical of the prophetic Antichrist.