comfort your hearts and establish you in every good work and word.
"Upon the whole, I think every impartial person who attentively considers the foregoing sketch must be sensible that, in the bishops of Rome, all the characters and actions ascribed by Daniel to the little horn, and by Paul to the man of sin and the lawless one, are clearly united. For, according to the strong workings of Satan, with all power, and signs, and miracles of falsehood, they have opposed Christ, and exalted themselves above all that is called god, or an object of worship; and have long sat in the temple of God, as God, showing themselves that they are God: that is, they exercise the power and prerogatives of God. And seeing, in the acquisition and exercise of their spiritual tyranny, they have trampled upon all laws, human and Divine; and have encouraged their votaries in the most enormous acts of wickedness; the Spirit of God has, with the greatest propriety, given them the appellations of the man of sin, the son of perdition, and the lawless one. Farther, as it is said the man of sin was to be revealed in his season, there can be little doubt that the dark ages, in which all learning was overturned by the irruption of the northern barbarians, were the season allotted to the man of sin for revealing himself. Accordingly, we know that in these ages the corruptions of Christianity and the usurpations of the clergy were carried to the greatest height. In short, the annals of the world cannot produce persons and events to which the things written in this passage can be applied with so much fitness as to the bishops of Rome. Why then should we be in any doubt concerning the interpretation and application of this famous prophecy?