comfort your hearts and establish you in every good work and word.
"According to this rule, though many different interpretations have been given of the prophecy under consideration, that, in my opinion, will appear the best founded which makes it a prediction of the corruptions of Christianity, which began to be introduced into the Church in the apostle's days, and wrought secretly all the time the heathen magistrates persecuted the Christians, but which showed themselves more openly after the empire received the faith of Christ, a.d. 312, and, by a gradual progress, ended in the monstrous errors and usurpations of the bishops of Rome, when the restraining power of the emperors was taken out of the way by the incursions of the barbarous nations, and the breaking of the empire into the ten kingdoms prefigured by the ten horns of Daniel's fourth beast. Now, to be convinced of this, we need only compare the rise and progress of the papal tyranny with the descriptions of the man of sin, and of the mystery of iniquity, given in the writings of Daniel and Paul.