altars, and groves, and chapels of idols, and sacrifice swine’s flesh and unclean beasts,” and “leave their children uncircumcised.” At length he set up an idol, or in the words of the history, “the Abomination of Desolation upon the altar, and builded idol altars throughout the cities of Juda on every side.....And when they had rent in pieces the books of the law which they found, they burnt them with fire.” It is added, “Howbeit many in Israel were fully resolved and confirmed in themselves not to eat any unclean thing, wherefore they chose rather to die .... and there was very great wrath upon Israel[1].” Here we have presented to us some of the lineaments of Antichrist, who will be such, and worse than such, as Antiochus.
The history of the apostate emperor Julian, who lived between 300 and 400 years after Christ, furnishes another approximation to the predicted Antichrist, and an additional reason for thinking he will be one person, not a kingdom, power, or the like.
So again does the false prophet Mahomet, who propagated his imposture about 600 years after Christ came.
And there have been events in our childhood, and in the generation before us, which seem to give still additional probability to the notion, that Antichrist is one, not many men acting together.
What I have said upon this subject may be summed up as follows: that the coming of Christ will be immediately preceded by a very awful and unparalleled outbreak of evil, called in the text an apostasy, a falling away, in the midst of which a certain terrible man of sin and child of perdition, the special and singular enemy of Christ, or Antichrist, will appear; that this will be when revolutions prevail, and the present framework of Society breaks to pieces; that at present the Spirit which he will embody and represent, is kept under by “the powers that be,” but that on their dissolution, he will rise out of the bosom of them, and knit them together again in his own evil way, under his own rule, to the exclusion of the Church.
4. It would be out of place to say more than this at present.
