ce
more, the Christian fathers themselves fell into the same fancies, and
doctrine of mysteriousness in certain verbal numbers. For example, both
Barnabas and Clement of Alexandria speak of the virtue of the number 318
as being that of {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ETA~}{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER TAU~} the common abbreviation for Jesus crucified; and
partly ascribe to its magical virtue the victory which Abraham gained with
his 318 servants over the Canaanitish kings. Similarly Tertullian refers
the victory of Gideon, with his 300 men, to the circumstance of that being
the precise number of {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER TAU~}, the sign of the cross. In the name of Adam, St.
Cyprian discerned a mysterious numeral affinity to certain characteristics
in the life and history of the second Adam, Jesus Christ. Irenaeus notes
the remarkable number 888 of the name {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, Jesus. And in the
pseudo-Sibylline verses, written by Christians about the end, probably, of
the second century, and consequently not long after Irenaeus, we find
enigmas proposed of precisely the same characters as that in the text;--the
number being given, and the name required."--_Elliott's Horae Apoc._, vol.
iii., pp. 204-6.

The "number of the beast" is indicated in the text by the Greek letters
"{~GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER XI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}" which were severally used to represent the numbers 600, 60 and 6,
making 666. As the name of the beast is equivalent to this number, the
letters in it will represent numbers which amount to six hundred
threescore and six.

After the division of the Roman empire, the western kingdom adopted for
itself the name of the Latin kingdom; and its subdivisions were called the
Latin kingdoms. The church connected with those kingdoms was also
emphatically called the Latin church. Says Dr. More: "They Latinize
everything. Mass, prayers, hymns, litanies, canons, decretals, bulls, are
conceived in Latin. The Papal councils speak in Latin. Women pray in
Latin. The Scriptures are read in no other language under the Papacy than
Latin. In short, all things are Latin." The Council of Trent declared the
Latin Vulgate to be the only authentic version of the Scriptures; and
their doctors have preferred it to the Hebrew and G