2;
iv. 3; ii. 7.) The apostles in their ministry had spoken frequently and
familiarly to the disciples of this personage, as an enemy of God and
man. "Ye _have heard_ that Antichrist shall come." "Remember ye not,"
asks Paul, "that, when I was yet with you, I _told you_ these things?"
(2 Thess. ii. 5.) Paul blames his countrymen, the Hebrews, that they had
need that one should teach them again which be the first principles of
the oracles of God, (Heb. v. 12.) And it is just so now, in the case of
most professing Christians, learned and illiterate; they yet need to be
taught again what is meant by Antichrist.

All who are acquainted with the sentiments of the reformers of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are aware that their conceptions of
this enemy were vague and confused. Persecuted as heretics and apostates
from the only true church, the church of Rome, the reformers very
naturally concluded that the Pope, or the church of which he is the
visible head, was the Antichrist. And this opinion is very generally
held at the present day.

Mr. Faber, however, dissents from this popular notion, and with much
confidence and plausibility broaches a new theory of his own. His style
is always forcible, and so perspicuous that he cannot be misunderstood.
In his "Dissertation on the Prophecies," he lays down the following
canon or rule for expositors:--"Before a commentator can reasonably
expect his own system to be adopted by others, he must show likewise
that the expositions of his predecessors are erroneous in those points
wherein he differs from them." To enforce this rule he adds,--"It will
be found to be the only way, in which there is even a probability of
attaining to the truth." 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 te