Page:Mahometanism in its relation to prophecy - or, an inquiry into the prophecies concerning antichrist, with some reference to their bearing on the events of the present day (IA mahometanisminit00philrich).pdf/39

 empire, and not to the kingdoms into which Alexander's empire was subdivided; and, after declaring this, he winds up with these remarkable words: "Let us therefore say, what hath been handed down to us by all ecclesiastical writers: that in the latter days of the world, when the Roman empire shall have been destroyed, ten kings shall arise, who shall parcel out the Roman territory between themselves: after which an eleventh king shall arise, small in his beginnings, who shall subdue three of those other kings." And here St. Jerome adds (what he could only have learnt from the same remarkable tradition, which he tells us prevailed in the early Church), that the three kings referred to, were " those of Egypt, Africa, and Ethiopia, or the interior of Asia." How remarkably this has been fulfilled we shall show more at large in a subsequent chapter. "'And behold,' says the Prophet, 'there were as it were the eyes of a man in that horn to show that he was not the devil or an evil spirit as some have thought, but a man, in whom Satan would dwell with his whole force;' and he had a mouth speaking great things:' for he is the same, as the Man of Sin, the Son of Perdition [spoken of by St. Paul in his second Epistle to the Thessaloniaus], who sitteth in the Temple of God, making himself as it were God." Thus