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/65

 necessarily affirm them to be, they are at any rate the homage of a great mind and of a brilliant genius to the Divinity of the Scripture prophecies. And to say nothing of other minor authors, or of the continental Protestants from Luther downwards, in our own time the subject has certainly been ably handled, although on wrong premises and false principles, by modern writers,—such as Forster, Faber, and Elliott. All these writers have laboured to show, according to their respective theories, that the Pope was either the Antichrist, or the Man of Sin, or the False Prophet of the Apocalypse, or that he was all three of these figurative characters combined. They have laboured to show that the Catholic Church of Christ fell at a very early period into a fatal apostacy from her primitive faith, that she defiled the revelation of God with a demonolatrous worship of saints and angels, an idolatrous worship of images and the Eucharist, and with a general practice, that fully warranted both them and their forefathers in quitting her communion, and in denouncing her to mankind as the Babylon of prophecy doomed to destruction, and as the most impious foe both of God and man.

On the other hand, Catholic writers, ever since the outbreak of the Protestant Revolu-