St. Paul’s prediction of the great apostasy, and the "man of sin, the son of perdition, who
opposes and exalts himself against all that is called God or that is worshiped; so that he sits in the
temple of God, setting himself forth as God."^292 sounds much more than any other passage like a
description of the papacy with its amazing claim to universal and infallible authority over the Church
of God. But the application becomes more than doubtful when we remember that the apostle
characterizes this antichristian apostasy as "the mystery of lawlessness," already at work in his day,
though restrained from open manifestation by some conservative power.^293 The papacy did not yet
exist at the time; and its besetting sin is not lawless freedom, but the very opposite.
If we would seek for Scripture authority against the sins and errors of popery, we must take
our stand on our Lord’s opposition to the traditions of the elders, which virtually set aside the word
of God; on Paul’s Epistles to the Galatians and Romans, where he defends Christian freedom against
legalistic bondage, and teaches the great doctrines of sin and grace, forgotten by Rome, and revived
by the Reformation; and on St. Peter’s protest against hierarchical presumption and pride.
There was in the early Church a general expectation that an Antichrist in the emphatic sense,
an incarnation of the antichristian principle, a pseudo-Christ of hell, a "world-deceiver" (as he is
called in the newly discovered "Teaching of the Apostles"^294 ), should appear, and lead astray many
Christians immediately before the second coming of Christ. The Reformers saw this Antichrist in
the Pope, and looked for his speedy destruction; but an experience of more than three hundred and
fifty years proves that in this expectation they were mistaken, and that the final Antichrist is still
in the future.
- As regards church history, it was as yet an unexplored field at the time of the Reformation;
but the Reformation itself roused the spirit of inquiry and independent, impartial research. The
documentary sources of the middle ages have only recently been made accessible on a large scale
by such collections as the Monumenta Germania. "The keys of Peter," says Dr. Pertz, the Protestant
editor of the Monumenta, "are still the keys of the middle ages." The greatest Protestant historians,
ecclesiastical and secular,—I need only mention Neander and Ranke,—agree in a more liberal view
of the papacy.^295
After the downfall of the old Roman Empire, the papacy was, with all its abuses and vices,
a necessary and wholesome training-school of the barbarian nations of Western and Northern
Europe, and educated them from a state of savage heathenism to that degree of Christian civilization
which they reached at the time of the Reformation. It was a check upon the despotism of rude force;
(^292) 2 Thess. 2:3-7. This is the passage quoted by the Westminster Confession against the Pope, chap. xxv. 6.
(^293) τὸ γὰρ μυστήριον ἤδη ἐνεργει̑ται τη̑ς ἀνομίας · μόνον ὁ κατέχων ἄρτι ἕως ἐκ μέσου γένηται. The Roman government was at first
(before the Neronian persecution of 64) a protector of Christianity, and more particularly of Paul, who could effectually appeal to his
Roman citizenship at Philippi, before the centurion at Jerusalem, and before Festus at Caesarea.
(^294) Ch. 16:4; κοσμοπλάνος, a very significant term, which unites the several marks of the Antichrist of John (2 John 7: ὁ πλάνος καὶ
ἀντίχριστος)of the Apocalypse (12:9: ὁ πλανω̑ν τὴν οἰκουμένην), and of Paul, since the Didaché connects the appearance of the
world-deceiver with the increase of lawlessness (ἀνομία, as in 2 Thess. 2:7). Comp. my monograph on the Didaché, pp. 77 and 214 sq.
(^295) Comp. especially Ranke’s classical work, Die römischen Päpste in den letzten vier Jahrhunderten, 8th edition, Leipzig, 1885, 3
vols. The first edition appeared 1834-36. Ranke has found a worthy successor in an English scholar, Dr. M. Creighton (professor of Church
history in Cambridge), the author of an equally impartial History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation, beginning with the
Great Schism, 1378. London and Boston, 1882 sqq. (so far 4 vols.). But the same period of the papacy is now being written with ample
learning and ability from the modem Roman point of view, by Dr. Ludwig Pastor (professor of Church history at Innsbruck) in his
Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, of which the first volume appeared at Freiburg-i.-B. 1886, and extends from
1305 to the election of Pius II. The author promises six volumes. He had the advantage of using the papal archives by the effectual favor
of Pope Leo XIII.