sheer away a whole limb from APNOYMEΝΟΣ.

After a manner sufficiently arbitrary, our speculatist, boldly no doubt, but perhaps not with the wisdom or understanding alluded to by the Apostle, lopped off bodily the whole last syllable of the word: and then, in the mutilated form APNOYME, he readily found the required number 666.

Calmet does not give the name of the individual, who struck out this exposition: and I am unable to supply the deficiency. I mention his gloss, not of course as being satisfactory, but as shewing the recognition of the true principle or rationale.

That principle, as we have seen, is no modern fancy: on the contrary, it has been far too much neglected and overlooked by modern commentators. Hence we have been saturated with a bootless coinage of fancied names or titles loose or indefinite or inapplicable: which are recommended by little more, than the circumstance of their numerical letters severally producing the fatal sum of 666.

The rationale, for which I contend, is as old as the time of Ireneus: and Archdeacon Wrangham shewed, at once, his judicious sobriety in adopting it, and his felicitous ingenuity in striking out the true name under its safe and satisfactory guidance.

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CHAPTER X.

GENERAL CONCLUSION.

THE moral, to be deduced from the whole inquiry, is sufficiently evident.

I. Those persons, who fix their hope of salvation upon the efficacy of the first advent of the Messiah, and who look forward to that second advent of the same divine Redeemer when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, are solemnly warned against the danger and the offensiveness of all apostasy from the soundness and simplicity of God's own revelation.

In these latter perilous times, such a warning is eminently appropriate.

At different periods of its existence, and under some one or other of its seven heads or polities, the Roman Empire, in strict accord

ance with its prophetically branded hieroglyphic, has been distinguished by the four apostasies of Paganism and Popery and Mohammedism and Infidelity.

From the occidentally extinct apostasy of Paganism, and from the universally declining apostasy of Mohammedism, there may be little danger in countries which have once been christianised but the case is very different with respect to the two apostasies of Popery and Infidelity.

:

The advocates of each of those schemes are abundantly active: and, however widely they differ in other respects, they concur in reviling the pure Christianity of the Gospel, either under the aspect of its being a damnable heresy, or under the aspect of its being altogether a palpable imposture.

II. In truth, we live during a period, when all the foundations of the earth may well be said to be out of course.

1. Even the most careless observer cannot refrain from noticing and acknowledging the

throughout all Europe, perhaps indeed well nigh throughout the whole world.

A feverish spirit of change purely for the sake of change, and a childish desire to pull down old institutions merely because they are old, united with a splendid contempt of our more sober forefathers and with a ludicrously overweening estimate of our own prodigious wisdom (if, verily, a decent man could be tempted to smile, when he is more rationally inclined to weep at such apish folly), are the leading operative characteristics of the present age.

In former times, the dawnings of such a spirit were, at least, marked by a strong sense of religious obligation. But, in its maturity, this spirit seems portentously determined, so far as unhallowed wishes can prevail, to shut God out of his own world, to refuse all recognition of his sovereign interference, and gracelessly to scoff at the very idea of a nationally and individually superintending Providence.

2. When the spirit of innovating Anarchy