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arguments brought in support of it inconclusive; I think his present avowed opinion yet more untenable, and his arguments yet more inconclusive.

The

The first question is, whether the Dictatorship be that head of the beast which received its deathstroke from a sword Nothing that the Apostle says gives the least warrant for such a notion. "Five", says he, "are fallen". What five are fallen, we are all agreed; Kings, Consuls, Decemvirs, Military tribunes, and Dictators. extinction of all these heads the prophet describes by one word fallen; as if he considered them as so many exuvia of the beast, which he successively shed without any very striking, or at least without any very peculiarly striking, occurrence that marked the fall of any one of them. Five are fallen. He does not say, Four are fallen, and one is slain by the sword: but simply, Five are fallen. Hence the probability is, that the slain head is not any one of the five, which St. John indiscriminately represents as having fallen at the time when he wrote. Accordingly every commentator, that I have met with before Mr. Whitaker, takes it for granted as a thing of course, that, whatever head may have been slain with the sword, it certainly can be none of the five first heads, because they are alike described as having simply fallen.

But how does Mr. Whitaker prove the Dictatorship to be the slain bead? I will give his own words. "Which then of the previous heads has been "wounded to death? For the merely having fallen "will not come up to the description by which "the fate of this is distinguished from that of the "other heads. The kings were only expelled, the

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"consuls were superseded. Two only of the "decemvirs were put to death, and neither of them, "as it appears, by the sword; the military tribunes "were only laid aside; but the last perpetual "Dictator was wounded to death by the sword, and " a vote of the senate passed, declaring that the "offices should never be revived-The dictator, "which received the wound by the sword, was a perpetual dictator and pontifex maximus— Augustulus, in whom the imperial line ceased, "was only deposed, not put to death, by Odoacer”*. From this statement I concluded (and will the reader blame me?), that Mr. Whitaker supposed St. John to have represented the dictatorial bead as wounded to death by the sword, because the individual Julius Cesar was slain by the sword of assassins: and I observed, that I could not comprehend how a wound of that nature could be healed by the rise of the Papacy; for, in the prophecy," the self-same wound, that is inflicted, is healed. If, in making this remark, I go near to represent Mr. Whitaker as "supposing that Julius Cesar was to rise again "and become pope't; the blame rests with the faultiness of bis system, not with the inference which may be drawn from my remark." But", says Mr. Whitaker, "Mr. Faber's next ground of censure is "his supposition" (supposition only!) "that I "conceive the murder of an individual only to be "meant by the death of an bead, whereas I had spoken of the recovery of the dictatorial and pontificial government of Rome in one person, "which had been separated by the assassination of

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* Comment. p. 214, 215. ↑ Letter, p. 28.

"Fulins

Julius Cesar, when the senate too passed a decrèe "that the office of dictator should never be revived”*. What Mr. Whitaker intends by this passage I cannot clearly discover. Does he mean to say, that the dictatorial bead is described as being slain by a sword, because the individual Julius Cesar was assassinated, or because the office of dictator was suppressed by a decree of the senate? If the first; my censure was just, and I can comprehend now as little as I could before, how the wound of the individual Cesar could be healed by the rise of the Papacy: if the second; I cannot see why the dictatorial bead should be said to be slain by a sword, because the senate suppressed the dictatorship. But the truth is, Mr. Whitaker has most singularly confounded the murder of a mere individual with the slaying of a form of government by the sword. Whatever may be the precise import of the phrase, of this at least we may be sure, that the killing of a form of government can never mean the killing of a man. Bp. Newton supposes that it was the sixth bead that was slain by the sword, on the ground that the sixth or imperial form of government experienced a violent political death from the Gothic sword. I think his Lordship mistaken, both because he appears to me not to have formed a right idea in the abstract of what is meant by killing a beast, and because his interpretation will not hold good even upon his own principles; for the imperial bead was not slain in the sense in which he supposes it to be slain by the gothic sword, but continued to exist many ages after in the city whither it had been translated by

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Constantine more than a century before its imagined éxtinction. Yet I do not object to his interpretation on the same grounds that I do to Mr. Whitaker's. Whether the man Augustulus bad been slain by the sword, or bad not been slain by the sword, would not have made the Bishop's system one jot either better or worse: for, as his Lordship rightly judged, the death of a head had nothing to do with the death of a man. The reader will probably have anticipated me in observing Mr. Whitaker's extreme inconsistency and repugnancy to St. John in his manner of stating one important part of the question. He takes it for granted, that the head slain by the sword must have been so slain before the days of the Apostle. Hence he asks, "Which of the previous heads had been wounded " to death? For the merely having fallen will not come up to the description, by which the fate "of this is distinguished from that of the other "heads"*. Nothing can be more just than this last remark; and, as I have already stated, it is one reason among others why I must flatly deny the dictatorship to be the slain head. The merely having fallen does not come up to the idea of being slain by a sword: but the apostle represents the five first beads, one of which was the dictatorship, as merely having fallen: therefore not one of those five beads can be the head slain by the sword. How often must I be compelled to repeat, what Mr. Whitaker seems most unaccountably to have overlooked; Five are fallen; not Four are fallen and one is slain by the sword; but Five are fallen?

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* Comment. p. 214.

I quite

I quite agree with Mr. Whitaker in thinking, that the phrase which was, is not, and yet is, denotes the existence of the beast previous to his being mortally wounded, his non-existence while he lay dead in consequence of the wound inflicted upon one of his beads, and his re-existence when that deadly wound was bealed*: but, by his restricting the phrase (although he has the authority of Mr. Mede for so restricting it) to the days of the Apostle, he completely confutes himself, even independent of every thing that has already been said. It is not declared restrictively, that only the slain head ceased to be, but that the beast himself ceased to bet. But how did the Roman beast cease to be, in any sense that the words are capable of, by the mere falling of the dictatorial bead? Is Mr. Whitaker prepared to say, that the beast was not in the days of St. John? And, if he can not say this, what better proof can we have that he is quite mistaken in restricting the phrase which was, is not, and yet is, to the age of the Apostle? I am aware, that he wishes us to understand the phrase as meaning nothing more than that the beast had ceased to exist under his dictatorial bead when the apostle wrote; but I can discover nothing either in the text or in the context

* See my Dissert. Vol. II. p. 160, 161, 162.

Rev. xvii. 8.

-the beast, that was, and is not, and yet is".

Letter, p. 28.-Comment. p. 214,

that

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