Eden, which was an emblem of heaven, is mentioned in the Apocalypse, near the beginning and near the end of the book, (chs. ii. 7; xxii. 2.) Now, we are told expressly that this tree is “in the midst of Paradise.”  But we learn both from our Lord and the apostle Paul that Paradise signifies heaven:—­“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,” said Christ to the penitent thief.  “I was caught up into Paradise;” that is, “the third heaven,” said Paul.  Did Christ and Paul mean the visible, or the invisible church militant by the name Paradise?  But the tree of life flourishes there, and all the redeemed eat of its fruit.  They are where the tree is, the tree is in Paradise, and Paradise is heaven itself:  therefore we are warranted to conclude with certainty that New Jerusalem is a symbol of the church triumphant; and, consequently, that those parts of chapters twenty-one and twenty-two, which are of symbolic structure, are descriptive of the heavenly state.

THE ANTICHRIST.

This word does not occur in the Apocalypse, nor in any other book of the New Testament except the first and second epistles, by the apostle John.  There it is found in the singular and plural form. (1 John ii. 18, 22; iv. 3; ii. 7.) The apostles in their ministry had spoken frequently and familiarly to the disciples of this personage, as an enemy of God and man.  “Ye have heard that Antichrist shall come.”  “Remember ye not,” asks Paul, “that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things?” (2 Thess. ii. 5.) Paul blames his countrymen, the Hebrews, that they had need that one should teach them again which be the first principles of the oracles of God, (Heb. v. 12.) And it is just so now, in the case of most professing Christians, learned and illiterate; they yet need to be taught again what is meant by Antichrist.

All who are acquainted with the sentiments of the reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are aware that their conceptions of this enemy were vague and confused.  Persecuted as heretics and apostates from the only true church, the church of Rome, the reformers very naturally concluded that the Pope, or the church of which he is the visible head, was the Antichrist.  And this opinion is very generally held at the present day.

Mr. Faber, however, dissents from this popular notion, and with much confidence and plausibility broaches a new theory of his own.  His style is always forcible, and so perspicuous that he cannot be misunderstood.  In his “Dissertation on the Prophecies,” he lays down the following canon or rule for expositors:—­“Before a commentator can reasonably expect his own system to be adopted by others, he must show likewise that the expositions of his predecessors are erroneous in those points wherein he differs from them.”  To enforce this rule he adds,—­“It will be found to be the only way, in which there is even a probability of attaining to the truth.”