Note 8 — Chapter XXI · Antichrist.

As this dogma struggled on to its consummation and victory, it necessarily took the form of a triumph over the Cæsars, who were proclaiming themselves gods, and demanding worship as such. The writer of the second Epistle bearing Peter’s name saw those christians who yielded to such authority typified in Balaam, the erring prophet who was opposed by the angel;8 the writer of the Gospel of John saw the traitor Judas as the ‘son of perdition,’9 representing Jesus as praying that the rest of his disciples might be kept ‘out of the evil one;’ and many similar expressions disclose the fact that, towards the close of the second century, and throughout the third, the chief obstacle of those who were just beginning to be called ‘Christians’ was the temptation offered by Rome to the christians themselves to betray their sect. It was still a danger to name the very imperial gods who successively set themselves up to be worshipped at Rome, but the pointing of the phrases is unmistakable long before the last of the pagan emperors held the stirrup for the first christian Pontiff to mount his horse.