--“Under the stress of the Protestant attack there arose new methods on the papal side, and their authors were the Spanish Jesuits, Ribeira (0b. 1591) and Alcasar (0b. 1614). (Encyclopaedia Britannica. 11th ed. Vol. 23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. “Revelation, Book of,” 213.) --“Accordingly, towards the close of the century of the Reformation, two of her most learned doctors set themselves to the task, each endeavoring by different means to accomplish the same end, namely, that of diverting men’s minds from perceiving the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Antichrist in the papal system. The Jesuit Alcasar devoted himself to bring into prominence the Preterist method of interpretation, which we have already briefly noticed, and thus endeavoured to show that the prophecies of Antichrist were fulfilled before the Popes ever ruled at Rome, and therefore could not apply to the Papacy. On the other hand the Jesuit Ribera tried to set aside the application of these prophecies to the Papal Power by bringing out Futurist system, which asserts that these prophecies refer properly not to the career of the Papacy, but to that of some future supernatural individual, who is yet to appear, and to continue in power for three and a half years.” (Joseph Tanner, Daniel and the Revelation (London, 1898), pp. 16–17.) ​ --"so great a hold did the conviction that the Papacy was the Antichrist gain upon the minds of men, that Rome at last saw she must bestir herself, and try, by putting forth other systems of interpretation, to counteract the identification of the Papacy with the Antichrist.” (H. Grattan Guinness, Romanism and the Reformation from the Standpoint of Prophecy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887), p. 268.) --“At length, as the century was advancing to a close, two stout Jesuits took up the gauntlet, and published their respective, but quite counter, opinions on the Apocalyptic subject:—the one Ribera, a Jesuit priest of Salamanca, who about A.D. 1585 published an Apocalyptic Commentary, which was on the grand points of Babylon and Antichrist what we now call the futurist scheme; the other Alcazar, also a Spanish Jesuit, but of Seville, whose scheme was on main points what may be called that of the wholly preterists. Either suited the great object of the writers nearly equally well; viz., that of setting aside all application of the prophecies of Antichrist from the existing Church of Rome: the one by making the prophecy stop short of Papal Rome; the other by making it overleap almost altogether the immense interval of time (that of the Popedom’s dominancy inclusive) which had elapsed since the prophecy was given.” (Edward Bishop Elliott, Horae Apocalypticae; or, A Commentary on the Apocalypse, Critical and Historical; Including Also an Examination of the Chief Prophecies of Daniel, 5th ed., vol. 4 (London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1862), 480.)