"earth." This great city however can be nothing but the empire of Rome. Pagan Rome it cannot be in the days of the harlot; because pagan Rome was rather the learner than the teacher of idolatry. If then it be not pagan Rome, it must be papal Rome. This point is yet further evident from the manner, in which the angel speaks of the ten kings. He tells the prophet, that they had not received their kingdom as yet, but should receive power along with the beast in one apocalyptic season: and he adds, that they should give their power and strength to the revived beast; or, in other words, that they should be the secular beast's engines of persecution*, and should uphold with all their might the new system of idolatry, by the establisment of which the beast, that was not, ascended afresh out of the bottomless pit. The ten kings therefore, who were yet future in the days of St. John and who erected their thrones upon the ruins of the ancient empire, who first gave their power to the beast and who afterwards should hate the whore their former paramour, have manifestly been contemporary, not with pagan, but with papal, Rome: the whore therefore cannot be pagan but must be papal, Rome†.

Thus

"It was given unto him (the secular beast) to make war "with the saints, and to overcome them" (Rev. xiii. 7.). This he did, at the instigation indeed of the second beast, but through the instrumentality of his own ten horns.

The reader will find the whole character of the harlot excellently elucidated by Bp, Newton in his Dissertation upon

this

Thus it appears that this grand compound hieroglyphic of the woman and her beast represents the whole of the great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth; the woman symbolizing its spiritual empire, and her beast symbolizing its temporal empire: that is to say, this complete hieroglyphic exhibits to us at one view the two co-existing Roman empires, which the prophet had before described separately under the symbols of two friendly contemporary beasts, leagued together for the purpose of erecting both a civil and an ecclesiastical tyranny over the minds as well as over the bodies of men *

SECTION

this part of the Apocalypse, and the captious objection of the Bp. of Meaux to the present interpretation of it no less excellently answered by Bp. Hurd in his Introduction to the study of prophecy.

* Mr. Galloway thinks, that the great whore means the confederacy of the beast, the false prophet, and the kings of the earth. This opinion runs directly counter both to symbolical propriety, and to the plain declaration of St. John. A whore is the symbol of a degenerate and corrupt church, and is never used to typify a conspiracy: the seven-headed and ten-horned beast, upon which she is sitting, is manifestly the great Roman beast, which had already been described in the 13th chapter of the Revelation: and the Apostle explicitly tells us, that the whore is" that great city which reigneth over the kings of "the earth." Hence it is manifest, that she must be the Roman empire either pagan or papal. Consequently she cannot be a confederacy, as Mr. Galloway supposes, of Papists, Mohammedans, and Infidels. What is scarcely fair in a professed discussion of a prophecy, Mr. Galloway omits all that part of it which makes against his system. He quotes the 17th chapter

8

The history of the true Church during the period of the great Apostasy-The harvest and vintage of God's wrath.

After this account of the persecution of the witnesses, the war of the dragon, and the rise and tyranny of the two beasts, St. John proceeds to describe the state of the true Church during the same period of 1260 years; its great contest with the mystic Babylon at the time of the Reformation; and the judgments of God upon his enemies during the two grand periods comprized under the seventh trumpet, namely the harvest and the vintage of

God's wrath.

I. "And I looked, and lo, a Lamb stood on "the mount Zion, and with him an hundred "forty and four thousand, having his Father's

name written in their foreheads. And I heard

a voice from heaven, as the voice of many "waters, and as the voice of a great thunder; " and I heard the voice of harpers harping with "their harps. And they sung as it were a new

66

chapter of the Revelation, which fully describes the whore and her beast, only as far as the 6th Verse. See Comment, p. 276,

song

song before the throne, and before the four "beasts, and the elders; and no man could learn "that song, but the hundred and forty and four

66

thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. "These are they, which were not defiled with

women, for they are virgins: these are they "which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth: "these were redeemed from among men, being "the first fruits unto God, and to the Lamb. "And in their mouth was found no guile: for "they are without fault before the throne of "God."

Hitherto we have beheld only the gloomy side of the affairs of the Church, the troubles and persecutions which she experienced from the dragon and the two beasts; we are now invited to contemplate that paradox, which real Christianity can alone explain. The 144,000, here mentioned, are the spiritual offspring of the twofold Church: and their mystic number is produced by multiplying 12 into 12, in allusion to the twelve patriarchs and the twelve apostles; and by again multiplying the square of 12 or 144 into 1000, in order to describe the faithful as constituting an exceeding great multitude*. These 144,000 are the immediate successors of the 144,000 sealed servants of Godt, who bore their testimony

* See my remarks on this subject in Chap. x. Sect. 1. § II. 1. + They are said to have been scaled in the age of Constantine, to separate them, as I have already observed, from the many that then began to "cleave to them with flatteries." Dan. xi. 34.

to

to the truths of the Gospel in the days of Paganism; and who "came out of great tribu"lation," to enjoy a short respite from their troubles in the tranquil age of Constantine *. They are the same in short as the two witnesses, or the line of faithful believers, whom God supported by the invisible though powerful agency of his, Spirit through the whole term of the reign of the beasts. In the particular history of the Apostasy itself, they are described as oppressed and prophesying in sackcloth: here they are represented in a state of exultation and triumph, as rejoicing in that "joy which no man taketh from them." The two accounts therefore, when put together, exhibit them to us, like the primitive Christians, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing," as "rejoicing,

in tribulation," and as even " exceeding joyful "in tribulation." That this exultation is purely of a spiritual nature, and that it subsists along with great temporal adversity, is evident both from the preceding external history of the witnesses, and from the intimations which are given even in the present chapter itself that the Church is still in a suffering state notwithstanding her triumphant spiritual joy in the Lamb †.

The 144,000 appeared to the Apostle as standing on the mount Zion, or in the true Church, because they constituted the persecuted Church in the wilderness ‡ : and, as the followers of the beast

• Rev. vii. † See Rev. xiv. 12, 13.

Rev. xii. 6, 14.

have