Chapter XI. Second Section of the Seventh Seal

1.—“Their Days of the Prophecy”

In the sixth verse of the chapter are the words, ἐν ἡμεραις αυτων της προφητειας, about which “the recent editors” are at variance with their predecessors. They recommend that it be changed, and translated, “during the days of their prophesying.” But, with all due respect to their recencies, I suggest that the words be let alone, and translated, “in their days of the prophecy.”

The whole apocalypse is “the prophecy;” for so it is termed in chap. i. 3. But the days in which the witnesses stand bearing testimony against “the God of the Earth,” do not extend through all the days of the prophecy. The God of the earth was undeveloped in all those days of the prophecy extending from John’s location in Patmos to the birth of the Catholic Woman’s Man-child. In all this time, therefore, the witnesses could not stand before him; and, consequently, these years were no part of “their days.” And from the finishing of their testimony to their resurrection and ascension, was over two hundred years. These, therefore, were no part of “their days,” unless a man can be said to stand in the presence of another, and testify against him while he is dead. It must be evident, then, that the days of the prophecy are of much longer measure than the days of the witnessing against the Antichrist. These days are the 1260, and therefore they are emphatically and specially “their days”—the portion of time appropriated to the One Body and its Helper, to contend earnestly for the “one Lord, one faith, and one immersion;” and to testify against the Vice-Christ and his idolatrous institutions.

And these “their days” neither begin nor end with the days of the prophecy. They began, as I have shown, in the three years’ epoch of A. D. 312-316, and would consequently end A. D. 1572-76; p. 642 because 1260+316=1576. Thus, their sackcloth-witnessing had its beginning and ending, long before the deliverance of the Holy City from its “forty and two months” of subjection to the Gentile governments. The Holy City still exists under Protestant ascendancy, in the lowest stratum of the abyss—trampled in the dust; but it is nowhere to be found under Catholic ascendancy, witnessing against the Antichrist, and tormenting him and his adherents with their testimony. In all catholic countries the saints have been “prevailed against;” and, though existing in Britain and America to a very limited extent, their witnessing for the truth as originally proclaimed by the apostles, and their testifying against “the spirituals of the wickedness in” protestant and catholic “high places,” and their gospel-nullifying traditions and institutions, command but little attention. Sceptical indifference, and profane contempt for “the testimony of Jesus Christ,” are the characteristic of the times in which we live The Holy City has but few citizens left, whose voice is overpowered in the unintelligible babble and confusion of the Great City. They testify, nevertheless, as this exposition of the apocalypse evinces; but their witnessing is not “in sackcloth.” Since their ascension, their enemies have been restrained from the use of whips, and chains, and fire, and faggot. These, which used to be the most powerful arguments against which they had to contend, have been wrested from their destroyers by “the Earth;” so that now they can advocate the truth, and testify against the apostasy, none daring, however willing, to make them afraid.

Now, the “forty and two months,” measure of the Holy City is bounded by two events—the giving of the saints into the hand of the Little Horn of the West, for its beginning; and the resurrection, for its ending: so also, the days of its sackcloth-witnessing are placed between the flight of the Woman, for their commencement; and the finishing of her testimony, for their termination. We find this ending indicated in the seventh verse, as, “when they may have finished their testimony, the beast which ascendeth out of the abyss will make war with them, and overcome them, and put them to death.” The beast herein referred to, is that which John saw arise, and describes in chap. xiii. 1-7. As John saw it arise, it was not extant in his day, but appeared afterwards. It was a new development of powers upon the same territory as that upon which Daniel beheld his fourth beast. It was the ten horns and little horn of this in middle-age manifestation—the Civil and Ecclesiastical Polity of the Gentiles who trampled the Holy City.

p. 643 The Mouth of this beast represents the same power as the Eyes and Mouth of Daniel’s Little Horn. John says, that the beast’s Mouth made war with the saints, and overcame them; and Daniel says, “the little horn made war upon the saints, and prevailed against them:” by which, John and Daniel identified the horn and mouth as symbolical of the same power.

With such testimony as this before us, we ought to find 1260 years after the Donatist trials in the presence of the Woman’s Imperial Man-child, a people specially obnoxious to the ecclesiastical and civil authorities of the nations with whom they were at war, for the purpose of putting them to silence, and suppressing their principles, by the advocacy of which they were “tormented.” We ought to find, too, that the conflict of this people with the powers was not only unsuccessful, but that it resulted in the death of the cause of civil and religious freedom, and the rights of man, in all the countries of the beast. We are however, not to suppose that they were not made war upon before the end of the 1260 years; I have shown before that there were frequent wars, in which they smote the earth with plagues as often as they willed. But, this at the end of “their days of the prophecy” was a special war, resulting as no previous wars had hitherto done, namely, in the putting of them to death in the symbolic sense of the prophecy.

This war was to supervene upon their finishing their testimony—ὁταν τελεσωσι, “when they may have finished their testimony” for Jesus Christ, and against the Antichrist. The testimony concerning the faith was silenced first; afterwards, that against the Antichrist, and for civil and religious freedom. “The Earth” maintained the conflict longest, having been energized by the accession of new life from the antipapal rebellion of the Lutherans and Calvinists. These not being of the Holy City, but advocates of a reformed national system of religion, were prepared to draw the sword against the papal powers with potent, though not universally subversive results. After a lapse of twelve hundred years, these sturdy combatants arose to disturb the peace, in which the worshippers of the Roman God were glorifying themselves greatly. They fought valiantly, but did not conquer: and, though in Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and Britain, they established governments independent of “the God of the earth;” yet, in all the Breadth of the Great City—επι της πλατειας πολεως της μεγαλης, which is allegorically styled Sodom and Egypt,—in Rome, Italy, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, the Austrian states and Poland, “the witnesses were overcome and put to death.”

p. 644 In the year 1530, the witnesses had been entirely employed in paving the way for union with the German reformers. Those of them residing in the South of France, did not encounter the enemy with their usual fortitude. They shrunk from the cross, and fell into the practice of feigning acquiescence with the national forms of worship. In the middle of this century also those of them residing in Calabria, coalesced with the presbyterian church under the pastoral care of the celebrated John Calvin and Theodore Beza at Geneva. The consequence of this was, that several presbyterian ministers of their school settled among the witnesses of Calabria, as pastors of their churches. This was their situation in A. D. 1560. The Calvinists and Lutherans, both princes and divines, claimed fellowship with them; and the claim was unscripturally allowed: for, while Swiss and German Protestantism in those days, was a powerful antagonism to popery, it had no affinity in faith and practice to the ancient apostolic religion, of the primitive age. It is an unbaptized speculation, which no true Christadelphian, or Brother of Christ, can fellowship without incurring the crime of apostasy from the faith. This was the position of the witnessing prophets in A.D. 1576. “Their testimony,” with which for 1260 years they had tormented their adversaries, “was finished.” “Their days of prophecy” were now expired. They could no longer teach others “the great salvation” by which they might escape the guilt and condemnation of sin unto eternal life in the kingdom of the Deity; and as for protesting against “the God of the earth,” the Lutheran and Calvinistic antipapists, with whom they had fraternized, were effective enough for that.

Thus, then, having finished their testimony, the impending sentence of conquest and death was about to burst upon them in a dreadful storm of massacre and desolation. Exactly 1260 years from the birth of the Imperial Man-Child of Sin (who, they testified had no more to do with the church, than christians with kings, or their bishops with courts); that is, in the year 1572, the first of a terminal epoch of four years, a dreadful calamity befel them in Paris and other cities of France. This was the celebrated papal massacre of “St. Bartholomew’s Day,” as the 24th of August is termed by the worshippers of the saint. The murderers ravaged the whole city, and in three days butchered above ten thousand lords, gentlemen, presidents, and people of all ranks. From Paris the massacre spread throughout the whole of France. According to Thuanus, 30,000 persons were destroyed in this massacre; or, as others affirm, 100,000. This was a notable beginning of that war p. 645 which “the beast ascending out of the abyss” was to wage against them. It burst forth upon them most unexpectedly in that section of the πλατεια, or breadth, of the Great City, styled in the thirteenth verse, το δεκατον, the tenth—one of the Ten-Horn-Kingdoms of the Beast.

I must leave to history the narration of the details of the events of this war between the beast and the witnesses. It will be sufficient to remark that, in the course of it, Richelieu, the cardinal premier of France, was convinced that either the antipapists must be admitted to the full enjoyment of unlimited liberty, and of all the privileges of the state, uncontrolled by catholics, and even at the hazard of the permanent establishment of the catholic faith, or that they must be totally subdued. He preferred the latter; and to accomplish it, turned the whole power of France against them; and succeeded in totally disarming them, leaving them, however, in possession of considerable privileges, civil and religious, guaranteed to them by the Edict of Nantes.

In this Tenth of the Papal Breadth they still amounted to over 1,500,000; many of them wealthy merchants, skilful manufacturers, able sailors and soldiers. The question with the Antichrist and his “eldest son” Louis XIV., was, should such a sect be permitted to exist; and whether their power was not now able to subdue it, and extirpate the heresy? The king believed that God had raised him up and prospered him for this very thing. The season seemed to them favorable. There was none of the European States that could protect them. England was weakened by its own discontents. The Emperor of the West was engaged in a war with Turkey. Spain was unable to contend with France. Other states were awed by her power, and however willing to support the Huguenots, dared not to provoke so mighty and unrelenting a foe as the GRAND MONARQUE. He was therefore free to essay their conversion to Romish idolatry, or to exterminate them from his kingdom. He accordingly began this great work of putting to death the witnesses by revoking the Edict of Nantes granted by Henry IV., April 1, 1599. The revocation was decreed October 23, 1685. It provided, that all their churches should be forthwith demolished; that there should be no meeting for religious worship in any place, on any pretence; that every kind of religious exercise in the houses or castles of nobility or gentry should be punished with death and confiscation of property; that all noncatholic ministers should leave the kingdom in fifteen days, or embrace the catholic religion; that all their schools should be absolutely shut up; that their children p. 646 should be “baptized” by the curates of the parish in which the parents resided, on pain of 500 livres; and that every one attempting to leave the kingdom should be condemned to the galleys or death: but, that all who were not decided, or not prepared to declare themselves, until it pleased God to enlighten them, might remain where they resided, continue their trades or arts, and enjoy their property undisturbed, provided they refrained from all exercise of their religion, and from every kind of meeting on that account. This was putting them to silence, or killing them as witnesses against Romish idolatry. So long as their mouths were closed they were unable to testify; so that as witnesses they were literally dead, though not therefore buried.

The execution of this decree was terrible, and its consequences most deplorable. Many were cruelly tortured and put to death; many were imprisoned or sent to the galleys; dragoons, “the basest troops of the kingdom, fellows that would stick at nothing,” were quartered upon them, who insulted and pillaged them, in order to force them to change their religion. Terror and dread marched before them, and the cruelties of 1572 were enacted over again. “Die or be catholics!” was the war-cry of these savages who executed the behests of the Little Horn. M. Claude, in his “Short Account,” published in 1686, says: “Amidst a thousand hideous lamentations and horrid blasphemies, they hung men and women by the hair of their heads, or by the feet, to the roofs of their chambers; or to the racks in the chimneys, and their smoked them with wisps of wet hay, till they were no longer able to bear it; and when they took them down, if they would not sign, they immediately hung them up again. They plucked off the hair of their heads and beards with pincers, till they left none remaining.

“They threw them on great fires kindled on purpose, and did not pull them out till they were half roasted. They plunged them again and again into wells, from whence they would not take them up till they had promised to renounce their religion. They bound them as they do criminals put to the rack, and in this posture, with a funnel poured wine down their throats, till the fumes of it depriving them of reason, they were made to say they were catholics. They stripped them naked, and after having offered them a thousand indignities, they stuck them all over with pins. They lanced them with penknives, and sometimes with red hot pincers took them by the nose, and so dragged them about the room till they promised to turn catholics. They bastinadoed them most cruelly, and then dragged them thus bruised to the churches, where this forced appearance p. 647 was accounted abjuration. They kept them from sleeping seven or eight days together; they tormented them in a thousand ways. They tied them to bed posts, and ravished their wives and daughters before their eyes. They plucked off the nails from the fingers and toes of some; and blew both men and women up with bellows till they were ready to burst.”

Such were the infamous dragoonings by which the Earth was subdued and silenced by the beast of the abyss. A million of them are said to have emigrated into other countries; and to have carried with them two hundred millions of money, besides their skill in arts and manufactures. The flame was smothered, but the embers remained, yet again to be fanned into a terrible and consuming conflagration. But for the present they were prostrated, as “corpses upon the breadth of the Great City spiritually styled Sodom and Egypt.”

Such, then, was the war by which they were overcome and put to death. It continued with intermissions during a period of a hundred and thirteen years from A.D. 1572. But although their testimony was silenced, and they were as dead “among the peoples, and tribes, and tongues, and nations,” upon which the Great Harlot sits in reeling instability, “drunk with the blood of the saints AND with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus”—their inanimate polities did not suffer dissolution. Their corpses remained entire. Communities of them still were seen in “the breadth of the Great City” awaiting “spirit of life from the Deity” to break in upon them for their resuscitation.

2.—Rome Rejoices at their Slaughter

The massacre with which they were overwhelmed at the outbreak of the war against them in 1572, and which was then supposed to have entirely ruined them, when known in Rome was a cause of great joy to their enemies in that city. When the letters of the Pope’s legate residing at the Court of Charles IX., were read in the assembly of the cardinals, by which he assured the Pope that all was transacted by the express will and command of the French king, it was immediately decreed that the pope should march with his cardinals to the church of St. Mark, and in the most solemn manner give thanks to God for so great a blessing conferred on the See of Rome and the “Christian World;” and that on the Monday after, solemn mass should be celebrated in the church of p. 648 Minerva, at which Gregory XIII., and the cardinals were present: and that a jubilee should be published throughout the whole of “Christendom,” and the cause of it declared to be, to return thanks to God for the extirpation of the enemies of the truth and the church in France. In the evening, the cannon of St. Angelo were fired to testify the public joy; the whole city illuminated with bonfires; and no one sign of rejoicing omitted that was usually made for the greatest victories obtained in favor of the Roman church. In addition to this medals were struck commemorative of the joyous event. A copy of it is before me in Elliott’s work, taken from Sir W. Cockburn’s work on the Massacre. It is about two inches and five eighths diameter. On one face is the bust of the Roman deity, Gregory XIII.; and on the obverse a winged angel with an uplifted cross in the left hand, and a drawn two edged sword in the right, symbolizing the papal destroyers of “the earth” in France. Men, women, and children are before the angel dead, dying, falling, and about to fall by his sword; while in the background is a woman, with uplifted arms supporting a mantle, and looking complacently upon the massacre, symbolizing the Catholic church. On the margin is the legend, “Ugonottorum Strages, 1572”—The Massacre of the Hugonots, 1572. These medals were for free distribution to one another commemorative of the death blow inflicted upon the hitherto unconquered enemies of the catholic idolatry. Thus was fulfilled the tenth verse of this eleventh chapter, saying, “They that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them and make merry, and shall send gifts (of medals) one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt upon the earth.”

The conquest and symbolic death of the witnessing prophets, then, was illustrated by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Oct. 23, A. D. 1685. This was the conviction of the whole antipapal world at the time. The poor sufferers in France especially who survived, were of opinion that these unequalled persecutions were the slaying of the witnesses; and they were, therefore, in high expectation looking for the end of the “three days and a half,” during which they were to continue politically dead, though not buried, or excluded from the observation of their merciless destroyers. Peter Jurieu, a Hugonot pastor, whose work, entitled, “The Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies,” was published in English two years after the Revocation, 178 years ago, treating on the Resurrection of the Witnesses; the Fall of the Tenth of the p. 649 City; and so forth, says: “It is a truth which must be held as certain (being one of the keys of the Revelation) that the City, the Great City, signifies, in this book, not Rome alone, but Rome in conjunction with its empire; the name of this great city is Babylon.” “This being supposed and proved, that the city is the whole Babylonish and Antichristian empire, it must be remembered, that this empire of Antichrist is made up of Ten Kingdoms, and of ten kings, who must give their power to the beast. A tenth of the city fell, i. e., one of these ten kingdoms which make up the Great City, the Babylonish empire, shall forsake it.” “Now, what is this tenth of the city which shall fall? In my opinion we cannot doubt that it is France.” The “kings who yet remain under the empire of Rome must break with her, leave her solitary and desolate. But who must begin this last revolt? It is most probable that France shall.” “Seeing the tenth of the city which must fall is France, this gives me some hopes that the death of the two witnesses hath a particular relation to this kingdom. It is the street, or place of this City, i. e., the most fair and eminent part of it. The witnesses must remain dead upon this street, and upon it they must be raised again. And as the death of the witnesses and their resurrection hath a relation to the kingdom of France, it may well fall out, that we may not be far distant from the time of the resurrection of the witnesses, seeing that the three years and a half of their death, are either begun, or will begin shortly.

“I lay not down the exact time of the resurrection of the witnesses. I do not say it shall be exactly in such a year; for I have declared, and do still declare, that I know not from what time God shall please to begin the reckoning of the three years and a half; not but I strongly hope that God intends to begin it at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but this does not arise to a full assurance.”

3.—The “Great City Where our Lord was Crucified”

It was in the πλατεια, or Breadth, of the GREAT CITY, the witnesses were to be killed and to lie unburied for three days and a half. This is the first place where the phrase, the Great City, occurs in the apocalypse. It is evidently both a city and a country; for it is said to be “called spiritually Sodom and Egypt.” The literal Sodom sunk into the abyss in the days of Abraham; it cannot, therefore, be the city of Lot. But, though destroyed, its memorial remains in the Daughters of Sodom. Since its destruction, the city has p. 650 “spiritually” existed again in Jerusalem, which was “spiritually called Sodom,” because of the Sodomitish abominations of her rulers and citizens. They were declared to be “a sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evil doers, children that are corrupters; who had forsaken Yahweh; provoked the Holy One of Israel; and gone away backward,” or become apostate: so that “the whole head was sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the” nation’s “foot even unto the head, there was no soundness in it; but wounds and bruises and putrifying sores”—Isa. i. 4-10. Hence, because of this moral likeness to Sodom and Gomorrha, the rulers and people were styled “the rulers of Sodom,” and “the people of Gomorrha;” and would have met with the fate of those cities, but for the saving influence of “a very small remnant.”

Now Jerusalem as a daughter of Sodom, is illustrative of the moral condition of the Great City in whose breadth the witnesses were slain. It is spiritually called Sodom, because its rulers and people are the moral counterpart of the Jews in their worst condition, upon whom that name was imposed because they were even worse than “the cities of the plain”—Matt. xi. 23, 24. There is nothing affirmed by Isaiah of Jerusalem as a spiritual Sodom, which is not literally descriptive of the uncleanness and filth of the Antichristian city and dominion. It is spiritually, or allegorically, styled Sodom, because of its moral likeness thereto, and because, being destitute of even “a very small remnant,” the like fate is decreed against it. The original Sodom suddenly went down crashing into hell; so, when the Angel of the Bow, Yahweh Elohim, shall judge the Great City, “as a great millstone cast into the sea,” she will go down surging and plunging into her subterranean abyss, and “be found no more at all”—Apoc. xviii. 21.

But, the Great City is also allegorically styled “Egypt.” It is the great “House of Bondage” in which Israel after the flesh, and the “very small remnant,” not of the city, but trampled in it, “the Israel of the Deity,” are sojourning, and waiting for deliverance. It is also spiritual Egypt because of its moral likeness to the literal land of Mitzraim. Its superstition, its ignorance of Yahweh, its hatred and oppression of his people, its hardness of heart, its sorcery, adulteries and murders, its darkness that may be felt—transcend the infamy of Pharaoh and his hosts in these abominations. The Great City is, therefore, well and truly styled Egypt. But it is also thus allegorized, because the plagues of Egypt await her; and because, the Eternal Spirit will judge her to an overthrow, as terrible and effectual in the judgment as when he judged the Egyptians by the hand of Moses. p. 651 This Sodom-and-Egypt territorial arena of Gentilism is the Great City “where also our Lord was crucified.” This is indicative of the empire allegorized by “Sodom and Egypt.” Christ was crucified by Rome without the walls of Jerusalem. He was, therefore, crucified in a province of the Roman empire; for the Jews then inhabiting Palestine earnestly testified that they had no other king than Cæsar—John xix. 15. Hence, the Great City is the empire of Rome, whose frontiers were decreed by Caracalla to be the limits of the city. The empire and city, then, are coextensive; in other words, they are the same. In this Great City, three thousand miles in one direction, and two thousand in another, the personal and mystical Christs were both crucified, or put to death by violence of the Fourth Beast power—Jesus in Palestine; and the witnesses of Jesus, in the plateia, or western breadth thereof—the special jurisdiction of Antichrist.

In Apoc. xiv. 8, this Great City is styled BABYLON, for a like reason that it is called Sodom and Egypt. It is spiritually styled Babylon; for it is as much a city of confusion as was the original Babylon: when the language of mankind was confounded in the days of Nimrod. Its name signifies confusion; and certainly, if ever there was a city in which “confusion worse confounded” was enthroned, “the Great City” is that domain. In Apoc. xviii. 10, 21, it is styled, “that Great City Babylon,” to be hereafter “divided” under the Seventh Vial “into three parts”—Apoc. xvi. 19. In ch. xvii. this Great City is likened to a Drunken Harlot, gorgeously arrayed, and sitting upon a Scarlet-colored Beast, the symbol of the power over which she reigns—verse 18. Her name is emblazoned in the fifth verse as, “MYSTERY, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.” She is styled “Mystery,” because she is the embodiment of that “Mystery of Iniquity,” which Paul says, was working at the time he was writing—2 Thess. ii. 7. Scaliger testifies that “Mystery” was once worn as an inscription on the Pope’s tiara; but afterwards removed by Julius III. The term “Mother,” as applied to the Great City in its ecclesiastical relations is recognized by all. As Jerusalem is the Mother of all the Saints; so Rome is the Mother of all their enemies—“Romana Ecclesia,” says the Council of Trent, “quæ omnium Ecclesiarum Mater est et Magistra”—The Roman Church, which is the MOTHER and MISTRESS of all churches. The Popes themselves seem determined that there shall be no lack of evidence to prove the identity of the ecclesiastical polity of which they are the deified head, with the apocalyptical Great City Babylon. On p. 652 occasion of the last Jubilee a medal was struck, a copy of which is given in Elliott. It is the size of a quarter of a dollar; on one face, is the effigy of Leo XII.; and on the obverse, a Woman, symbolizing the Roman Church, sitting on a globe, with rays of glory on her head, a cross in the left hand, and a cup, signed with a cross in its mouth, in her extended right hand, as if presenting it to be drunk. Beneath her is the date, and around her face the legend “Sedet super Universam. Anno Iubi. MDCCCXXV.—She sits upon the world. In the year of Jubilee, 1825—Apoc. xvii. 4, 15. Yes, she sits upon the world, or “upon many waters,” the shameless strumpet of the unmeasured court; and like certain notorious prostitutes of pagan times, bears her ignoble name upon her forehead.^a

But the Great City is not only spiritually styled Babylon because of the confusion of spiritual speech that obtains among all the “Names and Denominations” of which it is ecclesiastically constituted; but because it is the modern development of the same power that existed in the days of the Chaldean Babylon; whose golden head, for the time being, was the Dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar: and because a similar fate awaits her. It is, I say, the same power, only modified by time and circumstances. I do not say by place as well as by time and circumstances; for, when the Gogue of Ezekiel shall have attained to the full extent of his latter day dominion, much of Babylonia, even more than he now possesses, will be his. He will be, in the full manifestation of his power, the very apex of the Little Horn of the Goat—the Hellenistic Horn of the Great City, which even now includes the site of Babylon in its domain.

Now, Nebuchadnezzar who was, as it were, the second founder of Babylon, which he had built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of his power, and for the honor of his majesty (Dan. iv. 30), was much interested to know what would be the fate of the kingdom over which he ruled. That he might know the thoughts of his heart (ch. ii. 30) a symbolical representation was presented before him in a dream, illustrative of the general fortunes and consummation, of the kingdom of Babylon “in the latter days.” Hence, the kingdom of Babylon has been in continuous existence from his reign until now, for we are now living “in the latter days.” It is p. 653 true, that “the House of the kingdom has not always been the Babylon, which was the beginning of Nimrod’s dominion (Gen. x. 10); it has been sometimes at one place, sometimes at another, until at length Rome became “the House” of the Great City. Various dynasties have become the inheritors of the kingdom of Babylon. After Nebuchadnezzar’s, there was the silver dynasty, and the brazen dynasty, and the iron dynasty, and the clay dynasty—five dynasties ruling over one and the same kingdom; called also, “THE KINGDOM OF MEN”—Dan iv. 17. This Babylonish kingdom in its latter-day manifestation, the Spirit styles apoccalyptically, “that Great City Babylon;” and is the arena upon which will stand erect and complete in all its parts the entire Image, which, in these latter days, is to be smitten by THE STONE, or Angel of the Rainbow.

Now, a similar fate awaits the Roman House that in the days of Belshatzar befel the Chaldean House of this same kingdom of men. The Median father Darius, and his political son, but fleshly nephew, and Yahweh’s Messiah and Shepherd—Cyrus the Persian, besieged the Shinar House. He dried up “the great river Euphrates” from the city; and marching their “sanctified ones” along its bed, captured the House of the Kingdom, and slew Lucifer, the Son of the Morning, with the sword—Isa. xiii. 3, 17; xiv. 12; xliv. 28; xlv. 1; Dan. v. 30. But in these things that were transacted against the original Babylon, there was a mystery. Cyrus, whose Hebrew name כורשׁ Choresh, which is a contraction of כיוֹרש Chayoraish, and signifies Like the Heir, was, as his name was intended to express, the type of Christ in the execution of his mission against “the Great City Babylon” of the latter days. Yahweh’s sanctified ones, the Medes and Persians, under Cyrus, were also typical of the saints, who with Christ Jesus “the Heir of all things,” and “joint heirs with him,” at the head of the armies of Israel, are to enter the Great City when “the great river Euphrates,” in a political sense, shall be sufficiently “dried up” to admit of their passage through into the Roman House of the kingdom of men, in which they will slay the Papal Lucifer—“the Beast and the False Prophet”—the Little Horn that has Eyes and a Mouth speaking great things and blasphemies. The great river Euphrates, which flows into the Great City, has dried up greatly; that the way of these kings from the Sun’s risings, may be prepared—the power of the fourth, or Ottoman, angel is now only nominal; and the Gallic Frogs have well-nigh performed their mission: what, then, remains, but that Yahweh whom we seek should suddenly come to his temple, even p. 654 the Messenger of the Covenant whom we delight in?—Apoc. xvi. 12-15; Mal. iii. 1: and having broken, as a thief, into the strong man’s domain, bind him with chains and cause Babylon to fall, no more again to rise and curse the world with her cruelty and deceit.

Thus did the Spirit select three of the most infamous centres of iniquity among the ancients by which to allegorize the Great City, upon the arena of which has been developed and matured the great Greek, Latin, and Protestant apostasy. It is “spiritually,” or figuratively, called by these names, Sodom, Egypt, and Babylon, because of its striking resemblance to them in their beastiality, superstition, blasphemy, oppression of God’s people, and fate. Hence in Sodom, in Egypt, and in the Great City Babylon, “our Lord was crucified;” not in his own person only, but in that also of his witnesses; for what is done unto the least of his brethren, is done also unto him—Matt. xxv. 40; therefore in crucifying, or putting them to death, after their testimony was finished, he was again crucified with them in the Great City, they having been massacred in the noble service of witnessing for him against the deified usurper of his sovereignty and rights.

4.—The Death-State of the Witnesses

“And they shall see among the peoples, and tribes, and tongues, and nations, their corpses three days and a half, and they shall not suffer their corpses to be put into tombs.”

The πτωματα, in this text rendered corpses, are so called because they had fallen down from their former position of “standing before the God of the earth.” They were to be in this prostrate condition until something providential should occur to cause them to “stand upon their feet;” when, of course, they would no longer be corpses. The text before us, then, informs us, that the witnessing prophets having finished their tormenting testimony, were silenced. When witnesses are put to silence, they are symbolically dead; and so long as they are compelled by authority to keep silence, they are in the death-state: and though they may continue associated into bodies, yet being forbidden to assemble, and to propagate their principles upon pain of death, as by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, they are to all witnessing intents and purposes, dead bodies, or corpses.

They were reduced to this condition of death in all the breadth of the Great City over which the Deity of the earth exercised ecclesiastical sovereignty: not in France alone, but in Italy, and other p. 655 papal countries also. This appears from the formula βλεψουσιν εκ των λαων, &c., they shall see among the peoples, &c., their corpses. They must have been put to silence among these peoples, tribes, tongues, and nations, or they could not have been seen by them as unburied corpses. These nationalities had often experienced the potent effects of their witnessing when “in their days of the prophecy” they had turned the waters into blood: but this they were now no longer able to do, for they had fallen down from their standing in their midst; and the time was come for these “waters upon which the Great Harlot sits,” to rejoice over them in this the day of their prostration.

Now, when people are dead, it is usual for the living to put them out of sight, or to bury them, as soon as possible; but, in the case of these corpses “they would not suffer them to be entombed.” Who would not suffer it? Their enemies? Or some others friendly towards them? Certainly not their enemies; for these did their best to destroy them, and to blot out the remembrance of them for ever. It was the protection afforded them in the Protestant States that prevented their burial and decomposition. The refugee witnesses that fled by hundreds of thousands from the presence of the Deity of the earth and his regal adherents, settled in Holland, Britain, Protestant Germany, and America; where, under the protection of the laws, they existed as corporate societies, but bearing no testimony as of old. Some of these governments remonstrated in their behalf, which was not without influence in staying the destroyer’s hand. Hence, an unburied remnant of them was permitted to remain in the breadth of the Great City—a prostrate remnant, no longer able to testify, but waiting in silence for their resurrection to life and power.

5.—The “Three Days and a Half,”

And what length of time was to elapse from the slaying of the witnessing bodies in A. D. 1685, to their resurrection? The answer of the text is in mystical terms “three days and a half.” Now, during all the time of their lying dead and unburied in the breadth of the Great City, no one was able rightly to conjecture what number of years was signified by this enigmatical formula. But, when they arose and “stood upon their feet,” they convulsed the Great City, and made it tremble in all its ten kingdoms. There could be no mistaking the fact, that the advocates of civil and religious liberty p. 656 and the rights of man, who had been so cruelly massacred by Louis XIV., were again, in the reign of Louis XVI., in intense and terrible activity. This was, therefore, a resurrection of the same class that had been slain. New life had entered into them, and they were again a power in the state.

On May 15, 1789, the States General of France, consisting of 601 deputies of the Third Estate; 285 nobles; and 308 clergy; in all 1254 representatives, opened their sitting at Versailles. The Third Estate, which was the popular element, desired that the three orders should form but one assembly. This the nobles and clergy at first refused to do. On the 17th June, however, some of the clergy having joined the Third Estate, the deputies declared their assembly to be the only legal one, and constituted themselves as THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY; which, on the 27th, was joined by all the rest.

On the 23d of Aug. this new assembly published a decree proclaiming liberty of opinions, religious as well as political; on Oct. 1, it made a declaration of the Rights of Man in society; and on Dec. 24, issued a decree declaring all Frenchmen who are not Catholics admissible to all offices, both civil and military. Civil and religious liberty and the rights of man were the ancient testimony, both of the true believers, and of “the Earth” that helped them; and here we find the doctrine authoritatively reaffirmed by “the Earth” in its National Assembly, which restores these inestimable blessings to all noncatholic Frenchmen, who had been so mercilessly deprived of them in Oct. 1685. A Louis had taken away this liberty from his non-catholic subjects; and his grandson by the same class of people was compelled to restore it.

Here, then, are two important and signal dates—Oct. 1685, and Oct. 1789. These decrees of the National Assembly were as “the Spirit of life from the Deity;” and on the 10th July 1790 “they stood upon their feet;” for the Earth’s Assembly on that day decreed, that the property of the expelled Houguenots unsold at date, confiscated by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, should be restored to their heirs. They called this the National Justice, which it was the providential mission of the Third Estate to execute; and with terrible fidelity did they fulfil it in vindicating the oppressed, and in punishing the oppressor.

Now, between 1685 and 1790, is a period of 105 years. This is the duration of the death state in which the witnesses were deficient of all political life; and must consequently be the sum in common years of the mystical formula “three days and a half.” But, then, the enigma still remains to be solved, namely, upon what principle do p. 657 “three days and a half” represent 105 years? As we have seen, two years after 1685, Peter Jurieu proclaimed to the world, truly, that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes signalized the death of the witnesses; and three years after the decree restoring to them their unsold confiscated estates; that is, in 1793, Mr. Bicheno, pastor of a Baptist church in Newbury, England, who, though cloudy upon some points, was sufficiently sound to be regarded as one of the resurrected witnesses, proclaimed his conviction in a pamphlet styled, “The Signs of the Times,” that 1789–’90, was the year of their standing again upon their feet; and that the 105 years then terminating were the full measure of the “three days and a half.” But the best of his discovery was, that he was enabled to explain to the public upon what principle “three days and a half” are symbolical of 105 years. The reader will, no doubt, be gratified in perusing what he has to say about the matter; I shall, therefore, reproduce it in this place:

“What length of time,” he inquires, “is intended by these three days and a half? My answer is, that days in this eleventh verse are the same with months in the second verse, or, if you please, lunar days, reckoning as the Jews did, thirty days to a month, and as is the method in calculating the above forty and two months, to make them agree with the 1260 days in the third verse.”

Thirty multiplied by three, adding fifteen for the half day, makes 105. When this way of reckoning first occurred to my mind, I had no idea of the events which this number connected; for I did not recollect the year when the Edict of Nantes was revoked. But looking over Quick’s Synodicon, I found it to be Oct. 18, 1685, to which, if 105 be added, it brings us to 1790; take off the few months (if that should be thought necessary) for the event taking place before the half day is quite expired, and it brings us to 1789, when “the witnesses were to be quickened.” This is not necessary, as the 105th year belongs partly to ’89 and partly to ’90, in both, which the quickening was in process of development.

“Whether this may strike others,” he continues, “as it struck me, when I first observed the coincidence, I cannot tell; but from this agreement of the number 105 with the time which elapsed between one of the greatest persecutions ever experienced by christians, and this wonderful revolution which has taken place, a thousand ideas rushed upon my mind. Is it probable, is it possible, that this can be the quickening of the witnesses? What! The Olive Trees? The Candlesticks? I have always supposed these to be all Saints!^a

p. 658 And can that zeal which hath fired Frenchman to combat for civil and religious liberty, be ‘the Spirit of life from God?’ Is this resurrection, in the vision, the rising of this civil and religious liberty, previous to better days?—I will do all that I can to discover the truth.”

“I feel great satisfaction that this interpretation of a most important passage, about the publication of which I felt so much, has been approved by some of the best judges of such matters; and that some have strengthened the hypothesis by additional arguments, and those more apposite than what occurred to me. What the sensible and indefatigable author of Illustrations of Prophecy, has brought forward to show the propriety of this uncommon use of the term day, is very much to the purpose. ‘A prophecy concerning future events, is a picture or representation of the events in symbols (I quote from Dr. Lancaster), which being fetched from objects visible at one view, or cast of the eye, rather represent the events in miniature, than in full proportion. And therefore, that the duration of the events may be represented in terms suitable to the symbols of the visions, the symbols of duration must also be drawn in miniature. Thus, for instance, if a vast empire persecuting the church for 1260 years, was to be symbolically represented by a beast, the decorum of the symbol would require, that the said time of its tyranny should not be expressed by 1260 years, because it would be monstrous and indecent to represent a beast ravaging for so long a time, but by 1260 days.’ In the like manner, in the present instance, as Daubuz expresses himself: ‘The Holy Ghost was tied to the decorum p. 659 of the main[?] symbol of a dead body that will keep no longer unburied without corruption,’ From these observations, it will, I think, appear evident, why, in the prophetic scenery, it was proper to represent the body of the witnesses as having lain dead only three days and a half antecedently to their symbolical resurrection.”