21. The Great Voice in the Heaven
“And I heard a great voice saying in the heaven, Now is come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our Deity, and the authority of His Anointed; for the prosecutor of our brethren who accused them in the presence of our Deity, day and night, has been cast down. 11. “And they overcame him, through the blood of the Lamb, and through the word of their testimony; and they loved not their life unto death. 12. On account of this let the heavens rejoice and those who tent in them.”
“The heaven,” in which John, in prophetic vision, heard this “great voice,” was the same heaven as that in which the Woman, the Dragon, the Michael, and the war, had contemporary existence. I say contemporary existence; for, on the defeat of Maxentius, A. D. 313, the Catholic Church, or “Woman clothed with the Sun, and the Moon under her feet, and a stephan of Twelve Stars upon her head,” was the established religion of Constantine’s dominion; but not of the whole habitable, the rest thereof still rejoicing in the ascendancy of the Dragon and the gods of antiquity. Hence there were two contemporary established religions in the empire, each of them sustained by rival political factions. The Dragon had been cast out as the result of the recent war in the heaven. His “short time” was at an end. He had no longer any place in the heaven, nor his adherents. He who ruled there had no regard for the defeated gods of his ancestors. The heaven had been effectually cleared of all who rejoiced in them; so that there were now found therein only the Sun-clothed Woman and her Son.
This woman and her son constituted “the heavens and those who tent in them.” In other words, they were the constituted authorities of the Church and State, who were now all real or pretended catholics. Their religious and political adversaries and oppressors had been turned out of place and power; and they had been turned into p. 92 them by the wonderful revolution, with all the comforts and advantages accruing to those who by victory may claim the spoils. It was these in the heaven from whom the “Great Voice” ascended joyously. They had been long looking for “the salvation,” “or deliverance,” and “the power,” which they now enjoyed without fear; and what could that constitution of things, exhibited in the Woman and her Son, be, but “the kingdom of our Deity and the authority of His Anointed?” So they thought; for Eusebius, the ecclesiastical historian, who was one of the most prominent among those who then tented in the heaven, being one of the bishops of the Woman, and a companion of her Son, speaking of the new order of things in Church and State, says, “The event surpassed all words. Soldiers with naked swords kept watch round the palace-gate. But the men of God passed through the midst of them without fear, and entered the heart of the palace. And they sat down, some at the emperor’s table, the rest at tables on either side of his. It looked like the very image of the kingdom of Christ; and was altogether more like a dream than a reality. And on the occasion of opening a new catholic temple at Tyre, he said to the multitude assembled, ‘What so many of the Lord’s saints and confessors before our time desired to see and saw not, and to hear and heard not, that behold now before our eyes! It was of us the prophet spake when he told how the wilderness and the solitary place should be glad, and the desert rejoice and blossom as the lily. Whereas the church was widowed and desolate, her children have now to exclaim to her, Make room, enlarge thy borders: the place is too strait for us. The promise is fulfilling to her, In righteousness shalt thou be established: all thy children shall be taught of God: and great shall be the peace of thy children.’”
From these quotations which have reference to the real kingdom of Christ, Eusebius in his application of them to the Catholic Church, in the good fortune of which, he says, they were fulfilling; manifestly concluded that it was not only “the image,” but the very kingdom of Christ itself! This was his opinion, and that also of the clergy and people of his communion generally. Their belief was that “the salvation, power, and kingdom of the Deity, and the authority of His Anointed” had really come; and that now, all that remained was for professors to lead moral lives, or at all events to live at peace with, and in the favor of “Mother Church,” which would secure to them an abundant entrance into the only other kingdom known to them, termed “the kingdom of glory,” situated afar off from earth, “beyond the realms of time and space!” This opinion of Eusebius and his coreligionists, that the church is the kingdom of God, took deep hold p. 93 of the catholic mind of his generation; and in the nineteenth century is a characteristic of those who know not the truth. Catholics, papists and protestants all believe that what they call church is the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven. Of course, Millennarians may claim exception from this rule. Still, few of them are free from the tradition; for while they expect the reign of Christ upon earth, they hold the church to be the kingdom in some sense; and send off disembodied “immortal souls” to transkyanal regions, there to await the terrestrial millennial reign!
If Eusebius had restrained his fancy, and contented himself with saying, that the New Order of things was the shadow, type, or pattern, of the kingdom of Christ, there would have been little ground for objection. But “the very image of the kingdom of Christ,” is that kingdom itself; “the very image,” being used by Paul in Heb. x. 1, for the reality of things shadowed forth, or typified. The kingdom of “the Michael and his angels” shadowed forth the kingdom of Christ, the real Michael, and his angels, the Saints. Constantine, like Cyrus, in his military career, and in his ecclesiastical relation to the Catholic Church, was a type of Christ. The typical hero established his kingdom in its fullest extent on the ejection of the pagan dragon from the heaven; Christ will establish his by binding the Catholic Dragon, and shutting him down in the abyss—Apoc. xx. 2, 3. The typical hero attained “to Deity and his throne;” Christ will sit down with Deity upon his throne—Apoc. iii. 21. The typical hero acquired all the kingdoms of the Roman earth; Christ will acquire all the kingdoms of the globe—Apoc. xi. 15. The typical hero ruled all the Roman nations with an iron sceptre; Christ will rule all the nations of the globe with an iron sceptre—Apoc. xix. 15. The catholic clergy shared with the typical Michael the glory, honor, and power of his kingdom; the Saints will share with Christ the glory, honor, and power of his—Apoc. ii. 26, 27; iii. 21. After his birth of the unprivileged and persecuted woman, the sun-clothed catholic church became the Spouse of the typical Michael; the glorified Saints become the married wife, or bride adorned for her husband, Christ. Apoc. xix. 7, 8; xxi. 2, 9. The power of the Deity was with Constantine in measure; Christ is the great power of Deity without measure. Constantine established a new religion, the catholic; founded a new administration of affairs; and built a new capital, called Constantinople, or New Rome: Christ will establish a new system of worship for all nations, the Millennial; will organize a new government of the world; and establish a new capital for the throne of the Deity, Jerusalem rebuilt, in the midst of which he will be the glory—Isai. lvi. 7; Zeph. iii. 9; Acts xvii. 31; Eph. i. 10; Jer. iii. 17; Zech. ii. 5; viii. 21-23.
p. 94 Now, I take it, that these parallels are not accidental, but designed. Michael and the Dragon was literally enacted as previously explained. Its performance is the history of the last twenty-five years of the life of Constantine. This history in its most striking particulars was like much of the history of the Jews. Jewish history is not like common history—a story of the past unprophetic of the future. The things that happened to Israel as narrated in their history, happened unto them for types (τυποι); and they were written for our admonition, “upon whom,” says Paul, “the end of the æons is come’—1 Cor. x. 11. Typical history is the past representative of the future. This is the character of Michael and the Dragon. It is a past series of events typical of a future contest between the Michael of Dan. xii. 1 and the Dragon of Apoc. xx. This view of the prophecy imparts to it an interest for us which it would be devoid of if it were regarded merely as belonging to a past epoch over fifteen hundred years remote. There was war in the heaven then; and when the door shall be opened in the heaven, and the throne shall be set therein (Apoc. iv. 1, 2) there will be a war in the heaven again, “the war of that great day of AIL-Shaddai,” which will terminate in similar, but grander results; for “the very image” is always greater and more magnificent than the type. The great voice in the heaven, celebrative of the victory over the great red dragon, partakes of this typical character. It not only expresses what then obtained in shadow; but by anticipation celebrates the greater realities of the victory of Christ and the Saints over all the apocalyptic beasts; when the great salvation, and power, and kingdom of Yahweh, consisting of the kingdoms of the world, and the authority of His Anointed, the One Body of which Jesus is the head, shall have actually come. Then there will be in the heaven a great voice indeed—“a voice as the sound of many waters; and as the voice of a great thunder: the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Praise ye Yah: for Yahweh Elohim omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor unto him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready”—Apoc. i. 15; xiv. 2; xix. 6, 7.
But to return to the “great voice” of the Constantinian period. The things spoken were uttered in the heaven: namely, by those appointed to the vacancies created by the ejection from the heaven of the adherents and worshipers of the gods. In other words, the voice proceeded from the officials in church and state, who all professed the catholic religion, and said they were now “rich, and increased with goods, and had need of nothing:” but “they knew not that they were wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked”—Apoc. iii. 17. Such was the choir which sang,
p. 95 “Salvation now, and pow’r, are come,\ The kingdom also of our God,\ And the dominion of His Christ:\ For he who did our brethren try,\ And night and day ’fore God accus’d,\ Hath from the heaven been cast down.\ And they through th’ Lamb’s blood him o’ercame,\ And also through the word they taught:\ Nor yet their life lov’d they till death.\ Because of this, O heavens, rejoice,\ And all ye who sojourn therein!”
It is not to be wondered at that such a people who imagined that “they had need of nothing,” should mistake the shadow for the substance; and rejoice in what then existed as the full accomplishment of the Divine purpose. Salvation, or deliverance, had indeed come from the tyranny of the Public Prosecutor (ὁ κατηγορος) who continually accused them falsely, and punished them with torture unto death. But the “great salvation,” preached by Christ and his apostles, has not come yet. A new power, and a new kingdom, and a new dominion, had taken possession of the Roman Heaven, to the exclusion of the old order of things; and to the generation witnessing so wonderful a revolution, it seemed “more like a dream than reality.” The prophecy attributes it all to the power of Deity, as symbolized in the apocalyptic name Michael. The salvation, power, kingdom and dominion, therefore, are very properly predicated of the Deity and Christ; for assuredly, if they had stood by Licinius instead of by Constantine, this επινικιον, or song of victory, would never have been heard in the heaven. But we must be careful not to fall into the error of Eusebius and his Laodicean Catholic companions, who had need of nothing more, and to take the type for “the very image of the things.” The typical “kingdom of the Deity and dominion of His Christ” had come; and therefore it was, that the Woman’s Son, when he had fought his way up, by the providence of Deity, to supreme power in the heaven, is said to have been “carried up by force to Deity and his throne.” The power of the Deity was enthroned in the New Capital, Constantinople. But the shadowy representation of the kingdom of the Deity and the dominion of His Christ, passed away with the death of the typical hero, Constantine. The reigns of David and Solomon were prefigurative of the reign of Christ; but the typical character of their reigns was not transferred on their decease to their successors. And thus it was in relation to Constantine and those who came after him. His career of conquest, p. 96 and “half-hour’s” peaceful reign (Apoc. viii. 1), typified the future career of Christ in the conquest of the world, and the succeeding tranquillity of his times. But all this typical manifestation was dissolved when his three sons succeeded him, and divided the empire between them. The Heaven was still catholic; but, as the Spirit had “spued them out of his mouth” on their indifference to his “counsel” (Apoc. iii. 16, 18), he left them to their delusions; and “the Serpent” by whom they were beguiled; that is the Sin-power of the flesh, in a catholic instead of a pagan, political manifestation was enthroned; and became the future antagonist of the ANTICATHOLIC WOMAN and her seed—verses 14-17.
The Laodicean officials in their victorious conclamation refer to those they style “our brethren, whom the public prosecutor accused day and night before the Deity.” All passed for brethren until the Spirit formally spued the state party out of his mouth. Politically, they might truly claim all the saints who had, for two hundred and eighty years previous, been engaged in the conflict with the pagans. They were all “brethren and fellow servants,” as all democrats are brethren politically; while, religiously, they are scattered among sects of the most perverse and contradictory opinions. This is true of all other political factions in all ages; and it was true of those who uttered this great voice of triumph over the fallen adversary of their party. As anti-pagans, they belonged to a common brotherhood; but, when it became a question of religious doctrine, this political brotherhood resolved itself into two great hostile parties, between which no fellowship obtained.
In this great voice, the whole brotherhood might to some extent concur. It was a deliverance to them all from the Great Red Dragon; but to many of them, it was only a change from his oppression to that of a new form of tyranny. They allude to the fallen power as the katēgoros. This signifies one who speaks against another, especially before judges; one who appears as a prosecutor. The fallen power is said, to have spoken against them as prosecutor “before the Deity;” ενωπιον, in the sight of the Deity. This was literally true; for during the first five seals, which, at the end of the fifth, brings us down to the birth of the Woman’s Son, A. D. 312-313, the Seven Eyes of the Deity, which are his Seven Spirits (Apoc. v. 6) were present in the ecclesias. In the first four seals, their presence is symbolized by the Four Living Ones full of eyes; and their absence from the scenery of the fifth is supplied by the phrase, “and it was said unto them.” The Deity dwelt in the encampment of the saints; and by His spirit, or power, “dwelt in them, and walked in them”—2 Cor. vi. 16. Whatever, therefore, was transacted against them was p. 97 done “in his sight,” or “before his eyes.” He was therefore the Judge before whom the Dragon unconsciously displayed his malignity. He seemed to prevail for a time; but when the end of the “little season,” or ten years persecution of Diocletian, arrived, the Deity stepped into the arena, and judicially vindicated his elect.
The victory of the souls weltering at the altar base is attributed by the “great voice” to the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.” These brethren, “who were slain for the word of the Deity, and for the testimony which they held” (Apoc. vi. 9) were brethren, of whom those in place and power giving utterance to the great voice, were not worthy. “They loved not their life until death” laid them at the altar base. “The word of the Deity,” in the prophecy of the fifth seal, is parallel to “the blood of the Lamb,” in the great voice. The official utterers of this voice did not venture to say, “WE have overcome the fallen power by the word of the Deity concerning the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of our testimony.” They knew very well that they had overcome him by hard fighting. No; the honor and glory of the victory was not due to them who drew the sword; but to those faithful brethren, who had so leavened the Roman world with the truth, as to make the strongholds of paganism no longer tenable. “The blood of the Lamb,” as opposed to the blood of idol-sacrifices, was the great theme of “the word of the Deity.” The word of their testimony demonstrated the efficacy of the one; and the inutility and utter worthlessness of the other. Every pagan convinced by the word and their reasoning in exposition of it, was alienated from the party of the Dragon, and added to the faithful. The threatenings and torments unto death, inflicted upon them by the pagan authorities, could not put their testimony to silence. Where one fell others stepped in and stopped the breach; so that, “the blood of the witnesses became the seed of the church.” Thus, the power of the word accumulated, until society, but superficially acquainted with “the deep things of Deity,” had become too much enlightened any longer to tolerate the licentiousness and absurdity of the old superstition. Therefore, having no conscientious scruples as to war, they repudiated the passivity of the faithful; and having found in Constantine an ambitious politician and skillful general suited to their purpose, they unsheathed the sword against the idols, and cried, “Victory or Death.” As we have seen, they gained the victory; and in the great voice of triumph, clothed the memory of their non-resisting predecessors in the conflict with the “white robes of purity and truth”—Apoc. vi. 11. The victims slain by the fallen power had borne the heat and burden of the conflict; and the catholic church entered into their labors. The p. 98 “great voice” called upon all catholics in power to rejoice at this result; saying, “Rejoice, O heavens, and ye that tent therein!” They are addressed as οι σκηνουντες, dwellers, or rather, sojourners in a tent. This is a very temporary indwelling. They were not permanently established there. There tenantcy was transitory: the mere shadow of the holding to which the slain victors shall attain in “the time of the dead, when they shall be judged, and the reward shall be given to them,” with the “white robes” of incorruption and eternal life. These will not then merely “tent” in the heavens of the conquered world. When they enter there, they become the pillars of the Divine temple, and go out no more—Apoc. iii. 12: they possess the kingdom for the Olahm, even for the Olahm, and Beyond—Dan. vii. 18. Then, not only will the heavens rejoice, but all the earth will be glad. This was not the case in the time of the “great voice;” for, while it called upon the heavens to rejoice, and those, that tented in them, it gave no invitation to the inhabiters of the earth and sea to join in the joyousness of the time. But when the great salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of the Deity, and the dominion of His Christ, shall exist in the very image, then “every creature which is in the heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, shall say, Blessing and honor and glory and power, unto him that sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb for the æons of the æons—Apoc. v. 13, for all will then be blessed in Abraham and his seed.
Such was the “great voice,” and the interpretation of it. Did the character of the time, consequent upon the victory over Licinius, correspond to my exposition? Unquestionably it did. Eusebius, who lived at the time, testifies to this. “On the fall of Licinius,” says he, “the great conqueror Constantine and his son Crispus the Cæsar, received the East as theirs, established one government as formerly over the Romans, and swayed the whole in peace from east to west, and from north to south. The people therefore being freed from all fear of the Court by which they had before been overwhelmed, held festal days of great splendor. There were everywhere illuminations. They who were before dejected, looked on one another with joyful aspects and smiles, and with choirs and hymns through the cities and country, gave honor, first to God the Supreme Ruler of all, as they were taught, and then to the pious emperor and his children. The miseries and impiety of the past were forgotten; joy and exultation prevailed at the blessings now promised, and happy anticipations of the future. Philanthropic edicts were everywhere published by the emperor, and laws that displayed his munificence and piety.” And Lactantius also, a contemporary and friend of Constantine, p. 99 writes; “Let us celebrate the triumph of God with gladness; let us commemorate His victory with praise; let us make mention in our prayers day and night of the peace which, after ten years of persecution, He has conferred on his people.” Eusebius narrates very fully how, at the same time, there was solemn remembrance of the witnesses and confessors that had illustrated the past persecution, and praise and honor rendered them: he tells how public notice was taken of those who had suffered unto death, as of heroes that had conquered by the doctrine of the cross in their conflict of witnessing unto death; and how, as a further tribute to their innocence and worth, the property confiscated from them was reclaimed and restored to their surviving relatives, or to the catholic church.
22. The Ruling of the Woman’s Son
“Who was to rule all the nations with an iron sceptre”—ver. 5.
In consequence of the final overthrow of the idols by the defeat and death of Licinius, their champion, the Woman’s Son, who had cast him and his partisans out of the heaven, became, by right of conquest, the Supreme Ruler of “the whole habitable.” He had now arrived at “the Deity and his throne.” There was no power on the Roman inhabited earth equal to him; His authority was absolute in church and state, in both of which he did “according to his own will; and exalted himself and magnified himself above all.” He was now the chief of a great dominion, and prepared to rule with an iron sceptre. He was to rule all the nations; not all the nations of the globe, but all the nations of Daniel’s Fourth Beast so far as it was then developed. Beyond the limits of this symbolical dominion he exercised no rule. The nations of Persia, China, India, and so forth, with the tribes of what is now called Germany and Russia, were all exempt from his jurisdiction. He ruled “all the nations” inhabiting Britain, Gaul from the Rhine to the Atlantic, and from the Channel to the Alps and Pyrennees, Spain, Italy, the Roman Africa, Egypt, Syria from the Mediterranean to the Tigris, Asia Minor, the rest of Turkey and the Danubian Principalities, and Hungary (as they are now termed), Greece, the Islands of the Mediterranean, and the region lying between the Danube and the Adriatic: all the nations of these countries were subjected to his iron rule.
The character of Constantine as a ruler is no doubt correctly delineated in the eighteenth chapter of the Decline and Fall of the Roman empire. Therein Gibbon remarks, that by the grateful zeal of what he calls “the christians,” he has been decorated with every p. 100 attribute of a hero and a saint; while the vanquished party compared him to the most abhorred of those tyrants, who by their vice and weakness, dishonored the imperial purple. But neither of these opinions can be admitted without qualification. He was doubtless a hero and a tyrant; but neither a saint, nor the worst of the tyrants that had reigned. Had he fallen on the banks of the Tyber, or even on the plains of Adrianople, he might have transmitted to posterity, with some exceptions, a less questionable fame: “but the conclusion of his reign,” says Gibbon, that is, the last fourteen years, “degraded him from the rank he had acquired among the most deserving of the Roman princes.” This remark of the historian assigns the worst period of his rule to that indicated in the prophecy; namely, from the time he arrived at “the Deity and his throne” by the overthrow of Licinius. This was the period, “the conclusion of his reign,” when he was to rule all the nations with an iron sceptre; and Gibbon refers to it as the period of his degradation among princes. In regard to this period of his life he says, “we may contemplate a hero, who had so long inspired his subjects with love, and his enemies with terror, degenerating into a cruel and dissolute monarch, corrupted by his fortune, or raised by conquest above the necessity of dissimulation. The general peace which he maintained during the last fourteen years of his reign (the Half-hour’s silence in the heaven—ch. viii. 1) was a period of apparent splendor rather than of real prosperity; and the old age of Constantine was disgraced by the opposite yet reconcilable vices of rapaciousness and prodigality. The oppression of the people was the only fund which could support his magnificence. His unworthy favorites, enriched by the boundless liberality of their master, usurped with impunity the privilege of rapine and corruption. A secret but universal decay was felt in every part of the public administration, and the emperor himself, though he still retained the obedience, gradually lost the esteem of his subjects. An impartial narrative of the executions, or rather murders, which sullied the declining age of Constantine, will suggest to our most candid thoughts the idea of a prince who could sacrifice without reluctance the laws of justice, and the feelings of nature, to the dictates either of his passions or of his interest.” The murderous executions of his son Crispus, his nephew Licinius, and of a great number of respectable and innocent friends, who were involved in their fall, were sufficient to justify the discontent of the Roman people, and to explain the satirical verses affixed to the palace-gate, comparing the splendid and bloody reigns of Constantine and Nero. Such was the character of his rule—a sceptre of iron in the hand of the Man-Child of Sin.
p. 10123. The Flight of the Woman
“And the Woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place of the Deity, that they may sustain her there a thousand two hundred and sixty days”—Ver. 6.
The Antipagan Body, compared in the prophecy to a WOMAN, consisted of Catholics, Novatians, Donatists, Valentinians, Marcionites, Paulists, Cataphrygians, and others, whose names are no longer remembered. Out of this heterogeneous community, which agreed only in its opposition to the reigning idolatry, the Man-child of Sin was developed, A. D. 312, 313. The fall of Maxentius was the crisis of his birth. Being decreed by the Senate the first of the three Augusti of the Roman world, and being in intimate alliance with Licinius, then seemingly favorable to his policy, he published jointly with him the famous Edict of Milan. This was the great charter of toleration. It granted to “the whole body of the christians,” as well as to others, the free choice to follow that mode of worship which they may wish; and that no freedom at all shall be refused them. No distinction was made between christian and pagan in this matter; so that each might have the privilege to select and worship whatsoever divinity he pleased. Nor was there any distinction made with regard to sect in “the whole body.” When the edict was published, Constantine’s mind was either undecided as to which religion was absolutely true, or he hesitated to speak plainly that he might not offend the latent prejudices of his colleague. This indiscriminate toleration, he said, “has been done by us, that we might not appear in any manner to detract anything from any manner of religion, or any mode of worship.”
But, though well disposed to Antipaganism, the Man-Child of Sin, at the time of the edict of Milan, did not know his own Mother. He was too young to be able to discern her. He did not know to which sect of “the whole body of christians” he belonged. It was not long, however, before the worst of the sects was able to establish its ascendancy over the untutored mind of this ambitious and fortunate soldier. This was the sect which styles itself, and taught him so to style it, “THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH.” This was that sect which was pre-eminently “wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked;” but which said, “I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing.” It was the sect in which the rage of faction exploded in frequent and violent seditions; and the blood of its members was shed by each other’s hands. Hilary, a contemporary of the times, writes to Constantine’s successor, and declares concerning the catholic clergy, that “in the wide extent of the ten provinces of p. 102 Asia, to which he had been banished, there could be found very few prelates who had preserved the knowledge of the true God. It is a thing equally deplorable and dangerous that there are as many creeds as opinions among men, as many doctrines as inclinations, and as many sources of blasphemy as there are faults among us; because we make creeds arbitrarily. The Homousion is rejected and received and explained away by successive synods. The partial or total resemblance of the Father and of the Son, is a subject of dispute for these unhappy times. Every year, nay every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries. We repent of what we have done, we defend those who repent, we anathematize those whom we defended. We condemn either the doctrine of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others; and reciprocally tearing one another to pieces, we have been the cause of each other’s ruin.”
Such was the sect which Constantine concluded it would be to his interest to ally himself to. He, therefore, used the altars of catholicism as a convenient foolstool to the throne of universal dominion. He came to imbibe the piety peculiar to it, and with it its sanguinary spirit of persecution, and murderous hostility to all who dissented from it. The catholic church became the especial object of his care and favorable legislation; and he was taught by its bishops to believe that its members were his only real and trustworthy adherents. Impressed with this conviction he established it by law; and set it up in the heaven as the “Woman invested with the sun, and the moon underneath her feet, and upon her head a wreath of twelve stars.” And there she has remained over fifteen hundred and fifty years, even to this day. She has never been a fugitive in the wilderness; but has always (except in the short reign of Julian, who apostatized from her communion) retained her position in the heaven, by enacting the part of a Harlot with the kings of earth, until with her whoredoms and sanguinary abominations, she became “the Great Harlot sitting upon many waters, drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus.”—Apoc. xvii. 1, 2, 6.
But when Constantine came to recognize the catholic sect as his Mother Church, what became of the rest of the Anti-pagan Body—“the whole body of the Christians” besides, namely, of the Novatians, Donatists, Valentinians, Marcionites, Paulists, Cataphrygians, and others? They were still “the Woman,” only minus the catholic sect. Whatever other differences obtained among them, they were generally opposed to the union of church and state; for, as all of them could not be the world’s church, they were displeased at any one sect enjoying that pre-eminence over the rest. “What,” said they, “has the emperor to do with the church? What have Christians p. 103 to do with kings, or what have bishops to do at court?” Hence, without ceasing to be anti-pagan, they now became an ANTI-CATHOLIC BODY. This was the Woman” of the sixth verse of this twelfth chapter—the ANTI-CATHOLIC WOMAN. Between this woman and the Sunclothed Harlot in the heaven, there has been, and can be, no fellowship. They are essentially hostile organizations. Not that the anti-catholic woman as such is what Mr. Elliot styles “Christ’s faithful orthodox church;” for there were sects in her communion whose principles and practices were both worldly and unscriptural; but there were to be found in her anti-catholic pale οι λοιποι του σπερματος αυτης, remnants of her seed, who were characterized by “keeping the commandments of the Deity, and holding the testimony of the anointed Jesus”—ver. 17. These were anti-catholic of the intensest character; but they were also opposed to all other sects of the anti-catholic woman, which did not keep the commandments of the Deity, and did not hold the testimony of the anointed Jesus. This is illustrated by the position of CHRISTADELPHIANS in regard to all sects at this day. They are intensely anti-catholic, and are, therefore, an ecclesiastical element of the anti-catholic woman; but they do not, therefore, recognize as Christians, the anti-catholic sects of “Christendom” so-called.
The edict of Milan had confirmed to each individual of the Roman world the privilege of choosing and professing his own religion. But this inestimable privilege was soon violated; for with the knowledge of Catholic principles, the son and protector of the Catholic church, imbibed the maxims of persecution; and the sects which dissented from it were afflicted and oppressed by the triumph of Laodiceanism. Constantine easily believed that Heretics who presumed to dispute his opinions, or to oppose his commands, were guilty of the most absurd and criminal obstinacy; and that a seasonable application of severities might save those unhappy men from the danger of an everlasting condemnation. Not a moment, therefore, was lost in excluding the ministers and teachers of the separated congregations from any share of the rewards and immunities which the emperor had so liberally bestowed upon the Catholic clergy.
An imperial persecuting and repressant influence was thus brought to bear upon the anti-catholic woman, who under the hostile pressure would set her face fugitively towards the wilderness—εις την ερημον. The anti-catholic sect that took the lead in opposition at this crisis was that of the Donatists. It was in feud with the catholic sect before the overthrow of Maxentius; and, therefore, before the Roman Africa became subject to Constantine. It was such a feud as might be supposed to exist in the Baptist denomination, resulting p. 104 in the development of the Campbellite sect. There was, doubtless, error and wrong-doing both with the Donatists and Catholics; but, as from among the Anti-baptist Campbellites was originated τῳ λουτρῳ του ὑδατος εν ῥηματι, by the laver of the water with doctrine (Eph. v. 26), the CHRISTADELPHIAN DENOMINATION; so from among the anti-catholic Donatists began to be manifested in the three years of their trials before Constantine and his bishops, by the sealing angel that had ascended from the East (Apoc. vii. 2), the first of “the remnants of the woman’s seed, who keep the commandments of the Deity, and hold the testimony of the anointed Jesus.” The name of this first remnant, if it had any other than Donatist, has not come down to us. But it matters not what it was called in its beginning—it was the sect composed of “the servants of the Deity sealed in their foreheads.” This is the apocalyptic description of it. Arising in the epoch of the Donatist trials, and being with the Donatists intensely anti-catholic, it is very likely to have been confounded with them, without having at all been mixed up with the feud between the party of Cæcilian and that of Majorinus.
This feud is styled in history “the African Controversy.” The provinces south of the Mediterranean, from the confines of Cyrene to the columns of Hercules, A. D. 312, were distracted with religious discord. The source of the division was derived from a double election in the Catholic church of Carthage, the second in rank and opulence of the ecclesiastical thrones of the West. Cæcilian and Majorinus were the two rival bishops of Africa, and the death of the latter soon made room for Donatus, who, by his superior abilities and virtues, was the firmest support of his party. The advantage which Cæcilian might claim from the priority of his ordination was destroyed by the illegal, or at least indecent haste, with which it had been performed without awaiting the arrival of the bishops of Numidia. The bishops of the contending factions maintained, with equal ardor and obstinacy, that their adversaries were degraded, or least dishonored, by the odious crime of delivering up the Holy Scriptures to the officers of Diocletian to be burned. In this state of bitter partizanship, the divided church was incapable of affording an impartial judicature. Application was, therefore, made to Constantine by the Donatist bishops of Africa, A. D. 313, desiring him to appoint bishops of the church in Gaul to settle their difficulties. “Good emperor,” said they, “as you are of a just family, of all the emperors your father alone having never persecuted, and as Gaul is now exempted from that outrage, we ask you in your piety to appoint bishops from that province who may judge between us and the other bishops of Africa, with whom we are at variance.” Their request was granted, and p. 105 the controversy was tried in five successive tribunals, and the whole proceeding, from the first appeal to the final sentence, lasted above three years. A severe inquisition taken before the prætorian vicar and the pro-consul of Africa; the report of two episcopal visitors who had been sent to Carthage; the decrees of the Councils of Rome and Arles, and the supreme judgment of Constantine himself in his “sacred consistory,” were all favorable to the cause of Cæcilian: and he was unanimously acknowledged, by the Civil and Ecclesiastical Powers, as the true and lawful catholic primate of Africa. The honors and estates of the church were attributed to his suffragan bishops, and it was with difficulty that Constantine was satisfied with inflicting the punishment of exile on the principal leaders of the Donatists.
The punishment of exile was banishing, or causing to flee into a wilderness state. This was the imperial sentence upon the anti-catholic, or anti-state-church woman in the African wing of the empire. Her seed were banished from the high places of church and state, and made to seek refuge in the wild and uncivilized places of society.
Speaking of this “schism of the Donatists” A. D. 315, Gibbon remarks: “This incident, so inconsiderable that it scarcely deserves a place in history, was productive of a memorable schism, which afflicted the provinces of Africa above three hundred years, and was extinguished only with Christianity itself. The inflexible zeal of freedom and fanaticism animated the Donatists to refuse obedience to the usurpers, whose election they disputed and whose spiritual powers they denied. Excluded from the civil and religious communion of mankind (driven into the wilderness), they boldly excommunicated the rest of mankind, who had embraced the impious party of Cæcilian, and of the Traditors, from whom he derived his pretended ordination. They asserted with confidence that the prerogatives of the catholic church were confined to the chosen portion of the African believers, who alone had preserved inviolate the integrity of their faith and discipline. Whenever they acquired a proselyte, even from the distant provinces of the east, they re-immersed and re-ordained him, as they rejected the validity of the baptism and ordination administered by heretics or schismatics. Bishops and virgins were subjected to the disgrace of a public penance, before they could be admitted to the communion of the Donatists. If they obtained possession of a temple which had been used by their Catholic adversaries, they purified the unhallowed building with the same jealous care which a temple of idols might have required. They washed the pavement, scraped the walls, burnt the altar, which was commonly of wood, melted the consecrated plate, and cast the ‘holy p. 106 eucharist’ to the dogs, with every circumstance of ignominy which could provoke and perpetuate the animosity of religious factions. The narrow and solitary path which their first leaders had marked out, continued to diverge from the great society of mankind; so that they could affirm that when Christ should descend to judge the earth, he would find his true religion preserved only in a few nameless villages of the Cæsarean Mauritania.”
From this condensed quotation from Gibbon the reader will easily discern the feeling that existed between the Woman Jezebel in the heaven, and the Woman, by oppressive imperial edicts, caused to begin her flight into the wilderness. No enlightened professor of the doctrine which is according to godliness would think of looking for the true believers in “the heaven” where all was sunshine and imperial favor. “All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.”—2 Tim. iii 12. This testimony is true and not to be gainsaid, and directs us in our search for “the remnants of the woman’s seed, who keep the commandments of the Deity, and hold the testimony of the anointed Jesus,” to that anti-catholic community of professors, which has been ever since the great Donatist repudiation of the self-styled “Holy Catholic Church,” and “Church of God,” A. D. 315, an oppressed, proscribed and persecuted people—persecuted in some form or shape, if not by governments, by the machinations and slanders of scribes, pharisees and others; of all professors, in fact, whose foreheads are unsealed by the truth, and whose hearts, consequently, are unpurified by “faith that works by love” of the truth believed.
24. The Woman’s Place
“The woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place that had been prepared of the Deity—Ver. 6: And to the woman were given the two wings of the Great Eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness into her place”—Ver. 14.
The fourteenth verse, in certain particulars, is explanatory of the sixth. In this it is said that “the woman fled;” but nothing is hinted about “the two wings of the great eagle.” The sixth verse testifies that “she fled into the wilderness,” in which wilderness a place hath been prepared for her of the Deity. But where was this wilderness to be found? The Roman habitable was well stocked with wildernesses. Was it simply an uninhabited solitude, a desert waste? or did the word ερημον, indicate her isolation and exclusion from the ecclesiastical pale recognized by the powers that be? She fled into the wilderness-state, in which she did not stand in the presence of the p. 107 Serpent. The Serpent was in the heaven, from the sunshine and splendors of which she was caused to fly. It was the woman Jezebel that stood before the Serpent, and gloried in his embrace. The Serpent had beguiled her, and enthroned her in the heaven; but those of her party, who were proof against his enticements and subtilties, he banished from his imperial presence, that they might dwell alone in the solitude of social isolation.
But the woman fugitive was not an abstraction, or a mere idea. She was a multitude of dissidents from the new and established order of things. Like Israel after the flesh, they were to dwell alone, and not be reckoned among the nations; still, like Israel, they required some place, or country, in which to dwell. Where did the woman dwell in her wilderness-state? This question is answered in the fourteenth verse in the words, “The two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman.” These were the sections of the habitable divinely appointed for her, that there she might be sustained in her wilderness-state.
But, what was represented by this great bird of prey? The original is quite emphatic—ὁ αετος ὁ μεγας, the Eagle which is the great one. There was but one eagle contemporary with the woman’s flight that could be styled emphatically ὁ μεγας, the large, spacious, ample one. This was the Roman territorial jurisdiction. Rome was the eagle’s head; Italy, its body; and the Roman Africa and the regions of the Alps, Pyrennees, Britain, Bulgaria, Thrace, Asia Minor, and Armenia its wings or extremities. The eagle is the well-known symbol of the Roman Power. Moses alludes to this power in connection with the eagle in Deut. xxviii, 49, 50, 63, 64, as, “Yahweh shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, which as (כאשׁר, kaăshĕr) the eagle shall fly; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand; a nation of fierce countenance . . and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates . . . and ye shall be plucked from off thy land whither thou goest to possess it; and Yahweh shall scatter thee among all peoples.” This cannot refer to the Eagle of Nineveh and Babylon; because these eagle powers did not come “from the end of the earth” against Israel; and because they understood the tongue spoken by the Assyrians and Chaldeans. “The end,” not ends, “of the earth” in regard to Palestine, was Chittim, or Italy; whose ships came against Asshur, when Antiochus, king of Assyria, invaded Egypt—Dan. xi. 30. Israel did not understand the tongue of Chittim, which is known as that of the Roman Eagle, the Latin, between which and the Hebrew there is no family likeness. This eagle-nation was to come against them as a bird of prey to devour their body-politic, and to scatter them among all peoples, because p. 108 they did not fear “that glorious and fearful name, YAHWEH ELOHIM.” This was accomplished by the Roman legions under Titus, A.D. 70; predictive of which, YAHWEH ELOHIM, in fleshly manifestation, said, “wheresoever the carcase is, there shall the Eagles be gathered together”—Matt. xxiv. 28.
But, in relation to the woman’s flight into the wilderness, the two wings of the great Roman Eagle, spreading along its northeastern and southwestern regions, were not for destruction, but that she might find safety and protection in obscurity; upon the principle of being “out of the Serpent’s sight” (απο προσωπον) she might be out of his mind also. “The two wings” is regarded by some as a more correct reading than “two wings. They say that it reads thus in certain manuscripts—αι δυο πτερυγες. They are, no doubt, right. Daniel’s leopard had four wings; but there is nothing in symbolic prophecy to indicate that the great Roman Eagle had more than two. The mountains, glens, fastnesses, and more open valleys of these wings of the empire, would be but little cared for, or regarded, by the priests of the Catholic Church, who would crowd to those centres whence wealth and honors were distributed. The more interior locality of the eighteen hundred temples, endowed by the munificence of the emperor, would be the arena upon which they would, as Arians and Trinitarians, Iconoclasts and image-worshippers, disputatiously exhaust their zeal for the ensuing five hundred years. The violence of these all-absorbing disputes within the pale of the Serpent’s communion, would so occupy him that he would have but little time or ability to hunt for “heretics” and “schismatics” in the two wings of his dominion. In this way was providentially “prepared a place,” or country, for dissenters and nonconformists of whatever names their enemy, the Seed of the Serpent in church and state, might, in the plenitude of ignorance and malice, think proper to call them. It is not to be supposed, however, that in all sections of the Eagle’s Wings they would be always nourished in peace and safety. The woman’s seed could not evade the common lot of mankind, which is born to trouble. They are an afflicted people, clothed in sackcloth, until the end of their appointed time, when they will be invested with white raiment. But till then, affliction is more or less the rod of their condition; and necessarily so; for “whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth;” that, by this wholesome, but unjoyous, discipline they who are exercised by it, now partaking of the divine holiness, may hereafter reap the peaceable fruit of righteousness—Heb. xii. 6: Apoc. xi. 1-3.
p. 10925. The Period of the Woman’s Sojourn
“She hath a place which has been prepared of the Deity, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.—Ver. 6.
In the fourteenth verse, this is equivalently expressed by the words, “where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time out of sight of the Serpent.” This parallelism shows us that “1,260 days” is a form of words importing the duration of “a time, times, and half a time.” Whatever the word day may signify, it requires 1,260 of them to equal three times a half. In common time, 1,260 days are forty-two months, or three years and six months. But in dramatic prophecy, where the things predicted are acted on a small scale, by the persons of the drama, the time is proportioned, and therefore expressed in miniature. Hence, when a piece is performed on the boards of a theatre, its incidents, which are spread over a long series of years, are all brought in the acting before the spectator’s eye in the short space of an evening. This is a practical condensation of the time of the piece performed. If the acted time of the piece were dramatically expressed by the performer, according to the real time, an evening theatrical entertainment would be impossible. He has therefore, in his acting, to reduce the literal, or real, time of the incidents he represents, from years to minutes, which all the audience, from pit to gallery, easily perceives.
Now, upon the same principle of condensation is time exhibited in the apocalyptic drama. It is condensed from real time to acted time, the latter on being proportioned to the former, and to the agents dramatically engaged. Thus, if the real time be 1,260 years, it is proportionally represented by 1,260 days, or forty-two months, or three times and a half. It is also made proportional to the agents acting in the time. Thus, in the dramatic prophecy before us, the woman and her feeders, or nourishers, are the agents. She dwells in her place as a woman, the cycle of whose natural existence is threescore years and ten. Now, to affirm of her that they nourished her 1,260 years, would be in violation of the decorum of things. It would be a monstrosity in the picture, because out of all proportion, seeing that, naturally, women do not live 1,260 years. But the fitness and suitableness of things are observed; and the language descriptive of her pregnancy and subsequent life, does no violence, but is in strict accordance with, the laws of a real woman’s natural existence. The remarks of Daubuz upon symbolic time, are to the point in this place.
“The way of the symbolic language,” says he, “in expressions determining the spaces of time may be set in a plain light from the manner of predictions, or the nature of the prophetical visions. For p. 110 a prophecy concerning future events is a picture, or representation, of the events in symbols; which, being fetched from objects visible at one view, or cast of the eye, rather represent the events in miniature, than in full proportion; giving us more to understand than what we see; and, therefore, that the duration of events may be represented in terms suitable to the symbols of the visions, the symbols of duration must be also drawn in miniature. Thus, for instance, if a vast empire, persecuting the Church for 1,260 years, was to be symbollically represented by a beast, the decorum of the symbol would require that the said time of its tyranny should not be express by 1,260 years; because it would be monstrous and indecent to represent a beast ravaging for so long a space of time, but by 1,260 days. And thus a day may imply a year; because that short revolution of the sun bears the same proportion to the yearly, as the type to the antitype,”
Thus, the anti-catholic community was to be sustained, “out of the sight of the Serpent-government, in the two wings of the Great Roman Eagle, for one thousand two hundred and sixty years from the epoch of its legal condemnation as heretical, its exclusion from high places, and its banishment from the sunshine of imperial favor, A.D. 312-315. The three years intervening between these dates, constitute the initiatory epoch of the Woman’s flight. The individuals who composed the party of the woman were not all saints; they were all, as we have seen, exceedingly hostile to the State Church: but it was only a particular class of the woman’s seed which was entitled to be regarded as consisting of the saints. Her seed was composed of remnants, οι λοιποι, not, as in the Common Version, of a remnant. She was providentially placed in the wilderness, that she might be fed and nourished; for without food and nourishment she could not exist in such a world as this. The “faithful men” who were within her pale, “who were able to teach others”—2 Tim. ii. 2, fed her with knowledge and understanding (Jer. iii. 15); and “the earth,” with whom she found an asylum, “helped her” with the nourishment of protection, without which she would have been carried away of the serpent-flood. A remnant of her seed, and the common people of the Eagle’s wings, “the earth,” coalesced. They became political allies against the party in power.; and were upon emergency prepared to withstand their oppressor by force of arms. These were the vanguard of the other remnant of her seed, whose principle is passive endurance of injury “unto death;” and trusting for vindication to Him who saith, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” These were the saints sealed in their foreheads as the especial servants of the living God.
p. 111 Now, to what in our own times shall we liken the civil and ecclesiastical arrangement of things existing at the crisis of the woman’s flight? The following constitution of things with which the reader is familiar, will answer the purpose of bringing vividly before his mind what was presented before John’s in the dramatical exhibition of the woman in the wilderness. The British Imperial Unicorn is an element of the Serpent-power of the world. It is enthroned in all the splendor of the heaven; and sheds the rays of its glory and power upon all the constituted authorities of the state. Invested with this brightness is a Harlot, diademed with the jewels of the British crown. This woman is a daughter of “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots, and all the Abominations of the Earth;” and is constitutionally styled, “the Church of England and Ireland, as by law established.” In the palmy days of the Tudors and the Stuarts, there was another woman, who fled from the face of the British Serpent. This was the woman of nonconformity and dissent. And to this fugitive were given the wings, or extremities, of the Great Unicorn; that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished until the coming of the Ancient of Days. These wings are now known as the United States and British America. Here the Puritan Woman exists out of the sight of the British Serpent, fed by her spirituals, and nourished by “the earth,” which is remarkably inimical to everything British. But, are the sects of which this Anti-British State-Church Woman is composed, “the remnants of her seed which keep the commandments of the Deity, and hold the testimony of the anointed Jesus?” Far, very far, from it; they are as far from it as the British Harlot herself; nevertheless, there will be found within the pale of Anti-British Harlotry a remnant, styled CHRISTADELPHIANS, whose intellectual and moral characteristics are answerable to the last clause of Apoc. xii. 17.
Now, the Puritan Woman, styled by her enemies and persecutors “the Donatists;” but by the children of her body, Cathari, or the Pure Ones; for the first 1260 years of her existence was providentially settled in the wings of the Roman Eagle. Her remnants were not to be found in Persia, India, China, or America: but after the discovery and settlement of America, the persecutions and massacre of her seed by the Serpent-Powers of Europe caused her to seek refuge in the American wilderness, whereby the help of “the earth,” which styles itself “the unterrified democracy,” she is fed and nourished to the full.
It is now over 1550 years since her flight began in the days of Constantine, or A.D. 315. In Apoc. xi.—3, “the remnants of her seed” are specified by the names “THE HOLY CITY” and “The two p. 112 Witnesses.” The former, consists of those “who keep the commandments of the Deity, and hold the testimony of the anointed Jesus:” the latter, the Politico-Religious Democracy essentially and constitutionally hostile to the “Mother of Harlots” and her Harlot Daughters, in all the countries where they are “by law established.”
Now, the times of these two classes are differently arranged. The duration of the symbolical formulas is the same number of years with respect to each; though the symbolical formulas themselves are differently expressed. Thus the symbolical formula of “the Holy City” is written “forty-two months,” while the symbolical formula of the woman with especial reference to the remnant, “the witnesses,” is written “one thousand two hundred and sixty days.” This is also expressed in the form “a time, and times, and half a time:” and the reason why these two various formulas are given in the sixth and fourteenth verses of this twelfth chapter is, that this form, which is reproduced from Dan. vii. 25, and xii. 7, might be shown to consist of 1260 symbolic days. The form in Daniel indicates a period reaching to the epoch when judgment is given to the saints of the Highest Ones, which implies the manifestation of the Ancient of Days and the subsequent resurrection of the dead; because, there can be no judgment until they are raised; and no resurrection till He comes.
But the time when the 1260 œon commences is not the same in all its relations. In Dan. vii. and xii, it has special reference to “the Holy City,” or saints, in the highest sense; and begins with their delivery as heretics into the hand, or power, of the Roman Blasphemer, styled in Dan. xi. 38, 49, “a foreign god” and “a god of guardians.” The “forty-two months” of Apoc. xi. 2, begins at the same time. Not so, however, the 1260 of the Two Witnesses, and the times of the woman in ch. xii. 6, 14. These all begin with the commencement of her flight in the Constantinian epoch. In these times she was to be fed and nourished; and fire was to proceed out of the mouth of her dualized witnessing remnant, to devour her enemies and theirs. During these times they had power to shut the heaven, that it might not rain in their days of the prophecy, or the 1260. But when they may “have finished their witnessing,” which they accomplished at the end of that period, or 1260 years after their banishment by Constantine, that is, in the epoch A.D. 1572-’75, war was made upon them, and they were overcome, and put to death politically: they were “killed” in a like sense to the killing of “the third of the men” in ch. ix. 18—a death which said third sought, but could not find, because the time divinely appointed to extinguish the eastern Roman dominion had not yet come.
But, though the 1260 years of the sackcloth-witnessing of the anti-catholic p. 113 remnant of the woman’s seed ended in A.D, 1575; the other class of her seed, “the Holy City,” still continued to travail in the affliction of its down-trodden condition; and to press on through the weary years assigned to it in the “forty-two months,” or “the reed like to a rod” with which it was measured—Apoc. xi. 1. The finishing of the witnessing by the secular element of the woman in A.D. 1572-’5, marks the lapse of nine hundred and sixty-eight years of the forty-two months; in all of which time “the Holy City” had been in the hand of the Roman Blasphemer. At the end of the witnessing in A.D, 1575, there still remained two hundred and ninety-two years of the forty-two months to be traversed by the Holy City. These elapsed, and she attains the A.D. 1867-’8; or, having traversed and completed an œon or cycle, of forty-two months of years from A.D. 607, she is justified in looking for a speedy deliverance from the down-treading she has been subjected to in all that terrible and sanguinary time.
But though the 1260 years of her sustentation in the two wings of the Roman Eagle were fulfilled, it must not be supposed that, because war was made upon her seed, and they were overcome and politically killed, she was therefore dead, and had no further part in the history of the papal world. So long as she has a remnant upon the earth, she lives in it; though she may no longer be found in her original place of abode. Exterminated in one section of the Habitable, her seed reappear in another, on the principle of being persecuted in one city, they flee to another. In the first 1260 years of her sojourn out of the Serpent’s sight, her fugacious migrations were confined to the wings of his dominion. For three hundred years after her flight she was fed and nourished in the Roman Africa, and the Cottian Alps. At the end of these centuries, she disappeared from the African Wing of the Great Eagle, and manifested her presence in Armenia and Asia Minor; and when she could no longer find food and nourishment there, she migrated in the course of a hundred and fifty years into France, and thence into Bulgaria, and up the Danube westward and northward through Hungary and Bavaria. In the ninth century, the witnessing of her seed was no longer heard in Armenia, Asia Minor, and Thrace; but was more particularly limited to the Alpine regions of Italy, Switzerland, and France. In the twelfth century, the witnessing of her seed in these countries became so hateful to the Roman Catholic Church, that its malice against her became unbounded. “The rivers and fountains of waters,” or those who ruled among the mountains and valleys of the Alps, were stirred up by the spiritual head of that communion, to shed their blood without mercy—Apoc. xvi. 4-7: nevertheless, p. 114 the food and nourishment afforded her, enabled her to endure, and to continue her witnessing in these Alpine regions until the expiration of her 1260 years. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the power of the strong governments of Europe was brought to bear upon her seed. The two wings of the Great Eagle no longer afforded her protection; so that her witnessing against catholicism, and THE ANTICHRIST, whose power had now reached its greatest altitude and breadth, was suppressed in all the kingdoms, or Horns, of the Beast of the Sea—Apoc. xi. 7; xiii. 1.
This was the death of the witnessing of the politico-ecclesiastical remnant of her seed. The war upon her that ultimated in this result, continued over a century after the termination of her æon (αιων) of 1260 years. From A.D. 1685 to A.D. 1790, her seed’s voice against the Roman Antichrist was death-stricken in all the Ten-Horns of the Beast of the Sea. During this period of three lunar days and a half of years, her anti-catholic communities lay voiceless in the streets, or kingdoms, of the Great City, very much to the joy and mirthfulness of the priests and rulers of the Horn-Powers, especially of the VICE-GOD of “Christendom” and his Cardinals, whose sanguinary domination is now tottering to its fall. These priestly and besotted tyrants “rejoiced over them, and made merry,” because the tormenting testimony of her seed was, as they thought, effectually and finally silenced—Apoc. xi. 4-10. But they knew not the purposes of Him who doeth all things after the counsel of his own will. They knew not that a great revival of this tormenting witnessing had been decreed; and that their joyous mirth was doomed to set in mourning, lamentation, and woe. For, after the expiration of the three lunar days and a half of years, that is, of 105 years; marked also by the termination of 1260 years from the epoch A. D. 530-533, in which the Dragon-Power “acknowledged” the bishop of Rome as “a god” over all the spiritual affairs of his dominion—Dan. xi. 39:—after the end of his cycle, “the Spirit of life from Deity was to enter into them, and they were to stand upon their feet.” In the epoch of A. D. 1789-’93, this came to pass in the birth of what the terrified “foul spirits” and “unclean and hateful birds” of the Roman “cage,” denominate “THE REVOLUTION.” This fearful power, which is now sternly and threateningly glaring in the face of the trembling demon-and-idol-worshippers of the Roman “hold” (Apoc. xviii. 2), is the organized witnessing of the politico-ecclesiastical remnant of the Woman’s Seed. Created A. D. 315, slain A. D. 1685, it rose again A.D. 1789-’93; and, in the last epoch “it ascended to the heaven,” where it is now working through the Frog-like influences of the French, Italian, and Prussian powers; p. 115 which will not cease to operate until they shall have unwittingly “gathered the kings of the earth and of the whole habitable to the war of that great day of God Almighty—a day which is near, even at the door, and waiting only the expiration of the forty-two months of the down-treading of the Holy City; that is, of 1260 years from the giving of the Saints into the hand of “the Foreign God,” A. D. 607-’8; or 1335 from his “acknowledgment” by the King that did according to his will in A. D. 533; which gives for a glorious epoch to the believer, A. D. 1868-’9.
26. “The Earth Helped the Woman”
“And the Serpent cast out of his mouth after the Woman water as a flood, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. 16. And the earth ran with help for the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the Dragon cast out of his mouth. 17. And the Dragon was enraged against the woman, and went away to wage war with the remnants of her seed who keep the commandments of the Deity, and hold the testimony of the anointed Jesus”—Verses 15-17.
The Dragon, the Serpent, the Diabolos, and the Satan, in this twelfth chapter, are all terms expressive of the political, or civil, military, and spiritual, “enmity” in organized activity against the woman and her seed. When the political organization that seeks her destruction is wholly pagan, then it is represented as “a Great Fiery Red Dragon”—ver. 3: if still pagan, but not wholly so in all departments of the state, then it is no longer the “great fiery red dragon,” but simply the Diabolos,” as in ver. 12; and if no longer pagan, but a subtle and seductive power, wise in its own conceit, and invested with supreme authority, it is indicated by “the Serpent” and “the Dragon,” as in ver. 15, 16. This identity is established by the testimony concerning the flood of water, which states that it issued both from the mouth of the Serpent and the mouth of the Dragon: now the flood being one, not two, the serpent and the dragon in the verses at the head of this section must represent the same power.
But the dragon and his angels were cast out of the political heaven, or Roman government, “and their place was found no more in the heaven;” nevertheless, in the last four verses of this chapter we find the dragon in power, and exercising it vengefully for 1260 years against the woman, and making war with the remnants of her seed. How is this? It was the pagan constitution of power enthroned in Rome and Italy that was cast out, and has reappeared no more to this day. But after the battles of Adrianople and Chrysopolis all power over the Roman Habitable came to be vested in Constantine. He was the sole imperial bishop of the Dragon empire; p. 116 which, by the revolution he had consummated, was transformed from the Pagan Dragon, into the Catholic Dragon, dominion. It is this catholic serpent and dragon that figures in the concluding verses of this chapter, as well as in the thirteenth and twentieth chapters of the Apocalypse, which has no more to do with the great fiery red dragon after ch. xii. 13.
The throne of the pagan dragon was Rome; but when the dragon-power came to be vested in Constantine he established the New Polity in a New Capital, which after himself he styled, the City of Constantine, or Constantinople. In the period in which the woman became a fugitive, Constantinople, previously called Byzantium, became the capital of the Roman world. It has retained its sovereign rank over 1540 years. Its founder ascribed his resolution of building, it to the infallible and eternal decrees of Divine Wisdom; and in one of his laws, he declares that it was in obedience to the commands of God, that he laid the everlasting foundations of Constantinople. His choice of Byzantium for a city is said, by contemporary writers, to have been owing to a vision which appeared to him while he slept within the walls of that city. Its tutelar genius, a venerable woman sinking under the weight of years and infirmities, was suddenly transformed into a blooming female, whom his own hands adorned with all the symbols of imperial greatness. The emperor awoke, interpreted the auspicious omen, and obeyed, without hesitation, the supposed will of heaven. On the day on which the foundation of the city was laid, Constantine on foot, with a lance in his hand, traced out the boundary of the destined capital. It was of great extent, which his assistants observing, ventured to remark, that he had already exceeded the most ample measure of a great city. “I shall still advance,” replied Constantine, “till he, the invisible guide who marches before me, thinks proper to stop.” Whether or not the emperor did see the vision of his dream, it is a fact as already shown, that this twelfth chapter was generally supposed by anti-pagans of that day to refer to the events of the life of Constantine. Hence, it is more than probable that the dream he professes to have had was not a vision of his own, but a fiction into which he introduced the two women of this chapter, the one distressed, inferior, and persecuted, the other blooming and decorated with the sun, the moon and the stars, the symbols of imperial greatness, with which “his own hands adorned her;” and for whom he determined, dream or no dream, to found a new capital.
“Water as a flood” is said to have been cast out of the serpent’s mouth after the woman to sweep her away. Water flowing like a river indicates an army or body of men in motion. That water symbolizes p. 117 people is evident from Apoc. xvii. 15. Hence, when the water is in motion the people are moving; when it flows like a river the body of people moves in a certain direction; when the river overflows its banks, the army crosses its frontiers and invades another nation; when the water sweeps along like a flood, the army subdues and carries all before it; but when the earth opens and absorbs the flood, then the operations of the army are spent without effecting its purpose; and if the water of the river be dried up, as in Apoc. xvi. 12, the power and independence of the people represented are destroyed. Some of these definitions are strikingly illustrated in Isai. viii. 7: “Behold,” says the prophet, “Yahweh bringeth up upon them (the Jews) the waters of the river, the strong and mighty; even the king of Assyria and all his force. And he shall rise above all his channels, and shall go over all his banks; and he shall pass through Judah, overflowing and spreading; even to the neck shall he reach; and the extension of his wings (the wings of his army) shall be over the full breadth of thy land, O Immanuel!” The kingdom of Assyria was divided from that of Israel by the Euphrates, termed in scripture “the river,” and “the great river.” Hence, it came to symbolize his power; so that when he invaded Israel, the waters of his river are said to have swelled over their banks, and flooded their country to so great an extent as to rise “to the neck,” or capital, but without submerging it; so that it would be an overflowing invasion, which would recede without finally subjecting the nation.
The Mouth of the Serpent or Dragon is symbolical of the words, utterances and commands, proceeding from the power called serpent or dragon. The commands of a power are expressed or made audible and effective by the reigning administration of public affairs; and which holds a similar relation to the power that the mouth does to the brain of a man. Hence, “the Mouth of the Dragon, the Mouth of the Beast, and the Mouth of the False Prophet,” are the governments of the powers signified by these symbols.
The Serpent and Dragon are said to have cast water as a flood out of their Mouth; that is, an army of pursuers was sent forth by order of the catholic government of Constantinople and Rome, to sweep the fugitive woman from among the living. The execution of this decree of extermination might have been successful, had not “the earth ran with help for the woman, and opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood.” The Common Version says, “the earth helped the woman.” This is not incorrect; but it is not as exact as it might be, and as the events represented justify. The word βοηθεω, signifies properly, “to run to the aid of those who cry for help.”
p. 118 The woman in her flight was pursued, or persecuted by power, which caused in her sufferings to cry aloud. Her cries fell upon the ears of the earthiest of earthborns, who ran to and fro dealing the most terrific vengeance upon her foes. The ferocious purpose of the catholic power encountering this most unexpected resistance was defeated; the earth swallowed up the wrath which expended itself upon it, and the woman was saved.