name of the man being ascertained, we have only to inquire, what man in particular may be reasonably and scripturally determined to be the specific man intended.

With respect to this man, it may be observed: both that he must be some very eminent person; and that he must stand in close politico-theological connection with the beast, whose number and whose name he thus specially participates. It may also be added, that, since he is thus peculiarly branded as an apostate in the midst of a multitude of minor and less influential apostates, we may fairly expect: both that he will be a peculiar subject of scriptural prophecy; and that he will there be reprobated under the precise aspect of an apostate, who is the leader of apostates, or who is the spiritual head of an apostasy commensurate with the dominions of the beast whose own descriptive name is Apostatès.

Now it is hard to discover any man, to whom this mingled character will answer with more special propriety, than the extraordinary person foretold by St. Paul under the appellation of The man of sin. We have shewn, that the person, thus designated, is the same as he who presides in the little horn or kingdom of Daniel's fourth beast: and we shall presently shew, that, under the title of the false prophet, he is the same also as the head of that second apocalyptic beast or Empire which forms the prominent subject of the next section of the little book. Hence he is, at once, a

most conspicuous character, and a person standing in the very closest politico-theological connection with the beast whose number is 666. Nor is this all. St. Paul connects the revelation of the man of sin with the coming of a great Apostasy: and, in fact, by the revelation of that lawless one as its ostensible head, the Apostasy in question is completed. The man of sin, therefore, the head of the Apostasy, the very dux gregis, is of course himself preeminently the Apostate.

Hence, I think, we can scarcely doubt, that the man in the Apocalypse, whose descriptive name is Apostates and whose number is 666, is no other than the person, whom St. Paul denominates the man of sin, and whom he represents as presiding over a great apostasy from the sincere faith of the Gospel. In a word, the man, who participates the descriptive name and number of the beast, is the Roman Pontiff.

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CHAPTER V.

RESPECTING THE FOURTH SECTION OF THE LITTLE OPEN BOOK, OR THE VISION OF THE TWO-HORNED BEAST OF THE EARTH.

To complete his account of the great promoters and upholders of the demonolatrous Apostasy, it now only remains, that St. John should describe the spiritual Power, by the instigation of which the secular ten-horned beast is led to persecute the saints of God during the allotted of 1260 natural years.

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Accordingly, he devotes the fourth section of the little book to a development of the character of this tyrannical Empire within an Empire, under the symbol of a second beast coëxisting and coöperating with the first beast and afterward, when he returns to the larger sealed book, he yet further exhibits both its essential nature and its close connection with the secular beast, under the hieroglyphic of a harlot riding upon that secular beast or of an ecclesiastical community guiding the actions of the apostatic Empire which the secular beast represents.

As these two allied symbols, the second beast and the harlot, mutually illustrate each other, I shall consider them, in one and the same prolonged discussion, successively and conjointly.

I. The description of the second beast occurs, as

I have stated, in the fourth section of the little open book: and it is couched in terms following.

I beheld another wild-beast coming up from the earth: and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first wild-beast before him: and he causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first wild-beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, in order that he may make fire even come down from heaven upon the earth, in the sight of men. And he deceiveth those, who dwell upon the earth, by the wonders which it was given him to do in the sight of the wild-beast: saying to them, that dwell on the earth, to make an image for the wildbeast, which hath the wound of the sword and yet lived. And it was given unto him to give life unto the wild-beast's image, in order that the wild-beast's image should even speak, and in order that he might cause that as many as would not worship the wild-beast's image should be killed1. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, that they should give to them a mark upon their right hand or upon their foreheads: and that no man might be able to buy or to sell, save he that had the mark, the name of the wild-beast or the number of his name?.

'That is to say, the beast, not the image, might cause. Doddridge and Woodhouse in loc.

"Rev. xiii. 11-17.

See

1. In the symbolical language of prophecy, a wild-beast denotes a persecuting and idolatrous Empire, as contradistinguished from a horn or the smaller included domination of a persecuting and idolatrous kingdom.

(1.) Now St. John, in the Apocalypse, brings upon the stage two wild-beasts or two persecuting and idolatrous Empires: the one bearing ten horns, or comprehending ten kingdoms; the other distinguished by two horns, or containing two kingdoms. Yet these two Empires, instead of being successive, are contemporary: and, instead of being mutually at variance, are described as linked together in the most intimate friendship. For the second Empire evidently plays the part of an ally to the first and nothing can be more clear, than that they are both engaged in one and the same unhallowed warfare against the people of God.

Daniel, however, declares, that, in the great calendar of prophecy, the ten-horned or Roman beast is the last secular Empire, with which the fortunes of the Church should be specially connected; and he is wholly silent respecting his contemporaneousness and alliance with any other beast, though he represents him as being strangely under the influence of his own eleventh or supernumerary little horn: while St. John, on the contrary, who mentions with equal explicitness the ten-horned or Roman beast, is altogether silent respecting the eleventh little horn, though he represents him as influenced in the very same manner by a second beast or a second Empire.