For 1260 prophetic days then, or years, she was to disappear from men's view in the Roman world. Is it asked how her vitality was preserved? Doubtless in her children, known to God, though for the most part unknown to men; just like the 7000 that Elijah knew not of, who had yet not bowed the knee to Baal; some it might be in monasteries,1 some in the secular walks of life; but all alike insulated in spirit from those around as on other points, as expressed in its Articles and Liturgy. 3. The want of wisdom in those who, though professedly Protestants of the Church of England, do yet depart on this most important point from its doctrine.-I would beg to refer further on it to Hooker's Eccl. Polity, B. iii. § 1, 2, and Mede's Works, B. iii. ch. 10; also Mr. McNeile's Lectures on the Church of England, p. 10, &c. 1 I fully agree with the sentiment so eloquently expressed by Mr. Maitland, in his Book on the Waldenses, p. 45, as to the piety of many a tonsured monk, &c. Indeed on revision it seems to me so well and beautifully to illustrate the subject before us, that I cannot resist the pleasure of quoting the passage in part. "I will not shrink from avowing my belief that many a tonsured head now rests in Abraham's bosom, and that many a frail body bowed down with voluntary humiity, and wasted with unprofitable will-worship, clothed in rags and girt with a bell-rope, was a temple of the Holy Ghost:-and that one day these her unknown children will be revealed, to the astonishment of a Church accustomed to look back with a mixture of pride and shame to the days of her barrenness. She may ask, 'Who hath brought up these? Behold I was left alone: these, where had they been?' But she will have learned to know the seal of the living God, and will embrace them as her sons."-Compare however the illustration in the Note following as to the real spirit of vital faith in the persons spoken of. * In our own days there are many such. The visibility of the Church to which Christ's promises attach, has been especially advocated by the Oxford Tractarians, and semi-Tractarians. So Tract xi. "Why should not the visible Church continue? The onus probandi lies with those who deny this position." And Mr. Dodsworth; "There is no such thing as an invisible Church. I protest against the invisible number of persons, whom God shall finally bless and save, being called the Church. The Church is a body of persons called out and set apart by a visible order from the rest of the world." Again, Mr. Gresley says; "The evangelicals are unsound in the doctrine of the one Catholic and Apostolic Church; confounding it with that of the communion of saints, or invisible Church: holding it in a manner different from that in which it has been held by the Church Universal from the beginning." (Bernard Leslie, p. 339.)-As to this alleged confusion of ideas on the part of others, and Mr. G.'s own distinction of them, what will Mr. Gresley say to Archdeacon Manning? "The substance of the Apostles' Creed, as it now stands, except only the Articles of the 'Descent into Hell,' and the Communion of Saints,' was contained in the baptismal profession of the apostolic age. The two excepted Articles are in fact only explanations of the articles Buried,' and the Church.'" (Rule of Faith, p. 64.) So that by the rule of antiquity, as Archd. Manning expounds it, "the Evangelicals" would seem to be completely right in identifying the one Holy Catholic Church of the Apostles' Creed with the Communion of Saints; Mr. Gresley completely wrong in distinguishing them. It may be useful to compare my observations in Vol. i p. 212. them, and as regards the usual means of grace, spiritually destitute and desolate; even as in a barren and dry land, where no water is."-Besides whom some few there were of her children,-some very few,-prepared like Elijah of old to act a bolder part, and stand forth, under special commission from God, as Christ's Witnesses before Christendom. Was not Vigilantius, at the very time when the flood from the Dragon's mouth was beginning to be poured forth upon the Roman world, a specimen and prototype of them in one point of view; and Augustine in another? These were they of whom the sacred prophecy speaks in the last verse of the chapter before us, as "keeping the commandments of God, and the testimony or witness of Jesus: " these they whose faithfulness and courage in after times was depicted in that striking narrative and vision of the two Witnesses, given in the Part within-written of the Apocalyptic scroll, that has been already under our consideration. And the Devil, the animating Spirit of the old Paganism,-seeing that such there were, and that such there would be, in the new state of things just about to be introduced, -is represented as proceeding, with wrath 1 I may refer to Merle D'Aubigne, Bk. 1, p. 79, (Engl. Transl.) for a touching exemplification of this, which only came to light on the pulling down, in the year 1776, of an old building that had formed part of the Carthusian convent at Basle. It seems that a poor Carthusian brother, Martin, had written the following affecting confession: "O most merciful God, I know that I can only be saved, and satisfy thy righteousness, by the merit, the innocent suffering, and death of thy well-beloved Son. Holy Jesus! my salvation is in thy hands. Thou canst not withdraw the hands of thy love from me; for they have created, and redeemed me. Thou hast inscribed my name with a pen of iron in rich mercy, and so as nothing can efface it, on thy side, thy hands, and thy feet, &c."-This confession he placed in a wooden box, and enclosed the box in a hole he had made in the wall of his cell; where it was found on the occasion before mentioned. And the following remarkable words were found also written in his box; "Et si hæc prædicta confiteri non possim linguâ, confiteor tamen corde et scripto." Who does not see the solitariness, the wilderness-state of this poor monk in that which was his world, the monastery ;-it might be a numerous one! None there with kindred consciousness endued !— This was to be alone; this, this was solitude. May I not suggest Fenelon in his latter days, notwithstanding his high rank in the Romish Church, as another example in point? Alive," says Sir R. Inglis, Fenelon was condemned and persecuted; and to this day one of his devotional works (Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Interieure') is placed in the Papal Index of Abominations." Speeches on the Roman Catholic Question, p. 28. against Christ's cause and Church still undiminished, to plot for their destruction. His direct attack against one most essential doctrine of Christianity had failed. His indirect, by temptations to superstition, had succeeded so far as to have mainly operated to drive the true and primitive Christian Church almost into banishment. This then he saw to be the fittest principle of the new plan of attack. All seemed prepared in the mind of professing Christendom for it. Out of Christendom ecclesiastical itself to perfect an Anti-christendom, this was the grand problem set before him. And wonderful to say, the very adhesion of the Roman empire and Church established in it to Trinitarian orthodoxy, its very confession of the divinity of the Son of God, was one element, and an essential one, to its success. The scheme was developed by the prescient and eternal Spirit to St. John in the vision of the next chapter. And it was one indeed, (what was just noticed making it so perhaps more than any other characteristic,) which well deserved the appellation given it by the late Mr. Cecil; I mean that of "the master-piece of Satan." CHAPTER III. IDENTITY OF THE APOCALYPTIC WILD BEASTS FROM THE ABYSS AND SEA WITH EACH OTHER;—AND OF THE RULING HEAD IN EITHER WITH THE LITTLE HORN OF DANIEL'S TEN- OF SIN, AND ST. JOHN'S ANTICHRIST. 1 "AND he stood on the sand of the flood. And I saw a Wild Beast rising up out of the flood, having seven 1 esaon; i. e. the Dragon stood. I adopt this reading in preference to esalŋv I stood; because, besides being a reading of excellent manuscript authority, (au heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten diadems, and upon his heads names of blasphemy." &c. Apoc. xiii. 1. We are now come to one of the most important of the Apocalyptic predictions. As if with a regard to its great importance, not only is a very full description given of the Wild Beast, its subject, in the chapter now before us; but, in a manner unparalleled in the Apocalypse, this Beast is made the subject of a second figuration in the xviith chapter: the latter figuration being given at the termination of its predicted history, as the present is at its commencement.-In so speaking, however, I am assuming the identity of the Wild Beasts in the one and the other vision depicted to the evangelist. To prove this will be my first object in the present Chapter my second to prove their common identity, or rather that of the ruling Head in either case, (a point almost as interesting and important as the former to the Apocalyptic investigator,) with Daniel's fourth or tenhorned Wild Beast's Little Horn, and with the Man of Sin and the Antichrist of St. Paul and St. John. §1.-IDENTITY OF THE APOCALYPTIC WILD BEASTS FROM THE SEA AND FROM THE ABYSS, OF APOC. XIII AND XVII. In order the better to exhibit the evidence of this identity, and also to set before the Reader's eye, preparatory to our investigation of the subject, every recorded particular of them prefigured to St. John, I subjoin the thority according to Griesbach not indeed equal to esalŋy, but according to Tregelles superior *) it seems to me to have also much superior internal evidence to support it :-inasmuch as it perfectly accords with the appropriateness of the figure that the Dragon should stand on the flood-brink to make over his empire and throne to the Wild Beast thence evoked by him; while, on the other hand, there could be no reason why St. John, having witnessed from his usual position the flood itself, should need personal transference to its brink to see the Wild Beast rising therefrom. * It is both in the Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraemi: also in ninetytwo Codices of inferior authority, and in the Vulgate, Ethiopic, Syriac, Armenian and Arabic versions. descriptions of the one Beast and the other in parallel 2 Greek θαλασσης. 1 αναβαινον. This, like the Hebrew, is used perpetually of any flood of waters, especially of one formed by the overflowing of a river. So of the overflowing of the Jordan that formed the Sea of Galilee, or Tiberias, Joh. vi. 1, xxi. 1; of the overflowing Euphrates, Jer. li. 42: of the overflowing Nile, Ezek. xxxii. 2 and of the overflowing Tigris, Nahum iii. 8, &c. Whence, a river cast out of the mouth of the Dragon, in order to overwhelm the woman, having been just immediately before spoken of, this seems the natural meaning to give the word θαλασση here. 3 ονόματα. So Griesbach, Scholz, and Tregelles. 4 θρόνον. 5 edov is rejected by Griesbach, Scholz, and Tregelles: an omission which makes the accusative next following referable for its government to the verb gave just preceding; "the dragon gave him one of his heads that had been wounded to death;" as if to be healed. 7gn. 6 is copayμevny, in the perf. part. passive. 9 ποιησαι, i. e. to act prosperously. 10 E8σia: which is the word also in verses 7, 12. 11 επι των ύδαπων των πολλων. 8 ότι. 12 γεμον ονοματων βλασφημίας. So the received Text and Griesbach. Tregelles reads τα ονόματα. |