women to have been made with reference to the heretics symbolized, because women have so often been misled by and patronized heretics; e. g. Constantine's sister, and afterwards Justina, in the case of Arius and the Arians, Priscilla of Montanus, Lucilla of Donatus. In the sixth Trumpet he supposes the four Euphratean Angels to be identical with the four Angels of the winds in Apoc. vii; like Primasius and other Expositors before him.

After this I see no variation from Primasius, either in the exposition of the rainbow-crowned Angel's figuration in Apoc. x, or that of the Witnesses in Apoc. xi. Indeed he often quotes at length from Primasius, though without acknowledgment; as, for example, in the exposition of the verse Thou must prophesy again," as applicable both to John specially, and the Church universally. The two Witnesses he makes Enoch and Elias; 3 reproving Victorinus for suggesting Jeremiah. The Great City in which the Witnesses would be slain, might be either the world, or the earthly literal Jerusalem : their time, 1260 days, (three and a half years) either, mystically taken, the whole time of Christ's Church witnessing, after the example of the three and a half years that was the whole time of Christ's ministry, or literally.-In Apoc. xii, he expounds the travailing Woman, both of the Virgin Mary and the Church, specially and generally. In Apoc. xiii. like Cyril, he makes Antichrist to be the eighth head of the Beast, by subduing the seven remaining kings of the ten. The second or two-horned Beast he well and truly (I think) distinguishes from the other, as signifying the preachers and ministers of Antichrist; feigning the lamb in order to carry out their hostility against the Lamb: as Antichrist too, the first Beast's head wounded to death, would, he says, exhibit himself pro Christo, as Christ. The

Ib. 503.

2 See the full quotation at p. 151 of my 2nd volume. See p. 319 Note 1.

3 So, he says, Jerome and Pope Gregory. Ib. 522. 5 So at p. 537, in his notice of the woman's flight into the wilderness for three and a half times. "Cur hoc totum ecclesiæ tempus tribus annis et sex mensibus generaliter designatur patet ratio; propter evangelicam scilicet prædicationem, quæ trium temporum et dimidii spatii edita fuisse cognoscitur.”—I do not remember to have seen any such reason given for this mystical sense in Ansbert's predecessors.-Elsewhere, p. 545, he compares the equivalent forty-two months to Israel's forty-two stations in the wilderness.

6 So p. 541 repeated again p. 548, "præpositi atque prædicatores Antichristi." Here he nearly follows Irenæus. 7 Ib. 544.

"bringing fire from heaven" he explains as pretending and seeming to men to have the power of giving the Holy Spirit, such as Simon Magus wished to obtain by money; and that the second Beast would, by its preachings, signs, and dogmas, make men believe that the Holy Spirit resided in Antichrist. (This seems to me original, and quite deserving of remark.) Also that the Beast's Image meant Antichrist, the Devil's Image, while pretending to be Christ's image; and that all who assumed a similar hypocritical garb, would make as it were to themselves an image of the Beast.-On the Beast's mark he observes, that its being required on the forehead meant a man's profession,-on his head, his acts: and, as names containing the number 666, he mentions Irenæus' Teray, as well as those in Victorinus, αντεμος, γευσηρικός.

After the Vials, in which nothing appears to me observable, but that he makes the ulcer of the first Vial to be infidelity, (such as with the Jews and Pagans,3) the subject comes up again in Apoc. xvii, of the Beast and the Harlot riding him. Here he speaks of the old notion that the Beast that was and is not meant Nero, once one of seven Roman Emperors, and destined to rise again as Antichrist, as "absurd : " that the Beast (answering to Antichrist's body) had existed from the beginning in Cain, and the wicked afterwards; and that it might be said to have been, and not be, and yet be, because of the fleeting and successive generations of evil men. Of the five kings that had fallen, his solution is certainly as "absurd" as that he ridicules :-viz., that as in man the five senses come before reason, and then on reason's coming man's sixth and mature age, so in its sixth age, then current, the world had come to its maturity; and, preferring error, that so in the seventh would come Antichrist. -As to which sixth age he takes the opportunity of saying else

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Quos ut illi ministri Sathanæ facilius decipere possint, coram ipsis Spiritum sanctum dare se simulant; sicut dudum Simon Magus, &c." p. 549.

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Quomodo intelligendum est dare illi spiritum, nisi quia sive prædicationibus, sive signis et miraculis, suadere hominibus conatur spiritu prophetiæ plenum esse Antichristum?" p. 550.

3 Let me add that the Euphrates, the river of Babylon, will, he considers, be dried up when its power to injure and persecute is dried up; and that thus the way will be prepared for Christ the King from the East, according to Primasius' reading of the word in the singular; or, if in the plural, for the apostles and ministers of the Church. Ib. 580. • Ib. 592.

5 Ibid. So Tichonius. See p. 336.

⚫ Page 593.

where,' that it is not tantamount to the sixth millennary: the first age of the six being that from the creation to the flood, of more than 2000 years: so that none might argue from the 6000th year of the world approaching, that the end of the world was at hand; God keeping in his own hands the times and seasons.-On the millennium he of course follows his two predecessors and Augustine. And the New Jerusalem, and its blessings, he explains partly of the Church's present blessings; partly of those to be enjoyed in its future and heavenly state.2

During this same eighth century the venerable Bede flourished, who composed a Commentary on the Apocalypse. I have quoted from it in my third Volume, p. 235; but do not see need to say more of it, as it was most similar in general character and particular explanations to those of which I have just spoken.-Nor again need we stop at the Apocalyptic Comment by Haymo, Bishop of Halberstadt in the ninth century; whose Work forms a thick substantial duodecimo, in the princeps Editio printed at Cologne A.D. 1529; after collation, it is said, of many manuscript codices. For I have found it, on examination, to be little better than an abridgment from Ambrose Ansbert. There is scarce a chapter in which the examiner will not observe this. I shall only therefore mention three things from his Commentary:-1st, that in support of the three and a half days of the two Witnesses lying dead meaning three and a half years, he cites (first I believe of expositors) the well known passage from Ezekiel iv. as others had that from Numbers xiv ;-2ndly, that he reads in Apoc. xvii. 16, the horns thou sawest on the Beast," en To Onpiov. whereas Ansbert read, Kas To Onpion :-3rdly, that on Apoc. xviii. 3, which speaks of the reprobated merchandize of Babylon, he applies it to those that then sold their souls for lordships and bishoprics: tatus et episcopatus."

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I now turn to Primasius' and Ambrose Ansbert's two chief cotem

1 Viz. p. 553.

So on the river of life; "Possunt cuncta hæc ad præsens tempus referri, quo instar Paradisi prædicationis flumine saneta rigatur ecclesia." p. 646. At p. 647, however, on the absence of the curse, he explains it as fulfilled "in illâ æternâ felicitate," &c.

porary expositors in the GREEK Church and empire; viz. Andreas, and his follower Arethas.

Andreas was Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia. His age is said by Bellarmine, and also by Peltan the Jesuit, in his Preface to the Latin translation of Andreas' Apocalyptic Commentary,' to have been uncertain; save only that it was later than Basil, the famous father of the fourth century, as Andreas quotes him. By Cave and Lardner, while admitting its uncertainty, he is assigned to the latter part of the fifth century. And so too Professor M. Stuart. But I think internal evidence is not wanting to fix his date a half-century at least, if not a whole century later.

For first, besides other authors, he quotes Dionysius, the so-called Areopagite; one whose work is cited by no authority of known earlier chronology than the middle of the sixth century,4 Secondly, after noticing (under the fourth seal") a pestilence and famine in the Emperor Maximin's territory, at the close of the Diocletian persecution, in which dogs were wont to be killed that they might not prey on the unburied corpses, Andreas speaks of much the same thing having become usual in his own time ; Quin nostrâ quoque ætate quædam similia usu venisse novimus : a statement scarcely applicable except to a time of prolonged pestilence and mortality; and most exactly applicable to the æra of the great and almost universal plague and mortality under Justinian, prolonged from A.D. 542 to 594; during which it is expressly on record that corpses were frequently left unburied."-Thirdly, while recording generally the calamities and slaughters experienced by the generation then living, especially from the barbarians surrounding the province or empire, Andreas more than once particularly specifies the Persians

Given in the B. P. M. v. 589-633.

2 Lardner cites Cave's statement. "Vixisse videtur circà exitum seculi istius, ac claruisse anno 500. Incerta enim prorsus illius ætas." Lardner v. 77.

* In Apoc. i. 267.-Hug too, in his Introduction to the New Testament, Vol. i. p. 230, (Wait's Translation,) speaks of Andreas' age as not known; and that people vary in their conjectures from the 5th to the 8th century.

The earliest occasion, as Pagi admits, being the conference at Constantinople between the Catholics and the Severiani, A. D. 532.—Lardner himself, allowing a margin of fifty years, supposes that Dionysius' date may be perhaps set down at A. D. 490.

5 B. P. M. p. 600.

* Gibb. vii. 421. I have noticed this famous pestilence in my Vol. i. p. 374. 7 So on the sixth Seal, p. 601, speaking of Christians fleeing from place to place, in

as persecutors and slaughterers of Christians, both long previously, and even up to the time when he wrote; also their having been ever given up to magic (magiis) and superstitions: -statements well applicable to the period of Nushirvan's invasion of the Syrian province, A.D. 546, or of his last brief war with the Romans, A.D. 572; and still more to that of Chosroes' invasion and desolation of Cappadocia and other Roman provinces, in the year 611.2 On the other hand there the time of Antichrist, in order to escape his persecution, he adds; "Cujusmodi incommoda et clades nos quoque, ante Antichristi adventum, propter peccata nostra jam experti sumus." And on Apoc. xvii, p. 617, he says of many of his fellow-citizens of the Eastern Empire, that "Nefanda illa mala, quæ ex barbaris qui in circuitu degunt inferuntur, ægro animo ferentes," they impeached God's goodness, "quasi tot illas tantasque afflictiones nostræ huic generationi reservare non debuerit."

1 So on Apoc. xviii; p. 623. “Illa Babylonia quæ apud Persas extat," (he means Susa the Persian capital,) "quæ multorum sanctorum sanguinem diversis temporibus effuderit, et usque in præsentem diem effudere non desinit; magiisque et superstitionibus semper dedita fuerit." Again at p. 620, referring to the Persian Capital, he observes; "God knows the wickedness of that Babylon which even now reigns." The following chronological sketch (taken from Gibbon) of the Roman wars with Persia will illustrate what has been said: a sketch commencing from the æra of the great Theodosius, and his peace with Persia about 390. A. D.

A. D. 422, a slight alarm of Persian war; which however scarcely disturbed the tranquillity of the East. A Bishop having destroyed a fire-temple at Susa, (the Persian capital,) the Magi excited a cruel persecution of Christians in Persia, under Yezdegerd and Bahram. Armenia and Mesopotamia were filled with hostile armies; but no memorable acts. A truce for eighty years were agreed on, and the main conditions of the treaty were respected for nearly eighty years. Gibb. v. 428.

A. D. 502-505. A short Persian war; in which Amida was taken by the Persians, and Edessa unsuccessfully assaulted: then a peace, and Dara built by the Romans, which for a while proved an effective frontier defence. Gibb. vii. 138, &c.

A. D. 540. Nushirvan (also called Chosroes) invades Syria, takes Antioch its capital, slaughters the people, pillages the Churches, and sacrifices to the Magian God, the sun.-. —A. D. 541, 542, he is forced beyond the Euphrates by Belisarius ; and, Dara and Edessa having shortly afterwards successfully resisted a Persian attack, "the calamities of war were suspended by those of pestilence; and a tacit or formal agreement between the two sovereigns protected the tranquillity of the Eastern frontier." Gibb. vii. 311–318, In Colchos the war still continued, till A. D. 561; when a peace for fifty years was agreed on.-A. D. 572-579. Renewal of war. Dara taken; Syria overrun and despoiled; Caesarea (in Cappadocia) threatened; till in the battle of Militene the tide of success turned in favour of the Romans.-A. D. 579, Nushirvan's death.

Soon after this Chosroes, Nushirvan's grandson, under the pressure of civil wars, fled for refuge to the Romans; and was soon with their aid restored. On Phocas' murder of the Emperor Maurice, and usurpation of the eastern empire, Chosroes A. D. 603, invades the empire; A. D. 611 conquers and desolates Syria; then takes aud sacks Caesarea; and then, A. D. 614, Jerusalem, the Magi and the Jews urging the holy warfare the sepulchre of Christ is pillaged of the offerings of 300 years, and 90,000 Christians massacred. In 616 Asia Minor is overrun again to the Bosphorus: and