heads and ten horns. The former are afterwards minutely explained, by the apostle himself, in the same chapter, as the seven hills on which she sits; they are also seven kings, that is, it would seem, seven periods of empire, of which five are past, one now is, and one brief one is yet to come, and the bloody beast itself—the religion of heathenism—is another. The ten horns are the ten kings or sovrans who never received any lasting dominion, but merely held the sway one after another, a brief hour, with the beast, or spirit of heathenism. These, in short, are the ten emperors of Rome before the days of the Apocalypse;—Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian and Titus. These had all reigned, each his hour, giving his power to the support of heathenism, and thus warring against the faith of the true believers. Still, though reigning over the imperial city, they shall hate her, and make her desolate; strip her of her costly attire, and burn her with fire. How well expressed here the tyranny, of the worst of the Caesars, plundering the state, banishing the citizens, and, in the case of Nero, "burning her with fire!"
Who can mistake the gorgeously awful picture? It is heathen, imperial Rome, desolating and desolated, at that moment suffering under the tyrannic sway of him whom the apostle cannot yet number with the gloomy TEN, that have passed away to the tomb of ages gone. It is the mystic Babylon, drunk with the blood of the faithful witnesses of Christ, and triumphing in the agonies of his saints, "butchered to make a Roman holiday!" No wonder that the amazement of the apostolic seer should deepen into horror, and highten to indignation. Through her tyranny his brethren had been slaughtered, or driven out from among men, like beasts; and by that same tyranny he himself was now doomed to a lonely exile from friends and apostolic duties, on that wild heap of barren rocks. Well might he burst out in prophetic denunciation of her ruin, and rejoice in the awful doom, which the angels of God sung over her; and listen exultingly to the final wail over her distant fall, rolling up from futurity, in the coming day of the Gothic and Hunnish ravagers, when she should be "the desolator desolate, the victor overthrown."
As there are three mystically named cities—Sodom, Babylon, and the New Jerusalem; so there are three metaphoric females,—the star-crowned woman in heaven, the bloody harlot on the beast in the wilderness, and the bride, the Lamb's wife. A peculiar
