at this very time professedly writing the history of the 1260 days; and notwithstanding the three other chapters of the little book, namely, the chapter which immediately precedes this, and the two chapters which immediately follow it, are by the Bishop himself allowed to relate exclusively to the events of the 1260 days in the West.

"This plan of interpretation is liable to numerous objections-In the first place, it is highly improbable that the prophet, after having already foretold the conversion of the empire to Christianity under the sixth seal, should now at length, after he has begun to write the history of the western Apostacy, suddenly return to the pagan persecutions of the church and the days of Constantine. To suppose this is to suppose that a professedly chronological prophet, without a shadow of reason, violates at once the order both of time and of place: the order of time, by suddenly turning back from the year 606, when the Apostacy in its dominant state commenced, to the earliest days of Christianity and the year 312, when Constantine became a convert; the order of place, by as suddenly quitting the peculiar history of the West for the general history of the whole empire, and more especially that part of the empire which lay in the East-In the second place, the Bishop's supposition, that the dragon is pagan Rome, runs directly counter to the unequivocal declaration of St. John, that he is the devil-In the third place, his conjecture, that the man-child is Constantine, is equally incongruous with the analogy of scriptural language. The description of this man-child, that he should rule all nations with a rod of iron, is evidently borrowed originally from the second Psalm, where the universal dominion of Christ is predicted. The same mode of expression is twice likewise used in the Apocalypse to describe the power which Christ exercises both in his own person and through the instrumentality of the faith

ful:* hence surely it is very improbable, that it should here be intended to allude to Constantine.Had the prophet meant to have pointed out that prince, he would scarcely have used such very ambiguous phraseology, as must by his readers have been thought prima facie applicable, not to Constantine, but to Christ-In the fourth place, the prolepsis, of which the Bishop speaks, is no where to be discovered in the plain simple language of the prediction. Nothing is there declared, but merely that the woman, in consequence of the dragon's violence, fled into the wilderness, where she continued 1260 days; that, during her sojourn there, a war took place between Michael and the dragon; the result of which was, that the dragon was cast out of heaven: and that afterwards, still during her sojourn there, which the prophet carefully mentions a second time, the dragon vomited a great flood out of his mouth against her, in order that she might be completely carried away by it. In all this, I can perceive nothing like the slightest intimation of any prolepsis, but rather the very reverse: I can only discover a plain account of the woman's persecution during 1260 days: an account, which exactly tallies with the general subject of the little book: with the 1260 days prophesying of the witnesses in the preceding chapter, and with the 42 months tyranny of the beast in the succeeding chapter. Hence I conclude, that this middle chapter of the little book treats of the same period, that its first and two last chapters treat of-In the fifth place, the scene of the warfare between the woman and the dragon is laid, at least the beginning of it is laid, in heaven, or the church general. The dragon, the persecutor, was a sign in heaven, no less than the woman, the persecuted. Whence it will undeniably follow, that the seven-headed and ten-horned dragon, must have stirred up this persecution against the woman through the instrumentality, not of a pagan, but * Rev. ii. 27, and xix. 15,

U

of a nominally Christian, power. Heaven indeed is the symbol either of temporal or spiritual polity: little doubt however can be entertained in which sense it is to be taken in the present instance, when we note that both the woman and the dragon were equally signs in this heaven. Where the woman was, there was the dragon also. But, in the days of Paganism, imperial Rome alone occupied the temporal heaven: the church was utterly excluded from it. The heaven therefore cannot be the temporal heaven. But, if it be not the temporal heaven, it must be the spiritual heaven, or the church. And, if it be the spiritual heaven, or the church, then the prophecy can have no relation to the persecutions of pagan Rome; for the empire, as pagan, never was in the spiritual heaven; and consequently cannot be the dragon, which the prophet declares to have been in the self-same heaven with the woman. In no sense, therefore, either temporal or spiritual, can the dragon, upon Bishop Newton's interpretation, be placed in heaven at the same time that the woman was there.

"The fact is, this second chapter of the little book, like its fellows preceding and succeeding, relates solely and exclusively to the events of the 1260 years.

"Heaven is the church general, the same as the holy city, mentioned in the last chapter. The woman is the spiritual church, consisting of true believers; the same as the temple, and the two witnesses. And the part of heaven, occupied by the dragon, is the nominal church of the Apostacy; the same as the outer court trodden under foot by the Gentiles, and as the great scarlet whore, hereafter mentioned by the apostle as riding triumphantly upon the ten-horned beast.

"The woman is represented, as being clothed with the sun; to denote that her spiritual nakedness is only clothed by the righteousness of Christ: as standing upon the moon, which, like herself, is a symbol of the church; to mark, that she shines only with a borrowed light, being naturally a dark opaque body: and

as wearing a crown of twelve stars; to shew, that, as the church is a "crown of rejoicing"* to the apostles, so the apostles are the brightest crown of the

church.

"The dragon, as the Apostle himself teacheth us, is that old serpent, called the devil and satan." He is here represented with seven heads and ten horns, to shew us by whose visible agency he should persecute the woman; namely, by that of the seven-headed and ten-horned beast mentioned in the next chapter: and he is said to be in heaven, because the empire which he used as his tool, made profession of Christianity; and therefore constituted part, although an apostate part of the visible church general.

"As he is described with seven heads and ten horns, in allusion to the firstapocalyptic beast, or the Papal Roman empire; so he is said likewise to have a tail, in reference to the corrupt superstition so successfully taught by the second apocalyptic beast, or, as he is elsewhere styled, the false prophet. With this tail he draws the third part of the stars of heaven, and casts them down to the earth: in other words, he causes those Christian Bishops, whose sees lay in the Roman empire, to apostatise from the purity of the apostolic faith. The appointed time, during which he is permitted to reign, is the 1260 years of the great Apostacy: hence the woman is said to flee from his face, during precisely that period, into the wilderness, as Elijah heretofore did from the face of Ahab: and there, in the midst of the spiritual barrenness which spreads far and wide around her, she is fed with the heavenly manna of the word in her prepared place; as Elijah was, in the waste and howling desert, by the ravens.

Thus far the prophecy is sufficiently easy of interpretation, but the character of the man-child is attended with wonderful difficulties. That he must be Christ in some sense, is manifest, as Mr. Mede

* I. Thess. ii, 19.

very justly observes: but the matter is, how we are to interpret his character, so as to make it accord with the general tenor of the prediction. It seems at once extremely harsh, and altogether incongruous with the universal phraseology of Scripture, to suppose that the absolutely literal Christ can be intended by this symbol; for our Lord is invariably represented as the husband, never as the son, of his church. Hence Mr. Mede conceives, and perhaps not without reason, that the mystic Christ is here meant, or Christ considered in his members; in other words, that by the man-child we are to understand the whole body of the faithful, or the spiritual children of the church. The greatest difficulty however yet remains. Supposing this interpretation of the symbol to be the right one, how are we to interweave it with the prediction, so as to make them properly harmonise together? Mr. Mede believes the pains of the woman previous to her parturition to denote the persecutions of the church during the days of Paganism; and the catching up of the child to the throne of God to signify the introduction of the Christians into sovereign power by the conversion of the Roman empire under Constantine. This interpretation however both completely violates (as I have already observed) the chronology of the prophecy, by carrying us back to a period long prior to the commencement of the 1260 years; and, in other respects, likewise, is very far from being unexceptionable. If the man-child denote the whole body of Christians, why should they be said to be born more in the age of Constantine than in any other age? And, if numbers of spiritual children still continue to be born to the church by the laver of regeneration, how can the pangs of the woman signify the Pagan persecutions?

"Mr. Lowman's scheme appears to me liable to much fewer objections than Mr. Mede's. Like myself he confines the whole war between the woman and the dragon to the period of the 1260 years, instead of going back to the days of primitive Chris