1

distinctively; or that which answered on the Apocalyptic earth to the great and desolate wilderness in which, under the older dispensation, the nation and church of Israel, and afterwards Elijah too, and then Christ, were for a longer or shorter period of time hidden from the world. -But what then this desert scene, pictorially associated with the Apocalyptic Harlot; and what its significancy in the prefiguration? There is predicted elsewhere a state of Egna total and final, that is destined to befall the Woman εξημια at last through the judgment by fire from Almighty God.3 And some have supposed this latter to be anticipatively signified by the desert in question. But the whole character of the Harlot's symbolization seems to me to negative the idea of this being the desert scene here depicted: for she is here pictured, not as suffering under judgments either of human or divine origin, but in all the wantonness, pride, and gaudiness of a prospering harlotry.-Putting this then aside, it may be worth observing that, in the course of the Angel's explanatory statement, a certain further characteristic was noted of the desert scene's appearance to St. John; viz. that it appeared to a considerable extent flooded with water, round where the woman was seated on her subject Beast:-" The waters," it is said, "that thou sawest, where the harlot sitteth."5 And hence in fact Vitringa draws his explanation, to the effect that the local scene exhibited was imaginatively designed to answer to the chorography of the Euphratean Babylon; which, being finally surrounded by marshes, from the circumstance of the waters of the river overflowing and stagnating round it, was designated by the Prophet Isaiah as

fying the two epnuo;-the stepping-stone to his identification of the two women. An error fatal, as it seems to me, to all true interpretation of the Woman of chap. xii. 1 See Horne's Introduction, Vol. iii. P. 53.

2 1 Kings xix. 4, 8; Matt. iv. 1. See, to this effect, Michaelis' Note on "the desert" of Christ's temptation, as cited and approved by Middleton on the Greek Article, when commenting on Matt. iv. 1.

3 Apoc. xviii. 19; "For in one hour she hath been desolated;" μg wog nonμwọn. Such, for example, is Daubuz's explanation of the scenic figuration; as "depicting the state of the whore on her accusation and conviction;..just upon the brink of destruction, and ready to become desolate." pp. 748, 749. He however just alludes afterwards to the actual desert state of the Campagna.

1 Apoc. xvii. 15.

'the desert of the sea." But Vitringa should have observed that the Angel's discourse intimated yet a third and still more notable feature in the chorography of the scene associated with the Woman, viz. that of seven hills as her seat: 2 so that the conclusion we finally come to, and that by almost necessary inference, is, that the desert-scene pictured in the vision was not the Campagna of Babylonia, but the Campagna of Rome.

No doubt to St. John there might here arise a question of difficulty. How could this be the Roman Campagna, -considering that that Campagna was in his time, and had been for many centuries, a scene among the most cultivated and populous in the world; and every way one presenting the greatest contrast in appearance to a marshy desert? The explanation, as it seems to me, is at our point of time very simply and easily to be drawn from the fact of the present actual desolate state of the Campagna; and knowledge that this began at the time when first, the ten-horned Beast of Western Anti-Christendom having emerged into existence, the Harlot-church of Rome rose on its back to supremacy, and has so continued ever since. For the initiatory epoch let me refer to Gibbon; who, when about to describe Rome's revival and restoration to dominion, in the new character of Rome Papal, under Gregory the First's Pontificate, near about the close of the 6th century, gives a descriptive sketch of the then Campagna which one might almost suppose drawn, like so many other of his pictures, for the very purpose of illustrating this passage of the Apocalyptic prophecy. He states that at that time,

1 Isa. xxi. 1. So too Jer. li. 13; "Thou that dwellest on many waters."-This its predicted desert state was very much the actual state of the Euphratean Babylon in St. John's time. His contemporary Pliny, N. H. vi. 30, speaks of it as then a great desert wilderness.

2 Apoc. xvii. 9.

Strabo speaks of "the whole of Latium as a flourishing and very productive country, with the exception of a few spots near the coast which were marshy and unhealthy:" also, as to the Campagna between the Alban hills and Rome, that, "excepting the parts towards the sea, the rest is a good country to live in, and well cultivated." So Dr. Arnold, in his interesting Chapter on the Physical History of Rome and its Campagna; Vol. i. p. 505: in which Chapter he inquires whence, and why, the difference between its present and its ancient state.

So too the Christian Sibyl of the 2nd century, B. viii. p. 372, of whom I shall have to speak again in my History of Apocalyptic Interpretation ; εκετι νικήσεις το πεδον Ρώμης εριθηλε.

4 Gibb. viii. pp. 158-161: a passage referred to before in my Vol. iii. p. 129:

(chiefly from the long-continued and perpetual harass of barbarian incursions,) "the Campagna was reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness; the land barren, the waters impure, the air infectious." He further notices the superadded desolation from the effect of inundations of the Tiber, which (especially at the time of Gregory's elevation) had "rushed with irresistible violence into the valleys of the seven hills," and there bred pestilence from "the stagnation of the deluge." And, after remarking on the awful "depopulation, vacancy, and solitude of the city," he observes that, "like Babylon, the name of Rome might have been erased from the earth, if the city had not been animated by a vital principle, [viz. that of being St. Peter's See, and the depository too of his sacred relics, as well as of those of his brother-martyr Paul,] which again restored her to honour and dominion:" -restored her to it in the new character of "Rome, Mother and Mistress," the Harlot-Church of the seven hills. Nor, though the city rose again by degrees, in its new and ecclesiastical character, did the Campagna change from being a scene of desolation. In Robertson's sketch of the state of Western Europe after the subsidence of the barbarian invasions, in the earlier part of the middle age, he observes that, in consequence of the existing depopulation, districts once the most cultivated, above all in Italy, were in some parts converted into forests, in others into marshes, by the overflow of rivers and stagnating of the floods: insomuch, that in some of the earliest charters extant, lands granted to monasteries and individuals were distinguished into such as were cultivated, and such as were eremi, or desert; the reason of the grant being frequently this, that the grantee had reclaimed them ab eremo, from the desert. Now, in every where see also other illustrations of the fact cited. Pope Gregory's own account may be seen in the Appendix to P. Paolo's Council of Trent, p. 774. Engl. Ed.

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1 Gibbon alludes, in a Note, to an account of this inundation brought by one of his Deacons to Gregory of Tours (x. 1.): with the further report of a dragon having appeared in the flood; which, while passing down the Tiber into the sea, was stranded. Considering the emblematic sense attached to this flood by the Angel, and its probable identification with the one mentioned as cast out of the Dragon's mouth in Apoc. xii. 15, it is curious to compare the report of the Deacon on this point with the Apocalyptic description of the Dragon's standing on the shore of the Hood, and resigning his empire to the new rising Beast, Apoc. xii. 18, xiii. 2. So Gibbon impersonates Rome as a Woman.

3 Charles the Fifth; Proof 5. Also Hallam iii. 365.

Ducange on Eremus.

other of the countries referred to, the recovery of the lands from this state of barrenness, and desert, was by degrees successfully accomplished, together with the advancing progress of civilization and population. But not so in the vast plain round Rome. There, age after age, from the time of the Goths and Gregory, down even to the present time, where is the traveller to Rome that has not been struck by the waste and dreary Campagna that surrounds the "Eternal City;" whether approaching it by those desolate fifty miles from Civita Vecchia, or viewing it from the hills of Alba or Tivoli? Besides that the Tiber still from time to time fearfully overflows his banks, as of old;1 and Rome is thus still often to be seen from those distant hills sitting upon many waters.

Thus we see that the desert scene associated with the Woman, in the Apocalyptic scene pictured to St. John, was a landscape admirably perfect, as from the life:2-a true and faithful picture of the Campagna of Rome itself, such as it appeared at the time when under Gregory the Harlot first established her supremacy thereupon; and such as she has appeared ever since.-Nor was the pictured scene admirable in this point of view only; but also for its having an emblematic, as well as literal, significancy and truth. For, as the seven hills in the landscape were not merely a natural feature of the scene, but also symbolized the seven several forms of government that Rome would previously have experienced, so the floods that inundated the base of those hills where the Harlot had her seat were not only literally true, as a feature of the Campagna after Papal Rome rose to dominion, but also furnished the Angel with an apt symbol of the barbarian floods which, after pouring into and desolating the empire, would at length constitute nations, tribes, and languages subject to Papal Rome's dominion. Again, such as was the physical spa and barrenness all round it,

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1 Visitors in the winter of 1847, 1848 saw this strikingly exhibited before them. 2 See the Section in my 1st Vol. on the local appropriateness of Scripture Symbols, beginning p. 420.

Apoc. xvii. 10. See my solution, Part iv. Chap. iv.; Vol. iii. pp. 114, &c. • Apoc. xvii. 15.—To Bossuet's objection that, were this Woman an apostatized Christian Church, or City, she would be called an adulteress, not harlot, or moovn, I may again refer to Matt. v. 32, xix. 9, and also Isa. i. 21, &c. in the Septuagint; passages already before noted, p. 32.

such has ever been the spiritual egna characteristic of her dominion. This seems to me the perfection of symbolic figures; a perfection frequently observable in those of the Apocalypse. Besides which it must be observed that the presence of the flood in this picture, whence we may suppose the Beast to have emerged on which the Woman sate, made it, if I might so say, the precise pair and counterpart to a notable one shown in an earlier vision to St. John: 2 I mean to that which represented a flood cast from the Dragon's mouth, in order to drown the faithful woman, or Church; out of which, after her escape and disappearance, and when the earth had so drained off the waters as to leave but the remnant of a lake remaining, (so I infer from the description,3) a seven-headed ten-horned Beast, like this very one, appeared to emerge. It is a new tache of connexion between figurations in this and the other Apocalyptic series.

It only remains that I add a remark on the Vial-Angel who showed this vision to St. John, and the reason of John's being spoken of as carried away in the spirit to see it. The latter point is explainable, perhaps, from the circumstance of the vision being thus far out of the usual routine and order, as exhibiting a phænomenon of 1260 years' duration; and consequently that which Christ's people, living at the time of the Vials, would only be able to see mentally, not by the bodily eye."-As to the Angel, I think that particular Vial-Angel must be supposed the revealer, in the time of whose vial-outpouring a full understanding might prove to be given of the mystery of the Woman and the Beast :-that is, doubtless, the seventh and last.

So was the mystery of the Woman and her subject Beast

1 Now that I am reprinting the 5th Edition of this Work in 1861, has not this fact, politically, socially, and morally considered, forced itself on men's minds, very generally?

2 Apoc. xii. 15, xiii. 1. See my Vol. iii. pp. 71, 83. 3 See Vol. iii. p. 71, Note 2. 4"And he carried me away in the spirit to a desert place; and I saw," &c.

5 Compare the retrospective view of the two Witnesses' history given in Apoc. xi. The Angel gives it all in the form of retrospective narrative, until he has brought down their history to the time corresponding with that of his descent. Whereupon (but not before) the witnesses are brought on the scene in actual vision. See Vol. ii. pp. 462-464.

So the Angel, xxi. 9, that showed St. John the New Jerusalem, was evidently the seventh of the vial-Angels.