And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads, as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. If any man have an ear, let him hear. He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints. And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.—Rev. xiii.
I. There is something picturesque in the form which this vision assumes, if we retain the reading of the first word which our own translators have adopted. The prophet is transported to the shore of his little island; as he looks upon the waters, this ugly creature rises out of them.
But there is another reading of more authority and more consistent with the general scope of the vision. The third person is substituted for the first. It is the dragon, not the prophet, who stands by the sea-shore. The beast which is seen to rise out of it is the earthly counterpart of himself. The sea will then, like the beast, have an emblematical force. Symbol and fact will be less confused.
I have said that the beast is the earthly counterpart of the dragon; that is the first point to remember in determining what this beast is. The dragon is emphatically a spiritual power; the self-willed power, the destructive power. He is cast out of heaven; he can no longer blacken the image of Him that sits on the throne to those that dwell there; to those who see the Man-child at the right hand of that throne. But he can wage war against that Man-child upon earth; he can set up a rival dominion to His. Next, it should be recollected that such a rival dominion had, according to the Bible, existed in all ages. This final book of the Bible contemplates it at a particular crisis, when it had reached its full development.
The language of the last chapter, taken literally, compels us to think of the actual birth of Christ into the world as in some sense the commencement of the crisis. Yet it fixes a time of forty-two months, or a thousand two hundred and sixty days, as one in which the battle was at its climax, the decision of it at hand. The notion of a wild beast, who is the counterfeit of a dragon, seems to demand—has been thought by almost all interpreters to demand—a fulfilment in some person who should be the complete embodiment of an evil principle. To reconcile these different conditions, to find something that shall answer to them all, is the problem. Other conditions too must be satisfied. There is a description of this beast in the seventeenth chapter, which no conclusions we deduce from this ought to contradict. I believe it would be out of place to speak of that description here. It is mixed up with some topics of which at present we can take no notice. When we reach it in due course, we may consider how far it fits in with the interpretation I am about to give.
Seeing that the establishment of the Roman military despotism after the battle of Actium nearly synchronises with the birth of the Son of David; seeing that that despotism, after passing through its different stages of development in Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, was subjected to its great trial-day in the three turbulent reigns that followed, and came forth in its form of consummate brutality in the person of Vitellius; I take this to be the wild beast in which the dragon saw his own image reflected. The prophet beholds it first in that mild form which it wore when Octavius rose from the triumvir into the patron of arts, the preserver of order, the object of poetical adulation; when all the names and forms of the Republic (as the great historian observes) were so skilfully preserved to hide the tyranny which lay beneath them: then, when that tyranny had cast aside its veils and came forth as the mere expression of the will of the soldiery, having no support but that which it derived from their arms. Because this beast is represented as having a continuous existence throughout these reigns, he appears with seven heads. Why with seven and not rather eight, we are to learn hereafter. The ten horns are, I apprehend, the legions in the different provinces. The real royalty is in them: the beast is sustained in his own power only by them. But yet he has another power distinct from theirs. On each one of the heads, upon that of the first and every succeeding one to the last, was the name of Blasphemy. Octavius, in becoming an emperor, becomes a god. A poet so temperate and so wise, with so much of the older Italian spirit, as Virgil, would not have bestowed on him the title in a mere fit of exaggerated gratitude, if there had been anything shocking to his countrymen in it, if they had not accepted it as the natural and necessary meaning of his elevation to be the ruler of the world. In no case is the remark more applicable, that “words are things.” The name blended itself with all legal forms, mingled itself in all popular writings. The general of armies was in very deed the god to whom the Capitoline Jove did homage. He protected the city, which the old object of republican worship had been unable to protect. He was to take care of the worship of the gods; they were to return his protection, and uphold his throne. But to all intents and purposes he was their master, not they his.
Out of that great sea of troubles, the civil wars which had followed the death of Cæsar and those in which Antony and Augustus had defied each other, this beast arose. To say that there had been nothing like it in the earlier world, would be to contradict all history, and sacred history the most. Every military empire had united these qualities. In every one the god and the beast had been mingled, in every one the beast at last proved itself triumphant. It would be as false to say that there was to be no similar manifestation in the ages to come. Perhaps every one of those ages might have such a manifestation, every one might with its own variations repeat this story. But here was the great consummation of the efforts at universal empire in the old world; here was the pattern of all that would be made in the new. Let no one suppose that he confutes this representation of it by producing evidence that it was inevitable; that the Republic could not have lasted without a head; that the experiment of Brutus, and those who dreamed of preserving the old order, necessarily began in an outrage upon order, and ended in the exchange of a noble for vulgar tyranny. All this may be admitted, and is quite consistent with the vision. The beast was the natural product of previous evils. He was not less evil for that.
II. “And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion; and the dragon gave him his power, and seat, and his great authority.”
A despotism spotted with forms of law and freedom; resting on the rough and wild passions of a mob; yet always speaking through its soldiers; answers to these different outward appearances of the beast; its inward heart is that of the dragon.
If the purpose of the dragon is to destroy the government of the Man-child, here is the government which he opposes to it; here is his image of a throne that is above all thrones, and of an unlimited and universal sway.
III. “And I saw one of the heads as if it were wounded to death, and the deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshipped the dragon which gave power to the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?”
A vivid description surely of the empire after the death of any one of its successive tyrants, but specially after the death of Nero. Then the beast seemed as it were wounded to death. A power to the malignity of which there appeared no limit, and which had made itself felt in every province, in every household, had actually fallen. Could such a tyranny ever rise again? Had not the world burst its fetters once for all? But “the deadly wound was healed.” The beast was not really gone, only one of the forms in which its nature had been for a while exhibited. Another monster was ready to take the place of the old; another, in some respects a more unqualified manifestation of brutality, a more complete incarnation of the devilish. What was the effect? “All the world wondered after the beast.” The tyranny in its vilest form is accepted as the regular, appointed condition of things; yes, and it becomes an object of admiration. Not only the neck has become used to the collar. The souls of men have become used to it; have learnt to love it; are fashioned in accordance with it. “And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast.” They believe in the omnipotence of evil; they rejoice in it, they do homage to it, and to it alone. But evil in its essence is too rare and subtle a thing for their ordinary habitual service. They like it best in its concrete, earthly form. They “worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?” Can you not hear the words coming across all these centuries from the lips of two Roman youths talking with each other, as they lounge together in the Forum? They had noble thoughts once; they had heard of the deeds of their fathers; they had dreamed that there might be some possible good for their age. But they have become sottish, licentious, gamblers. And one more gigantically sottish, licentious, gambling than themselves has become their ideal of what is desirable and possible. Who is like to him? who can make war with him? These two youths fairly represent the age on which they have fallen. There is no originality in them. They think what every one else thinks. Their private opinion is the public opinion of the city and of the world.
But this wild beast, though he assumes from time to time the form of a particular man, and at last finds one in which there is little of the human left, must yet be contemplated mainly as representing mere force, especially the force of a turbulent army, conscious that it may confer the purple on whomsoever it will. So I explain the next verse.
IV. “And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemes; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them; and power was given unto him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.” The forty and two months here, as elsewhere, denote, I apprehend, the whole of that time of lawlessness which preceded the accession of Vespasian and the restoration of a regular government. During that time the sufferings of all provinces in the empire from an army which the aged hand of Galba was in vain striving to restrain, which mocked the effeminacy of Otho, which found only encouragement from the vileness of his successor, must have been utterly intolerable. The blasphemy against God, and His name, and His tabernacle, was provoked and aggravated, no doubt, by the conviction that the Jews who had talked about an invisible God, were at once the worst of all people, and were doomed to extinction. Yet, I understand their blasphemies to be against all right and order, not specially against that witness for it which was borne by one class of men or another. Their victory over the saints may mean, that whenever they met with a man who had any reverence for right, there they recognised an enemy, one who was to be put down—not by any processes of law—rather by summary execution. And to this desperate military violence and tyranny, which was the proper outcome and result of the despotism—though it had really no despot, only a head chosen to be its instrument—were all kindreds, and tongues, and nations for a while surrendered.
V. “And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” It is not said that all should worship this beast of mere power, that all should believe in the prevalence and omnipotence of evil, who did not belong to the Christian community. Probably very many who belonged to that community did join in that general, that all but universal worship; did with their hearts, if not with their tongues, subscribe to the creed, that the dragon was the supreme lord. Only those who, whatever name they might have, however little known to each other, were known to God as confessing in their hearts a self-sacrificing King to be the highest King—only those who reverenced a Prince of Life, and not a destroyer—could resist the temptation to acknowledge that as supreme which to all appearance was proving itself supreme. Their names are said to be written in the book of the Lamb that is slain. Whether we suppose the prophet to say that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, or that their names had been written in the book from the foundation of the world, the lesson will be the same. An eternal Deliverer is the only refuge from this great world-tyranny. A faith would be of no avail which did not look before and after, and connect itself with mankind. There was need to contemplate a Lamb who had always been offering himself up, who had come into the world to do that which it was His nature and His Father’s will that He should do; otherwise there was no sufficient counterpoise against the overwhelming pressure of present wickedness, no sufficient assurance that it might not be permanent. There is no necessity to ask who were or were not armed with this protection. Thank God the book of life is the Lamb’s, and is not open to the inspection or correction of any man or any Church.
VI. “If any man have an ear,” the prophet goes on, “let him hear. He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity; he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.”
A most needful recollection for that time, and for all time since, worthy to be introduced with that solemn preparation by which our Lord, in the days of His flesh, was wont to bespeak attention to His own words. Hear, suffering men! This dark, devilish tyranny seems as if it were destined to be immortal. It has been growing worse and worse. Each change of masters has aggravated it. Division of masters appears to be the worst state of all. You do not know with whom to ally yourselves. The success of each party only promises you fresh misery. Wait, I say; wait; join yourselves to no party; enter into no conspiracies. If you do, you involve yourselves in their doom. For there is an eternal law which this beast cannot set at naught, though he fancies that he can. He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity; for a Redeemer, not a maker of slaves, is Lord of all. He that killeth with the sword shall be killed with the sword; for there is a Judge who laughs at men’s might, and who will show how weak it is before Him. This faith you may hold fast, for the Lamb that was slain held it fast while He was upon earth. This may be your patience, for it was His. It went with Him through death; and now He is far above all principalities and powers and every name that is named here and in all other worlds.
VII. “And I beheld another beast coming out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.” A form apparently quite unlike the other. He is very soft and gentle. Horns he has, but they are not meant to gore. He does not burst out of the stormy sea; he is born of no civil commotion. He rises gradually out of the earth; he is the natural product of men’s thoughts; he sympathises with their weaknesses. And yet, when he begins to speak, it is as a dragon. Terrible threats go forth from him. This lamb-like creature desires to inspire fear just as much as the other.
What is he? That which sustained the imperial tyranny of Rome was the religion of Rome. With that religion in the old republican days had been mixed many Divine elements: the acknowledgment of fatherly authority; of sacred law; of a righteous government in the midst of the city. Always there had been a tendency to turn these merely to the account of the politician. The augurs were to be consulted: partly to know the mind of the gods; partly that the people might suppose that it was known. Sacrifices were offered: partly to confess things that had been wrong, and to proclaim the dominion of right; partly to try if wrong could not be made right by compensation; partly to persuade the people that wrong had been made right. There was this mixture of faith and unbelief, of truth and lies. It could not go on. The civil wars expelled most of the faith; made the lies more tolerable and more necessary. The empire needed a religion that should be entirely adapted to its purposes. Then rose this beast out of a darkened earth, to meet the natural fears of men and their bewildered conceptions of the unseen; holding out fair promises and terrible prognostics; the lamb and the dragon in one, ready to do for the tyrant whatever he could not do for himself.
VIII. “And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.”
What I said of the former beast applies to this. He did not appear first in the Roman world. In Egypt, in Chaldæa, in every country where arbitrary rule prevailed, there did some form of false worship, some miracle-working enchanter or soothsayer arise to sustain that arbitrary rule with invisible tricks and terrors, to fashion the minds of the subjects into conformity with it. Whenever in later ages the one beast has risen out of the sea and asked the homage of nations, wearied with previous seditions and conflicts, the other has risen out of the earth to secure that homage for it by a similar assumption of the lamb-like character, by a similar use of the dragon’s art and the dragon’s fury. But the prophet gives us a striking illustration of the whole subject by fixing on that particular moment in the history when the first beast had received the wound by the sword and yet lived. Apparently the imperial tyranny had been smitten by its own instrument. The sword had turned against it. Why, then, did it not die? There was another influence at work which would not suffer it to die. A corrupted religion had been so teaching men to reverence mere power, had been so fixing the image of that power in their hearts, had been so possessing and occupying all the avenues through which the thought of any other kind of power could have entered in, that even when it had been crushed by its own proper masters, it started again into fresh life. This is what we are told in the fifteenth verse.
IX. “And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.”
A fearful power! but one which is given from time to time to those who direct the spiritual and moral forces of a land. When some dark form of tyranny has fallen, by the weight of its own crimes, by the act of its own accomplices, they can and do reanimate it. The sense of the invisible is mighty in all men—mighty in the wrongdoers, if it takes only the form of dread of what may be coming. If those who profess to commune with the invisible world, instead of arousing the conscience of men to a horror and hatred of lies, fill it only with fresh lies—playing with its hopes and its terrors, and turning both alike to evil—they may restore for a little while the worst form of brutal power, they may help to destroy all that it hates, all who will not bow before it. This is the reason.
X. “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
The words “he causeth” clearly ascribe this operation to the second beast. If it had been the first, we might imagine that some outward mark or sign was meant; for that beast deals with the visible and outward. But this one stamps an image on the souls of men; this writes a name on all their inward thoughts, which afterwards expresses itself in their common daily acts. Accepting these words in this sense, I know none which are so fearful and none which are confirmed by such undoubted warrants of experience. Men fancy, when they read and talk of some great tyrant-power which has established itself in their country or their age, that they are reading and talking of something which is far off from them. They can comment upon it, measure its effects, calculate the chances of its continuance or of its fall. If any complain of it as bad in its origin or immoral in its practices, wise persons will whisper, “But it does not hurt you. You can buy and sell happily under the shadow of it. Your gains are not seriously lessened. You incur no great risks of loss.” And all the time these wise persons are not aware that they themselves, as well as those with whom they are conversing, have received the mark of this power on their foreheads and their right hands; that the image of it is graven in their hearts; that they are shewing in these very discourses of theirs that they bear the name and character of that which they are excusing. This vision refers, as I have said often, to a moment when the effects of principles were no longer kept down by any formal or legal restraints. And then that became apparent which was not apparent before. It was seen that men follow, admire, worship that which corresponds to some image that is within them. It would not have come forth in palpable form in one man, if hundreds of thousands—if the great majority of the society had not received the impression. It becomes deeper and darker with every fresh act of service and adoration. It is not the wit or wisdom of the ruler which holds his subjects in fetters. He may have parted with his wit or wisdom, and they with theirs. But the fetters will remain; for they are as he is. They bear his name about with them. The God which he obeys is the God which they obey. What he does on a larger scale, each of them does or tries to do in his own little sphere. There is no act of barter which they transact with each other that does not shew forth the spirit with which he is governing kindreds and tongues and nations. For men are bound together in a fellowship if they become ever so resolutely and savagely selfish. They must have a common name, a common image, whether they like it or not. It may be the name of a Father, or of a Dragon; it may be the image of a Christ or of an anti-Christ. But at last, by the laws of the universe, one or other will make itself manifest, in the little and the great, in the rich and the poor, in the free and in the bondmen.
XI. Besides the mark and the name, there is an allusion at the end of this passage to the number of the name. We ask what that means. The concluding verse of this chapter gives the answer.
“Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” Acting in obedience to this command, interpreters who thought they had understanding, have set to work with great diligence to count this number. As it is said to be the number of a man, their object has been to find what man is likely to be pointed at; then to ascertain whether by any means his name can be made to square with the figure six hundred and sixty-six. The traditional process for arriving at satisfaction on this point, is to take the numerical values of the Greek letters composing the name on which the experiment is made, and to add them up. By the application of this method—assisted occasionally by the variation of a letter, or the interpolation of an iota subscript when it is found necessary—I cannot say how many an eminent man in one age or another has been demonstrated to be the beast of which St. John speaks. It is rash, I know, to break through a rubric of interpretation which has so long a prescription in its favour; but I cannot think that the success of this scheme obliges us to choose one out of the multitude of names which different commentators have suggested, to the necessary rejection of the rest, or warrants us in venturing any new guess in the same direction. As I have hinted that Vitellius was that eighth head of the Roman empire who appeared to restore all the brutality of Nero’s dynasty, I might try whether his name, translated into Greek letters, might not by some skill in counting, fulfil the required conditions. But I fancy I should be overlooking other conditions as necessary to be considered, if I took this course. I never heard that the name of Vitellius, or any other name, was ordered to be marked on the right hands or the foreheads of the inhabitants of the Roman empire, or that no one might buy or sell who did not bear it. Amongst the various acts of reckless and cruel tyranny recorded of Roman emperors or their successors, no hint of this strange and wanton exercise of power, I believe, has been preserved. But if we will have an actual word, reduced first into letters, then into numbers, we must adhere to the text in these particulars; we cannot be material one moment, spiritual the next.
It is well, I think, to dismiss these trials once for all, even if we are compelled to leave the problem altogether unsolved. If I venture to make one more attempt at a solution, I am far from saying it is satisfactory; I shall rejoice to exchange it for any simpler one that hereafter may be discovered. At least, it will not clash with what I have said already respecting the mark and the name. These I believe to have been stamped in no material letters, then or at any other time. The name or character of the great tyrant of any age, I still assume to be imaged in those who have raised him to his bad eminence, and who sustain him in it.
In counting the number of this name, I cannot help noticing how continually the number seven occurs in this book, and what a meaning is always attached to it. Whether the prophet speaks of the seven candlesticks, the seven Spirits of God, the seven eyes, or the seven horns of the lamb, the idea which is presented to us is that of perfect unity involving perfect distinctness. To the mind of a Jew—why should we not say to the mind of an Englishman?—the week is the simplest, and yet the profoundest illustration of this unity: the six days and the one day making the complete whole: the day of rest giving the interpretation, and purpose, and harmony to the others; connecting the order of times and the life of man, with the Being who made all things, and made man in His own image.
Now suppose we found the number six used to denote that beast who embodies the antichristian principle—who is at the head of the kingdom which is opposed to the kingdom of God—we should at once, I think, compare it with this perfect number, and should conclude that it was the symbol of a society, of which man, not God, was the head, a society in which there would be a number of atoms without a centre, work without a sabbath. Suppose, then, we have not one six, but a succession of sixes, six in units, six in tens, six in hundreds, may not the intention be the same? It is as if he had said, “Here is the number which denotes what is divided, in opposition to what is united. Repeat this number as often as you will, you do not arrive at unity. You have lost the secret of unity, the spiritual bond; no material accumulations will be a substitute for it. How to find a unity which does not depend upon the repetition of numbers; how to bind the toil of the six days with the rest which completes it, and gives it its meaning: this you may learn if you will behold the next vision; if you will look at those who are surrounding, not a wild beast, but a lamb, who have not the name of a destroyer, but the name of their Father written on their foreheads.”