And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration. And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition. And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast. These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful. And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled. And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.—Rev. xvii.
In a former chapter, we had the vision of a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet. In this chapter, we read of a woman on whose forehead was written “Babylon the great, the mother of harlots, and abominations of the earth.” That the two visions answer to each other, all have perceived. A Protestant controversialist would tell us at once that the first describes the true Church of God, which has been kept alive upon the earth through different ages—obscure in the sight of man, in the eyes of its Divine Lord beautiful and glorious; that the latter points to the Papacy, which has been seated on a throne full of outward grandeur and power, but marked with God’s sign of doom as idolatrous and apostate.
An interpretation which has penetrated into the mind of a nation like ours, which affects our popular speech, colours our devotions, it is not safe to discard. There must be a significance in it. If we are indifferent to that significance, we are in danger of missing some of the lessons which the prophecy has been meant to teach, of contracting it according to some individual conceit, of reducing it into mere antiquarian lore.
But there are other applications of the title, great Babylon, which, on the same principle, we ought not to overlook. It has been bestowed upon the city of London, the very capital of Protestantism, and our consciences have accepted it as appropriate. Again, the most earnest religious teachers have exhorted their hearers to flee from Babylon, to avoid any intercourse with the Babylonian harlot, meaning by either phrase that world which Romanists as well as Protestants renounce in their baptism. Whilst we are doing justice to one of these forms of speech, we should try whether it is not possible to do justice to all three. If we adhere strictly to the book itself, I believe that we may.
I have given you my reasons for considering that the vision of the woman clothed with the sun, and about to bring forth the man-child, is a vision of humanity, under its true aspect; in itself weak and feminine; great only while it looks up to a glory above its own, which becomes its vesture; poor and incomplete till it has found a Son of Man who is also a Son of God, who does not tarry upon earth, but is carried to the throne of heaven, who there is to be recognised as our living Head, our Redeemer, our Representative. The discovery of this true Head of Man, and of the glory of Man in Him, I regarded as the subject of the vision. Before this discovery could be made, there was war in heaven; when it was made, the adversary was cast down from heaven. There was no more darkness over the form of Him who sat upon the throne. Those who confessed the Crucified Man to be at His right hand, could overcome all doubts and temptations by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of His testimony. But there was war upon the earth. The adversary had not ended his battle here, but was carrying it on with fury. What that battle was, who would be engaged in it, we were to learn as we proceeded.
Taking the first vision in this sense, it would, I thought, justify those who said that the Church was implied in it. If the Church is that body which, in its own life and acts, is appointed to testify of a Son of Man and a Son of God, to say that humanity is only complete in Him, to bid men claim the glory which He has claimed for them; to tell them that the face of God has been fully manifested in the only begotten Son, and, therefore, that we know it to be a face of clear, unclouded light; it must, in its hour of deepest sorrow, which has been its hour of greatest triumph, represent the woman who sees the sun above her head and the moon at her feet. She must be in danger of looking at the moon rather than the sun at herself rather than at her Divine Head.
On the other hand, I have shown you how the idea of a woman forgetting her true lord, and becoming a harlot, is embodied in all the language of the Old Scriptures, and is the illustration of all national transgressions. This harlotry is, of necessity, attributed, in the Old Testament, to Israel—to Israel exclusively—to Israel because it is said to have been claimed as the bride of an unseen and spiritual Lord. The sin which earns for it this disgraceful name is idolatry. It forgets its unseen King, and becomes the worshipper of visible things—it becomes a creature of sense. In doing this, it tries to be like the nations round about, whereas it was set in the world to tell those nations that they were created for another service, for a nobler fellowship. For this crime, the punishment was captivity in the land which gathered into itself the idolatry of all the nations; where idolatry had its head and crown; where idolatry was organised into a system; where it was the obvious and confessed support of a universal tyranny; where it was rapidly passing into the mere worship of a mortal ruler; where this worship was rapidly degenerating into the worship of that which is below humanity.
Babylon, then, contemplated in its first form on the plain of Shinar—where trust in God was exchanged for trust in brick walls—where the family that had been rescued from the waters forgot its work of colonising and subduing the earth, and tried to make itself a name, and to build a tower which should reach to heaven; Babylon, contemplated in all its subsequent tyranny and conquests, was the living type of the idolatrous city. And when the chosen Son was revealed as the head, not of one nation, but of every man, then the idolatrous city began to be contemplated as the mother of harlots; as that which had been all along withdrawing men from the worship of a Spiritual Being, who was their Lord, and Friend, and Redeemer, to be worshippers of a multitude of natural things or powers—to be the worshippers of that which was not the archetype of man, but his image—to be worshippers of evil instead of good. From the hour that the mystery of God—the mystery of a redeemed humanity—was revealed, Babylon became the mystery of iniquity, that which represented the degradation and misery of humanity, socially and individually. There was no need that the place should remain the same. That which had been Nineveh under Sennacherib was Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. The type remained, though a city of the West, in quite a different stage of civilisation and development, became the ruling power of the earth.
If, then, as we Protestants believe, there has been and is, a system diffused through Christendom which deprives man of his true elevation, which intercepts his communication with his risen and ascended Lord, which separates heaven and earth, by making a mortal man the highest of all rulers—if that system deserves to be called idolatrous and apostate; then, surely, that is a true instinct which connects this system with Babylonian harlotry; just because our charges against it imply that it is a relapse into the condition of the heathen world, that it has canonised that despotism of sense from which the birth and glorification of the Man-child was to redeem the creatures whom God had created in His image. If, again, in this city there is, in clergy and laity, in the idle and the busy, the noble, the tradesman, the artisan, on one plea or another, upon religious or irreligious pretexts, in deference to aristocratical or democratical notions, a disposition to reverence the visible more than the invisible, the transitory more than the permanent, the traditions of society more than moral and eternal laws—if this disposition has gained great power, and threatens to become supreme, then it is also a true instinct which recalls the greatness of Babylon, when we are tempted to exult in the greatness of London, and foretells that the one may not be stabler than the other. It might be equally right for a citizen of Paris, or Madrid, or Vienna, or Venice, to have this feeling. But our consciences tell us that we have less to do with Paris, or Madrid, or Venice, or Vienna, than with London; that their evils are, to a certain extent, alien from us, that its evils are our own. And therefore it is right also that those who are teaching children or men that they should renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, should explain what they mean by saying, “Now, as in the old time, there are idols’ processions, and sacrifices offered to vain things, that cannot help or deliver. Members of Christ, who gave up Himself, you are tempted by a society which makes self its centre. Children of God, you are tempted to think that you are children of Mammon, and that all the things about you are bowing to him. Inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, you are led to suppose that there are no treasures for you but those which the moth and rust corrupt, which thieves break through and steal. An evil atmosphere is about you. Call your world religious, political, commercial, fashionable, by what epithet you please, it is still a harlot world, a world of sense; it is still a Babylonian world, a world of confusion and of bondage.” But then, these different applications all denote a foregone conclusion. They would be worth nothing if there were not some type of them in the old world; what that is we are to learn from the Apostle himself, who will always tell us more than his commentators.
The first six verses of this chapter refer to the mystery of this woman; that is to say, to the meaning of the symbol; to that which is not of one time, but of all times; to that evil which has been threatening the heart of human society ever since there was a human society. They are connected with the previous vision of the seven vials; they point, as all the previous chapters have done, to an impending judgment.
I. “And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness; and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abomination and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name written, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and I wondered with great admiration.”
In a vision of the Prophet Zechariah, which has many striking points of resemblance to this, and which evidently sets forth the mystery of wickedness as opposed to the Divine mystery which was represented in the Temple at Jerusalem, an angel speaks to the seer of a “House in the land of Shinar, which shall be established and set there upon her own base.” A polity standing upon its own base, its gods formed out of human conceptions, by help of them becoming a cruel and bloody tyranny—this is the idea of Babylon here and throughout the Scriptures. The final result has been brought before us often. She who would not stand upon a Divine ground must at last be supported by a beast. Humanity has but a choice between the two. She must confess at last a spiritual Lord or a brutal Lord. In the progress to her complete degradation, she has been drinking the blood of righteous men who have borne witness to her of her true greatness and of her fall. All these are called martyrs of Jesus. It signifies not when or where they lived, in what city of the earth they were sending forth their protest, in what words or acts it was expressed. So far as they were testifying that man is more than an animal; that there is a Divine Power who is seeking to give him his true human rights; that he is not to save his life, but to lose it; not to glorify self, but to give himself away; so far they were witnesses for Jesus, so far His Spirit and no other was working in them. An apostle must needs say so. Other men might call them brave or heroic. He must refer everything that is good in man to the Lord of Man—all partial light to the perfect light.
Next, we proceed to the explanation of this mystery in reference to the particular period about which the prophecy is occupied.
II. “And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and one is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.” The explanation of the Babylon of that day which is given by the angel has, I observed last Sunday, been accepted by all interpreters as clear and conclusive. Rome, they have agreed, must be signified by it. The only question has been, Rome at what period? On this point I said I thought that the statement was quite as precise as upon the other. Supposing there are those grounds which I stated in a former sermon, for regarding the establishment of the military despotism under Augustus along with the divine honours that were attributed to him as the head of that despotism, and the Incarnation or proclamation of Christ’s kingdom, as parallel events in the world’s history, Augustus would then be the first of the five kings spoken of here. Tiberius would, of course, be the second, Caius Caligula the third, Claudius the fourth, Nero the fifth. These kings are not. In the absence of any evidence for the old tradition that the Apocalypse belongs to the time of Domitian, almost any thoughtful critic would accept this very passage as a reason for referring it to the reign of Galba. He, the sixth, was; Otho, the seventh, was not yet come. A figure was seen rising behind—an eighth, and yet strangely like one of the seven. When Nero died, it seemed as if the wild beast into which imperial government had transformed itself was extinct. Vitellius would show that it lived and breathed. The world would not only submit to the new apparition, but would gaze after it with a blank astonishment, as if beastly tyranny had now proved itself to be omnipotent, as if there could be nothing else intended for mankind; a most natural conclusion, and which facts appeared fully to justify; which every experiment for shaking off the yoke only confirmed. None who merely looked at passing events, and reasoned from them, could resist the belief in the permanent predominance of evil. Only those whose names were in the book of life from the foundation of the world, who looked at all things in the light of eternity, and saw a book of life unrolling itself from the beginning, and claimed a place in that roll instead of the roll of death—only they could sing confusion to the beast in his hour of triumph; only they would be sure that he could last but for a short space. I do not say that the followers of the tyrant might anticipate any long duration for his power. Anticipation belongs to men, to spiritual beings; they could feel nothing but the leaden weight of the present; they could only suppose that such a yoke as was on the earth then must be always. And so it has been again and again, and so it will be. The revelation may belong directly to the short space during which Vitellius reigned. But it is the revelation of that temper of mind which overtakes, in one time or another, those who have no king but Cæsar, who, being “sensual and dark,” must carry the image of a sensual and dark tyranny in their hearts.
III. “And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no power as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their strength and power to the beast.”
I have already supposed these horns to be significant of that military force upon which the empire rested. The ten kings would then be the commanders of the legions in the different provinces, who had received no power as yet, though they had just as much title to the purple, and were as likely some day to obtain it, as the usurper with whom they were content to work, and for whom they suspended their own pretensions. There could not be a more faithful account of an organised anarchy. The state out of which Hobbes supposed society to emerge was the state into which it had sunk.
IV. “These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.”
In old Roman legends, champions upon horseback, who were recognised as the divine Twins, appeared suddenly to cheer the falling host, and were seen no more when the victory was won. An old Hebrew, an apostle of Jesus Christ, has no sympathy with such legends. He does not want appearances. The prophecy is to deliver us from slavery to shapes and apparitions. These were for the sense-bound idolater. The Christian man believed in the crucified Lamb, whom he could not see. Whatever visible hosts are fighting, he beholds the real King of kings and Lord of lords engaged on one side, and His enemy on the other. What would always give him strength for such a crisis as that we are reading of would be the assurance that unseen hosts were on his side, and that Christ was leading them, and that therefore the beast would go down to perdition. And the first century was to give the watchword to all centuries to come. Whenever a conflict has been going on, in which the order, freedom, and well-being of mankind is interested, it signifies not what are the powers of the combatants, it signifies not whether they know in what name they are fighting. The victory which is to put down the oppressor is the victory of the Lamb. He, and the chosen, and faithful, and true, are going forth against the beast. In hoc signo vinces is a message to the true warrior. God’s Spirit can bring it to him without any cross in the sky.
V. “And he said unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled. And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” When the armies of the Duke of Bourbon entered Rome, and in the name of Charles V., the upholder of the Church, laid waste the holy city with fire and sword, and took its spiritual ruler captive, no doubt the Reformers of the sixteenth century thought that this language was strikingly fulfilled. The great powers of the earth were making desolate and naked the “great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth. God had put into the hearts of these soldiers of different lands to fulfil His will.” Supposing the like drama had been enacted above fourteen centuries before—suppose Rome then had been laid waste by military violence, and its Capitol burnt—the Reformers of the sixteenth century will not have been wrong in saying that the lesson was repeated in their day; that the same kind of instruments were at work in both cases; that the judgment, by whomsoever it was executed, went forth from the highest throne of all; that the wicked and cruel tools were working out His great and gracious and true will. Such thoughts are the only ones which can sustain men’s spirits through great crises—the only ones which can enable them to endure the misery which they witness. The Reformers marred the lesson if they turned it to any party use—if they read in the victory of the Bourbon a judgment in favour of Protestantism, not a judgment upon unrighteousness, and corruption, and hypocrisy, wheresoever it is found. That has been one most mischievous effect of our mode of dealing with the Apocalypse, which I have endeavoured to illustrate in this sermon. We have found Babylon in the Papacy; we have forgotten to look for it among ourselves. We have not seen that the harlotry of sense is at work everywhere; that everywhere men are tempted to become idolaters; that everywhere there are seducers, withdrawing them from their true Husband and Lord. The far-off evil we have discerned; its punishment we are prepared to hail; that which is at our own door, at our own hearts, is not visible to us; we do not remember that God is no respecter of persons; that Churches which acknowledge the supremacy of Rome, and Churches that reject it, individual Papists and individual Protestants, Pharisees, and Publicans, will alike be winnowed with His fan—must alike have their chaff consumed with unquenchable fire.
And this evil result of hasty and partial interpretation is closely connected with another. We speak of a Papal apostasy till we forget what the very word apostasy means. We forget that we stand off from that which is our proper standing-ground; that if we revolt it is from a government which is actually established over us. There could not have been an apostasy if there had not been a kingdom of God set up in the world. We have given Popery an honour to which it has no claim when we have identified it with the Christian Church of a number of centuries, when we have supposed that only some little body here and there represented the Divine election. It is a most necessary part of faith to believe that a fungus, however widely diffused, however nearly it may approach the life, is not the tree which it is destroying; that that is wholly of a right seed. Forgetting this truth, all history becomes nothing but a record of foul enormities. It is a record not of the reign and conquests of the Lamb, but of the Beast. Forgetting this, we at once glorify ourselves, as if we were better than others, and degrade ourselves by denying the glory and responsibilities which have been put upon us and upon them equally. London at one moment exalts itself as the great contrast to Rome; in the next it sinks into a mere Babylon, in which evil is the rule, the good the rare exception. Whereas, we ought to believe that both Rome and London are cities of redeemed men, in which God has set up His kingdom, and which the citizens of one or the other turn into a Babylon, by disbelieving in their redemption and in His rule, by exalting their own idolatrous, sensual, selfish inclinations, in contempt of their own human greatness, in defiance of His Divine purposes.
For this, I believe, lies at the root of all our moral evils, that we do not confess humanity to be married to Christ; all men to have been claimed as citizens of His kingdom, and not of the Babel kingdom. We do not really confess that God has reconciled the world to Himself; therefore we do not really repudiate the world’s assertion that it is separate from God, and that it can live without Him.
From these mighty errors, which are infecting our theology and our life, I believe the study of the Apocalypse, as it is actually written, may be a most effectual means of emancipating us. It will teach us that the Babel society was always corrupt and adulterous; that it never, in any age of the world, could be regarded as the Order of the world. The history and literature of the heathen nations, as our fathers judged when they made them capital parts of our education, though stained and infected with idolatry, bear witness to that which is not idolatrous—are perpetual protests against that which was corrupting and degrading mankind. They looked onward to the incarnation of the Son of God, which asserted all the life, justice, self-sacrifice of the old world to be His. The battle of the Lamb and of the Beast was to vindicate that truth for the past, to make it the foundation of all the fellowship of men in the ages which were to come.