The passage: John stands on the seashore and watches a beast come up out of the sea, with seven heads and ten horns, crowns on its horns and a blasphemous name on its heads. It looks like a leopard, with a bear’s feet and a lion’s mouth, and the dragon gives it his power and throne and great authority. One of its heads seems to have been mortally wounded, but the wound heals, and the whole world marvels and follows the beast, worshipping both the dragon and the beast and saying no one can compare with it or fight it. It is given a mouth to speak great blasphemies and power to act for forty-two months; it blasphemes God, his name, his dwelling, and those in heaven; it is allowed to make war on the saints and overcome them, and to rule over all peoples. Everyone whose name is not in the Lamb’s book of life will worship it. Whoever leads into captivity will go into captivity; whoever kills with the sword will be killed with the sword — here is the patience and faith of the saints. Then a second beast rises from the earth, with two lamb-like horns but a dragon’s voice; it wields the first beast’s power, makes the earth worship the first beast, works wonders such as making fire fall from heaven, deceives people by these miracles, and tells them to make an image of the first beast that had been wounded and lived. It gives the image life and voice, and has all who refuse to worship it killed. It forces everyone, of every rank, to receive a mark on their right hand or forehead, so that no one can buy or sell without the mark, the beast’s name, or the number of its name. Here is wisdom: let the one who understands count the number of the beast, for it is a man’s number, and it is six hundred sixty-six.
I. There is something vivid in how this vision is described, if we keep the reading of the first word that our translators adopted. The prophet is carried to the shore of his little island; as he looks at the water, this ugly creature rises out of it.
But there is another reading with more authority behind it, and one that fits the whole thrust of the vision better. It uses the third person instead of the first. It is the dragon, not the prophet, who stands by the seashore. The beast that rises out of the sea is the dragon’s own earthly counterpart. In that case the sea, like the beast, carries a symbolic meaning. Symbol and fact are then less confused with each other.
I have said the beast is the earthly counterpart of the dragon; that is the first thing to keep in mind when working out what this beast is. The dragon is above all a spiritual power — the self-willed power, the destructive power. He has been cast out of heaven; he can no longer smear the image of the One who sits on the throne in the eyes of those who dwell there, who see the Man-child at the right hand of that throne. But he can wage war against that Man-child on earth; he can set up a rival dominion against His. Next, remember that such a rival dominion has, according to the Bible, existed in every age. This last book of the Bible views it at one particular crisis, when it had reached its fullest growth.
The language of the previous chapter, taken literally, forces us to think of Christ’s actual birth into the world as, in some sense, the start of this crisis. Yet it also fixes a period of forty-two months, or 1,260 days, as the time when the battle was at its peak and its outcome was near. The image of a wild beast who is the counterfeit of a dragon seems to require — nearly all interpreters have thought it requires — fulfilment in some person who would fully embody an evil principle. To reconcile these different requirements, to find something that answers to them all, is the problem. There are other requirements too. There is a description of this beast in the seventeenth chapter, and nothing we conclude here should contradict it. I think it would be out of place to discuss that description now, since it is tangled up with matters we cannot deal with yet. When we come to it in due course, we can consider how far it fits the interpretation I am about to offer.
Seeing that the establishment of the Roman military despotism after the battle of Actium nearly coincides with the birth of the Son of David; and seeing that this despotism, after passing through its stages under Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, was put on trial in the three turbulent reigns that followed and emerged in its most brutal form in the person of Vitellius — I take this to be the wild beast in which the dragon saw his own image reflected. The prophet sees it first in the mild form it wore when Octavius rose from being a triumvir to being the patron of the arts, the preserver of order, the object of poetic flattery, when all the names and forms of the Republic were (as the great historian observes) so cleverly kept up to hide the tyranny beneath them; and then in the form it took when that tyranny threw off its disguises and came out as nothing but the will of the soldiers, propped up by nothing but their weapons. Because this beast is shown as having a continuous existence through these reigns, it appears with seven heads. Why seven and not eight, we shall learn later. The ten horns are, I take it, the legions in the different provinces. The real kingship lies in them: the beast keeps its power only through them. Yet it has another power distinct from theirs. On every one of the heads, from the first to the last, was the name Blasphemy. Octavius, in becoming an emperor, becomes a god. A poet as restrained and wise as Virgil, so full of the older Italian spirit, would not have given him that title out of mere exaggerated gratitude if it had shocked his countrymen, if they had not accepted it as the natural and necessary meaning of his rise to rule the world. In no case is it truer that “words are things.” The name worked its way into all legal forms and into all popular writings. The general of the armies really was the god to whom the Capitoline Jove paid homage. He protected the city that the old republican object of worship had failed to protect. He was to take care of the worship of the gods; and they, in return, were to 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 after Caesar’s death and the wars in which Antony and Augustus defied each other — this beast arose. To say there had never been anything like it in the earlier world would contradict all history, and sacred history most of all. Every military empire had combined these qualities. In each of them the god and the beast had been mingled, and in each the beast finally proved victorious. It would be just as false to say there would be no similar manifestation in ages to come. Perhaps every age might have such a manifestation, each repeating this story with its own variations. But here was the great climax of the ancient world’s attempts at universal empire, and here was the pattern for all that would be made in the new. Let no one think he refutes this account of it by showing that it was inevitable — that the Republic could not survive without a head, that the plan of Brutus and those who dreamed of preserving the old order necessarily began in an outrage against order and ended in swapping a noble tyranny for a vulgar one. All this may be granted, and it is fully consistent with the vision. The beast was the natural product of earlier evils. That did not make it any less evil.
- “And the beast which I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like a bear’s, and his mouth like a lion’s; and the dragon gave him his power, and seat, and great authority.”
A despotism spotted with the forms of law and freedom; resting on the rough, wild passions of a mob; yet always speaking through its soldiers — this answers to the beast’s various outward appearances. Its inner heart is the dragon’s.
If the dragon’s aim is to destroy the government of the Man-child, here is the government he sets against it; here is his image of a throne above all thrones, and of an unlimited, universal rule.
- “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?”
Surely a vivid description of the empire after the death of any one of its successive tyrants, but especially after Nero’s death. Then the beast seemed mortally wounded. A power whose malice had seemed limitless, and which had been felt in every province and every household, had actually fallen. Could such a tyranny ever rise again? Had the world not thrown off its chains once and for all? But “the deadly wound was healed.” The beast was not really gone; only one of the forms in which its nature had appeared for a while had gone. Another monster was ready to replace the old one — in some ways an even more unqualified display of brutality, a more complete incarnation of the devilish. And what was the result? “All the world wondered after the beast.” Tyranny in its vilest form is accepted as the normal, appointed state of things — and more than that, it becomes an object of admiration. It is not only that the neck has grown used to the collar. Men’s souls have grown used to it, have learned to love it, are shaped to match it. “And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast.” They believe in the omnipotence of evil; they rejoice in it, they pay homage to it and to nothing else. But evil in its pure essence is too rare and subtle for their everyday devotion. They prefer it in a concrete, earthly form. They “worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?” Can’t you hear the words coming across all these centuries from two young Romans chatting as they lounge in the Forum? They once had noble thoughts; they had heard of their fathers’ deeds; they had dreamed there might be some possible good for their age. But they have become drunken, dissolute gamblers. And someone even more monstrously drunken, dissolute, and gambling than they are has become their ideal of what is desirable and possible. Who is like him? who can make war with him? These two youths fairly represent the age they live in. There is nothing original about them. They think what everyone else thinks. Their private opinion is simply the public opinion of the city and of the world.
But this wild beast, though from time to time it takes the shape of a particular man, and finally finds one in which little of the human is left, must still be regarded mainly as representing sheer force — especially the force of an unruly army that knows it can bestow the purple on whomever it likes. That is how I understand the next verse.
- “And there was given him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given 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 him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them; and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.” The forty-two months here, as elsewhere, denote, I take it, the whole time of lawlessness before Vespasian’s accession and the restoration of regular government. During that time the sufferings of every province in the empire, at the hands of an army that Galba’s aged hand tried in vain to restrain, that mocked Otho’s softness, and that found nothing but encouragement in the vileness of Otho’s successor, must have been utterly intolerable. The blasphemy against God, His name, and His tabernacle was no doubt provoked and sharpened by the belief that the Jews, who had talked of an invisible God, were at once the worst of all peoples and doomed to extinction. Yet I understand their blasphemies to be against all right and order, not specially against the witness for it borne by one class of men or another. Their victory over the saints may mean that whenever they came upon a man who had any reverence for right, they saw in him an enemy, someone to be put down — not by any legal process, but rather by summary execution. And to this desperate military violence and tyranny — which was the proper outcome of the despotism, though it had no real despot, only a figurehead chosen as its instrument — all peoples, tongues, and nations were for a while handed over.
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 does not say that all who did not belong to the Christian community would worship this beast of sheer power, or would believe in the prevalence and omnipotence of evil. Very likely many who did belong to that community joined in this general, almost universal worship — subscribing in their hearts, if not with their tongues, to the creed that the dragon was supreme lord. Only those who, whatever name they went by, however little known to one another, were known to God as confessing in their hearts a self-sacrificing King to be the highest King — only those who revered a Prince of Life rather than a destroyer — could resist the temptation to acknowledge as supreme that which to all appearances was proving itself supreme. Their names are said to be written in the book of the Lamb that is slain. Whether we take the prophet to mean 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 is the same. An eternal Deliverer is the only refuge from this great world-tyranny. A faith would be useless if it did not look before and after, and connect itself with all mankind. It was necessary to contemplate a Lamb who had always been offering himself up, who came into the world to do what it was His nature and His Father’s will that He should do; otherwise there was no sufficient counterweight against the crushing pressure of present wickedness, no sufficient assurance that it might not last forever. There is no need 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.
- “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 necessary reminder for that time, and for every time since — worthy to be introduced with the same solemn preparation our Lord used, in the days of His flesh, when He wanted attention paid to His own words. Hear, you suffering people! This dark, devilish tyranny seems as though it were destined to last forever. It has grown worse and worse. Each change of masters has made it worse. Division among the masters seems to be the worst state of all. You do not know whom to ally yourselves with. Each party’s success only promises you fresh misery. Wait, I tell you; wait; join no party; enter no conspiracies. If you do, you share their doom. For there is an eternal law that this beast cannot overturn, though he imagines he can. He who leads into captivity shall go into captivity, for a Redeemer, not an enslaver, is Lord of all. He who kills with the sword shall be killed with the sword, for there is a Judge who laughs at men’s might and 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 on 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.
- “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. He has horns, but they are not meant to gore. He does not burst out of the stormy sea; he is born of no civil upheaval. He rises gradually out of the earth; he is the natural product of men’s thoughts; he sympathizes with their weaknesses. And yet, when he begins to speak, it is like a dragon. Terrible threats come from him. This lamb-like creature wants to inspire fear just as much as the other does.
What is he? What sustained the imperial tyranny of Rome was the religion of Rome. In the old republican days that religion had contained many divine elements: the acknowledgment of fatherly authority, of sacred law, of righteous government in the heart of the city. But there had always been a tendency to turn these merely to the politician’s advantage. The augurs were to be consulted, partly to learn the mind of the gods, partly so the people would suppose that mind was known. Sacrifices were offered, partly to confess wrongs done and proclaim the rule of right, partly to see whether 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 last. The civil wars drove out most of the faith and made the lies both more bearable and more necessary. The empire needed a religion perfectly fitted to its purposes. Then this beast rose out of a darkened earth, to meet men’s natural fears and their confused notions about the unseen; holding out fair promises and dreadful predictions; the lamb and the dragon in one, ready to do for the tyrant whatever the tyrant could not do for himself.
- “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 first beast applies to this one. He did not first appear in the Roman world. In Egypt, in Chaldea, in every country where arbitrary rule prevailed, some form of false worship, some miracle-working enchanter or soothsayer, arose to prop up that arbitrary rule with unseen tricks and terrors, and to shape the minds of the subjects to fit it. Whenever in later ages the one beast has risen out of the sea and demanded the homage of nations worn out by earlier riots and conflicts, the other has risen out of the earth to secure that homage for it — with the same assumed lamb-like appearance, the same use of the dragon’s cunning and the dragon’s fury. But the prophet gives us a striking illustration of the whole matter by fixing on the 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 struck down by its own instrument. The sword had turned against it. Why, then, did it not die? Another influence was at work that would not let it die. A corrupted religion had so taught men to reverence sheer power, had so fixed the image of that power in their hearts, had so filled and blocked every avenue by which the thought of any other kind of power might have entered, that even when it had been crushed by its own proper masters, it sprang back into fresh life. That is what we are told in the fifteenth verse.
- “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 given, from time to time, to those who direct the spiritual and moral forces of a country. When some dark form of tyranny has fallen under the weight of its own crimes, by the hand of its own accomplices, they can and do bring it back to life. The sense of the unseen is powerful in all men — powerful even in wrongdoers, if only as dread of what may be coming. If those who claim to commune with the unseen world, instead of rousing men’s consciences to a horror and hatred of lies, only fill them with fresh lies — playing with their hopes and their fears, and turning both to evil — they may restore, for a little while, the worst form of brutal power, and help it to destroy all that it hates, all who will not bow before it. That 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 attribute this to the second beast. If it had been the first, we might suppose some outward mark or sign was meant, for that beast deals with the visible and outward. But this one stamps an image on men’s souls; it writes a name on all their inward thoughts, which then expresses itself in their ordinary daily acts. Taking these words in this sense, I know none more fearful, and none confirmed by such undoubted evidence from experience. When men read and talk about some great tyrant-power that has established itself in their country or their age, they imagine they are reading and talking about something far removed from themselves. They can comment on it, measure its effects, calculate the odds of its continuing or falling. If anyone complains that it is evil in its origin or immoral in its practice, wise people whisper, “But it does you no harm. You can buy and sell happily under its shadow. Your profits are not seriously reduced. You run no great risk of loss.” And all the while these wise people do not realize that they themselves, as much as those they are talking to, have received this power’s mark on their foreheads and their right hands; that its image is engraved in their hearts; that in these very conversations they are showing that they bear the name and character of the very thing they are excusing. This vision refers, as I have often said, to a moment when the effects of principles were no longer held down by any formal or legal restraints. And then something became visible that had not been visible before. It became clear that men follow, admire, and worship whatever matches some image already within them. It could never have come out in palpable form in a single man if hundreds of thousands — if the great majority of society — had not already received the impression. It grows deeper and darker with every fresh act of service and adoration. It is not the ruler’s wit or wisdom that holds his subjects in chains. He may have lost his wit or wisdom, and they theirs. But the chains remain, because the subjects are what he is. They carry his name about with them. The God he obeys is the God 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 bargain they make with one another that does not display the very spirit in which he governs peoples and tongues and nations. For men are bound together in a fellowship even if they become utterly 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 in the end, by the laws of the universe, one or the other will show itself — in the small and the great, in the rich and the poor, in the free and the enslaved.
- Besides the mark and the name, there is a reference at the end of this passage to the number of the name. We ask what that means. The chapter’s closing verse 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.” Obeying this command, interpreters who thought they had understanding have set to work very diligently to count this number. Since it is said to be the number of a man, their aim has been to find which man is likely meant, and then to see whether his name can somehow be made to add up to six hundred and sixty-six. The traditional method for settling this is to take the numerical values of the Greek letters in the name being tested and add them up. By this method — sometimes helped along by changing a letter, or slipping in an iota subscript when needed — I cannot say how many an eminent man, in one age or another, has been “proven” to be the beast St. John speaks of. It is rash, I know, to break with a rule of interpretation that has such long-standing usage in its favor; but I cannot think that this scheme’s success obliges us to pick one out of the crowd of names various commentators have proposed, throwing out all the rest, or entitles us to hazard some new guess in the same line. Since I have suggested that Vitellius was that eighth head of the Roman empire who seemed to bring back all Nero’s brutality, I might try whether his name, put into Greek letters, could by some clever counting be made to meet the requirement. But I suspect I would be overlooking other requirements just as necessary. I never heard that the name of Vitellius, or any other name, was ordered to be marked on the right hands or foreheads of the empire’s inhabitants, or that no one might buy or sell without bearing it. Among all the acts of reckless and cruel tyranny recorded of Roman emperors or their successors, no hint of this strange and wanton use of power, I believe, has been preserved. But if we insist on an actual word, first turned into letters and then into numbers, we must stick to the text in these details too; we cannot be material one moment and spiritual the next.
It is best, I think, to set these attempts aside once for all, even if we are forced to leave the problem entirely unsolved. If I venture one more try at a solution, I am far from claiming it is satisfactory; I would gladly trade it for any simpler one discovered later. At least it will not clash with what I have already said about the mark and the name. Those, I believe, were stamped in no material letters, then or ever. The name or character of any age’s great tyrant, I still assume, is imaged in those who have raised him to his evil height and who keep him there.
In counting the number of this name, I cannot help noticing how constantly the number seven appears in this book, and what 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 presented to us is perfect unity that involves perfect distinctness. To a Jew’s mind — and why not to an Englishman’s? — the week is the simplest and yet profoundest illustration of this unity: the six days and the one day making the complete whole, the day of rest giving meaning, 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 the beast who embodies the anti-Christian principle — who heads the kingdom opposed to the kingdom of God. We should at once, I think, compare it with this perfect number, and conclude it was the symbol of a society whose head is man, not God — a society made of a mass of atoms without a center, work without a sabbath. Suppose, then, we have not one six but a series of sixes — six in the units, six in the tens, six in the hundreds — may not the meaning be the same? It is as if he had said: “Here is the number that denotes what is divided, as against what is united. Repeat this number as often as you like, you never reach unity. You have lost the secret of unity, the spiritual bond; no material accumulations will replace it. How to find a unity that does not depend on piling up numbers; how to bind the toil of the six days to the rest that completes it and gives it meaning — this you may learn if you will look at the next vision, if you will look at those who surround, not a wild beast, but a lamb, who bear not the name of a destroyer but the name of their Father written on their foreheads.”