It is only necessary to know that the whole book from the first verse to the last is written in symbols, to be satisfied that the true meaning of this passage is simply, that only the great Confessors and Martyrs will be had in remembrance and honour in the Church after the establishment of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.  And observe, it is the souls that the Seer beholds:—­there is not a word of the resurrection of the body;—­for this would indeed have been the appropriate symbol of a resurrection in a real and personal sense.

Ib. c. vi. p. 108.

Now this very thing St. John likewise declareth * * to wit, ’that they who have been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and they who have not worshipped the beast’, these shall live, ‘or be raised’ at the coming of the Lord, ’which is the first resurrection.’

Aye! but by what authority is this synonimizing “or” asserted?  The Seer not only does not speak of any resurrection, but by the word [Greek:  psychas], souls, expressly asserts the contrary.  In no sense of the word can souls, which descended in Christ’s train (’chorus sacer animarum et Christi comitatus’) from Heaven, be said ‘resurgere’.  Resurrection is always and exclusively resurrection in the body;—­not indeed a rising of the ‘corpus’ [Greek:  phantastikon], that is, the few ounces of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and phosphate of lime, the ‘copula’ of which that gave the form no longer exists,—­and of which Paul exclaims;—­’Thou fool! not this’, &c.—­but the ‘corpus’ [Greek:  hypostatikon, ae noumenon].

But there is yet another and worse wresting of the text.  Who that reads Lacunza, p. 108, last line but twelve, would not understand that the Apocalypt had asserted this enthronement of the souls of the Gentile and Judaeo-Christian Martyrs which he beheld in the train or suite of the descending Messiah; and that he had first seen them in the descent, and afterward saw thrones assigned to them?  Whereas the sentence precedes, and has positively no connection with these souls.  The literal interpretation of the symbols c. xx. v. 4, is, “I then beheld the Christian religion the established religion of the state throughout the Roman empire;—­emperors, kings, magistrates, and the like, all Christians, and administering laws in the name of Christ, that is, receiving the Scriptures as the supreme and paramount law.  Then in all the temples the name of Jesus was invoked as the King of glory, and together with him the old afflicted and tormented fellow-laborers with Christ were revived in high and reverential commemoration,” &c.  But that the whole Vision from first to last, in every sentence, yea, every word, is symbolical, and in the boldest, largest style of symbolic language; and secondly, that it is a work of disputed canonicity, and at no known period of the Church could truly lay claim to catholicity;—­but for this, I think this verse would be worth a cartload of the texts which the Romanist divines and catechists ordinarily cite as sanctioning the invocation of Saints.