Many have understood the mountains to signify the seven mountains on which the city of Rome is said to be built; but that is adopting the literal mode of interpretation, and is contrary to the laws of symbolic language.  The more obvious meaning is that the seven heads represent seven mountains and also seven kings; but this probably is not the idea intended.  The heads of a beast are not the proper symbol of mountains.  The fact, too, that the woman is represented as sitting upon these mountains, shows that they are to be taken as a symbol, as well as the woman, and not the object symbolized.  They are, then, the same as the heads and denote the seven kings or seven forms of government under which the Roman empire subsisted.

The seventh and last head has not yet been identified.  Before considering it, however, I wish to call attention to another point that has already been referred to.  The beast that John here saw, with the seven heads and ten horns, was Rome under the Papal power.  Did new Rome in reality have the seven heads?  No.  The dragon John saw in chapter 12 is represented as having seven heads and ten horns, and signified Rome under the Pagan power.  Did old Rome really possess the ten horns?  No.  According to verse 12 in this chapter, they were to arise future of John’s time.  But notice carefully that the seven heads, which according to this description, belonged to the beast sustaining the Papal power in after years, are here explained by the angel as signifying the very forms of government by which Pagan Rome subsisted.  “Five are fallen [a past event], one is [exists at this present time], and the other is not yet come.”  So according to divine interpretation, the same heads and horns serve for both the dragon and the beast.  This could not possibly be a true representation unless they were both in reality the same beast, they being represented as two only for the purpose of describing the two phases of Roman history—­Pagan and Papal.

With this point established, that these two forms of Roman history are the same beast, we are now prepared to understand the statement that the beast “was and is not, and yet is.”  This is equivalent to saying that the beast existed, it ceased to exist, and then it came into existence again.  This was exactly the history of Rome.  Its downfall under the Pagan form was described under the fourth trumpet as an eclipse of the sun, moon and stars, so that they shone not for a third part of the day and night.  For a time it seemed not to exist.  A little later the eclipse is lifted; the beast exists again under the Papal form.  In this is set forth clearly the wounding and the healing of the beast.  The wound was inflicted on its sixth, or Imperial, head (for the first five had already fallen, according to the historical facts just related), being accomplished by the hordes of Northern barbarians overturning the empire of the West.  It appeared for a time that