Here we are brought face to face with some of the most solemn truths contained in the Book of God.  The very powers of apostate Christianity just described under the symbols of two beasts are now represented by the angel as Babylon; for, be it observed, the divine message is against those who worship the beast and his image.  The image was made by the second beast.  Therefore Babylon includes both Romanism and Protestantism—­the whole realm of formal churchianity; and beast-worship is here condemned in one of the most terrible denunciations found in all the Word of God.  All the evils inherent in the false, unscriptural systems of so-called Christianity are here summed up under the one word Babylon, of which we shall have more to say later.

Two things prominently brought out in these symbols should be remembered, however—­first, that even during the reign of the beast and his image, God had true people who were carefully distinguished in the prophecy as those whose names were written in the book of life and who would not “worship the image of the beast”; and second, that the symbolic scene now being considered represents these saved individuals as gathered out into one company with the Lamb on Mount Zion, before the end of time.  The illustration is that of the joyful Israelites who made their return to Zion after the fall of literal Babylon, where they were long held in captivity.  This is the illustration and the prophetic description; therefore we may rest assured that just as truly as time revealed the rise of the papal and Protestant systems, as set forth in the symbols of the Revelation, just so surely will there come before the end of time a revival of pure, apostolic Christianity, a reformation in which the true people of God will take their stand outside of all forms of the apostasy and carry the full gospel of the Son of God to “every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.”

We have traced in prophetic symbolism the four epochs of the Christian dispensation represented respectively by the star-crowned woman, the leopard-beast, the two-horned beast, and the redeemed company gathered together with the Lamb on Mount Zion.  The papal period, represented by the leopard-beast, continued for 1,260 years, its universal sway terminating with the sixteenth century reformation.  The length of the Protestant reign following is not stated in this series.

[Sidenote:  The two witnesses]

Let us now return to the description of the two witnesses given in Revelation 11.  We have already considered the first part of that symbolic description pertaining to the 1,260 years during which the holy city was to be trodden under foot and the two witnesses were to prophesy in sackcloth; and we have shown that this description is exactly parallel with the prophecy that set forth the period of the papal supremacy.  But the description continues, covering the era of modern sects and leading up to the work of a final reformation.