birth-day may illustrate the conduct of these votaries of the beast and dragon. (Acts xii. 22.) The poor ignorant and deluded subject, in rendering homage to the beast, did homage to the devil, from whom the power was derived.  Such is the degradation to which man is reduced by blind obedience to despotic power, whether civil or ecclesiastical.  He glories in the chains which bind him!—­And this is the actual and voluntary condition of the great majority of the population of Christendom at the present hour.  There has been, indeed, within the current century, an effort by the masses of the people to assert their natural and civil rights, to regain the exercise of the elective franchise; but in selecting candidates to bear rule over them, they generally prefer such as are, like the majority of themselves,—­“aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise.”  Hence, “vile men are exalted, the wicked bear rule, and the people mourn.” (Ps. xii. 8; Prov. xxix. 2.)—­The “blasphemies” uttered by this beast are all those royal prerogatives claimed by the several crowned horns or civil sovereigns who have established idolatry and superstition within their respective dominions.  The “blasphemous headship” over the church of Christ, as viewed and designated by his persecuted disciples in the British empire, may tend to illustrate this part of the beast’s history.  King Henry VIII. of England, upon renouncing the civil and ecclesiastical headship of the Pope, proceeded to usurp an ecclesiastical headship within his own dominions; and all his royal successors till the present day have asserted a similar dominion over the faith of the Lord’s people.  As an “inherent right of the crown,” the sovereign of Britain, male or female, is declared to be “supreme judge in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil!” The rest of the horns are no less blasphemous in their haughty pretensions.  History attests that the martyrs of Jesus denounced these encroachments on the prerogatives of Christ, and the intrinsic power of his church, as “Erastian supremacies,—­blasphemous supremacies.”  Most expositors tell us that the blasphemies are chargeable to the Pope or to the Romish church.  But this interpretation confounds this beast of the sea with the apostate church of Rome; and indeed this confounding of symbols and consequent mistaking of objects in actual history, are the primary errors of expositors in nearly all their attempts at expounding the Apocalypse.  This first beast of John, and fourth of Daniel, however, is wholly secular or civil; and clearly distinguished by both inspired prophets, from the other agents of the dragon, as we shall find in the subsequent part of this chapter.  This beast “blasphemes the name of God” by compelling men to worship idols and images, enacting penal statutes and issuing bloody edicts to force their consciences.  He “blasphemes his tabernacle,” when stigmatizing the assemblies of God’s worshipping people as