or symbol, Babylon, was unwarrantably restricted in import, as representing only the Church of Rome.  And it is to be deplored that most protestant expositors continue to limit the inspired symbol in the same way till the present time.  The literal Babylon, a name common to the ancient city and empire by the river Euphrates, was in no sense a church; and it would be anomalous and incongruous to select either city or empire as an emblem of a church!  There is, however, in the Apocalypse a combining or blending of symbols in order clearly and fully to represent a complex moral person.  This has been already exemplified in ch. xiii. 2, where the prominent features of Daniel’s first three beasts, (ch. vii. 4-6,) are combined in John’s first beast of the sea.  Just so in this instance.  The idolatrous and tyrannical Roman empire, in alliance with an apostate church, constitutes mystical Babylon.  History demonstrates the fact of their coalition.  The great red dragon, the devil, operates through both during the allotted period of 1260 years against the witnesses of Christ.  Sometimes, indeed, the nominal church is the more active and visible instrument, and at other times the state, in opposing Mediatory authority; and thus Babylon, or one of her streets, which is the equivalent of a horn of the beast, becomes prominent.  This second angel confidently proclaims,—­“Babylon is fallen, is fallen.”  So said Isaiah of literal Babylon long before the event; (ch. xxi. 9,) and so said Jeremiah, (ch. li. 8,) to whose predictions John obviously alludes.  All these three prophets speak in present time of a future event, simply because of the settled and unalterable purpose of God, acting not formally as a sovereign, but as a judge.  The multiplied and aggravated crimes of Babylon, literal or mystical Babylon, are the just grounds of her deserved and awful doom.  From ancient times God has declared by his prophets the things that are not yet done. (Isa. xlvi. 10.) His counsel stands and he doeth all his pleasure.

That the mystical Babylon emblematically represented the complex systems of civil and ecclesiastical corruption and despotism organized in Christendom, was in some degree understood by the reformers in Europe; but the work of this second angel was carried on successively by men of piety and learning, who were eminently qualified for systematically arranging the doctrines of grace as deduced from the word of God.  Their pious labors we still have in the forms of Bodies of Divinity and Confessions of Faith, in both which the unscriptural and antiscriptural dogmas and heresies of Rome are condemned and solidly confuted by the Scriptures.  There is a wonderful “harmony of confessions” framed by those who separated from the fellowship of the Romish church; which harmony can be accounted for only by the fact that those who framed them drew their materials from the Bible.  But it was by their public covenants especially, that the