especially in prophecy, than many, if not most modern interpreters.  In the time of our Lord’s humiliation he quoted and applied to him a prophecy in the 91st psalm, (v. 11, 12.) He also dreaded being tormented,—­“before the time.” (Matt. viii. 29:) from which it appears that he reasons of the “times and the seasons” as revealed in the Bible.  But by the phrase, “a short time,” the devil understood,—­and we are to understand,—­not the time to transpire till the end of the world; but, the time intervening between his ejectment out of heaven, and the overthrow of Antichrist, when he is to be bound.  Now, we may learn from the devil’s calculation, that all those learned and famous divines, especially of the prelatic church of England, “do greatly err, not knowing the Scriptures;” who say, that the dragon was cast out of the symbolic heaven in the time of Constantine! The space of duration from Constantine till the millennium, cannot be relatively “short,” under the New Testament dispensation.  The time of the dragon’s being cast out of heaven, and the instruments by which this was accomplished, are to be found clearly verified in the authentic histories of the sixteenth century, to which some references have been already made, as elucidating the events of the 11th chapter:  for it is to be still remembered that the former part of the 11th chapter agrees in time with the 12th, 13th and 14th chapters.  At the end of the second woe, which we supposed to be in the latter part of the seventeenth century, about the year 1672, it is declared “the third woe cometh quickly,” (ch. xi. 14.) Now here it is said “the devil,—­hath but a short time.”  Taking both expressions as relating to the same period, it follows that we are now living,—­not in the time of the third woe, but in the time of the devil’s activity among the “inhabiters of the earth and of the sea;” that is, the population of Christendom either in a tranquil or revolutionary state.  The enemy makes his second attack upon the “woman” in a new and unexpected mode of warfare.  So long as permitted, he never ceases to persecute the saints.  When defeated in heaven, he renews the assault upon the earth.  If the edicts and bulls of crowned and mitred heads have lost their power to terrify and destroy the souls of men, he will try to effect the same object by other means.

14.  And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place; where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.

15.  And the serpent cast out of his mouth, water as a flood, after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood.

16.  And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth.

Vs. 14-16.—­To guard against the second attack of the dragon, the woman flees a second time to the place of safety, which had been mercifully prepared for her preservation before the war began, (v. 6.) And she is in no less peril from her deadly enemy than before.