The Mark of the Beast

by Sydney Watson

The world had begun by "Wondering after" the Beast, it gave itself up to error, despised the Truth, opened itself to receive the "Strong delusion," the Anti-christ lie, so that the worship of the Beast himself, then of his image, became but just consequent steps one after the other.

In Ancient Roman days its Emperors took divine titles, accepted homage, worship, honor, all of which belonged, by right, to Deity alone. Augustus had temples reared for the worship of himself, and, through all the ages since, the remains of one of these temples (at Angora) has remained, and inscribed upon a great stone lintel is the significant word: "To THE GOD AUGUSTUS." Near by, in the same district, is a kindred inscription, "To MARCUS AURELIUS … by one most devoted to his Godhead." Nero and Domitian, fiends of blood and lust, were styled, while they lived, "GOD," and "OUR GOD AND LORD."

And Apleon fulfilled, to the minutest letter, all that was prophesied of him as regarded his assumption of the divine. "He will exalt himself," wrote Daniel "and magnify himself above God. He will speak marvellous things against the God of gods. He will not regard any God, for he will magnify himself above all." "He opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God," Paul said, "or that is worshipped; so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God."

Whatever may be the cause of it, the fact remains that ever since the Devil's lie in Eden was absorbed by, and ruined man, there has been a proneness, a latent tendency to idolatry in the human race. And the manifestations of this tendency have not been confined to peoples who in their recent past have been won from idol worship.

As late as the revolution days, in cultured, polished France, busts of Marat and others, were greeted in the streets with bursts of Hallelujahs, by the populace, and, even in the churches, all over France, the people sang odes and Hallelujahs, and bowed themselves before these busts, and at the mention of their names. Marat, especially was treated as divine and "was universally deified," and "divine" worship of his image was everywhere set up in churches.

And the "worship of the Beast" came about easily, and as the natural transition from the world's earlier adulation of the "Man of Sin."

Millions upon millions of his image, in the form of charms, were worn like the eikons of the Greek church. In the hour of death these eikons (likenesses) "of the Beast," were held before the eyes of the passing soul, as the crucifix was held, (in the old days before the destruction of the older ecclesiastical systems,) before the eyes of the dying Romanist and Ritualist.

In that first three months of the second half of the seven years of Anti-christ, much had changed in every way in the world. Under the supreme dictation of Apleon changes commanded by him were effected throughout the whole world, in one week, that would have occupied a century in the old days of the nineteenth century, say.

Babylon the Great, which had long since been rebuilt, had become the world's commercial centre. It was exclusively a commercial city, there was nothing ecclesiastical (Babylon ecclesiastical, the religious system had been destroyed, when all religious head-ship had been summed up in Apleon).

There was nothing military, in the New Babylon, and though every vileness in the form of entertainment was to be found in the great city, all this was but the recreative side of the life of the commercial people of the world's metropolis.