"Through this wonderful Revelation of God to John, God makes known to us what that organism is, and how the agency and the domination of the enraged Dragon will be exerted in acting out his blasphemies, deceits, and bloody spite. The subject is not a pleasant one, but it is an important one. It also has features so startling and extraordinary that many may think it but a wild and foolish dream. Nevertheless it is imperative that we should all look at it, and understand it. God has evidently set it out for us to learn and know just how things will eventually turn out.[1]
"John, 'in the Spirit,' finds himself stationed on the sands of the sea—the same great sea upon which Daniel beheld the winds striving in their fury. He beholds a monstrous Beast rising out of the troubled elements. He sees horns emerging, and the number of them is ten, and on each horn a diadem. He sees the heads which bear the horns, and these heads are seven, and on the heads are names of blasphemy. Presently the whole figure of the monster is before him. Its appearance is like a leopard or panther, but its feet are the feet of a bear, and its mouth as the mouth of a lion. He saw also that the Beast had a throne, and power, and great authority. One of his heads showed marks of having been fatally wounded and slain, but the death-stroke was healed.
"He saw also the whole earth wondering after the Beast, amazed at his majesty and power, exclaiming at the impossibility of withstanding it, and celebrating its superiority to everything. He beheld, and the Beast was speaking great and blasphemous things against God, blaspheming His name, His tabernacle, even them that [Transcriber's note: line missing from book here] tabernacle in the Heaven the translated saints), assailing and overcoming the saints on the earth, and wielding authority over every tribe, and people, and tongue and nation. He saw also that all the dwellers on earth, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain, did worship this Beast. And for forty-two months the monster holds its place and enacts its resistless will.
"This is the picture! What are we to make of it? What does it mean? How are we to understand it? It would seem to be a symbolic presentation of the political sovereignty of this world at the final crisis.
"The Beast has horns, and horns represent power. On these horns are diadems, and diadems are the emblems of regal dominion. The Beast is said to possess power, a throne, and great authority. He makes war. He exercises dominion over all tribes, and peoples, and tongues, and nations. He is a monstrous Beast, including in his composition the four beasts of Daniel.
"From the interpreting angel we know that Daniel's four beasts denoted 'four kingdoms' that arose upon the earth. The identification thus becomes complete and unmistakable, that this monstrous Beast is meant to set before us an image of earthly sovereignty and dominion. And if any further evidence of this is demanded, it may be abundantly found in Rev. XVII. 9-17, where the same Beast is further described, and the ten horns are interpreted to be 'ten kings.'
"This Beast is therefore the embodiment of this world's political sovereignty in its last phase, in the last years of its existence. Daniel's beasts were successive empires, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Graeco-Macedonian, and the Roman. But the lion, the bear, the leopard, and the nameless ten-horned monster, each distinct in Daniel, are all united in one in Revelation.
"This Beast appears to be, undoubtedly, an individual administration, embodied in one particular man. Though upheld by ten kings or governments, they unite in making the Beast the one sole Arch Regent of their time.
"This he—the Beast, the Anti-christ—gets a grip of the nations, who willingly submit to his rule, being under the spirit of delusion, 'believing the lie' of the Anti-christ.
"Already, we see that this confederacy of nations is being called into an almost sudden existence. The seers of our nation, before this strange order of things that has arisen in our midst, since the taking away of the church, were wont to say to certain political changes—'at the back of all the known forces that have helped to bring so-and-so to pass, there almost seems to have been some unseen, unknown Master-mind at work.'