that is, that I might make thee a kingdom, or political world, " and I might say unto Sion, • Thou art my people.''

The subject treated of is the emancipation by which God delivered the people of Israel out of Egypt, that he might, of that people, found for himself a kingdom or republic in the promised land. From whence it will not be difficult to collect what is meant in the same prophet, c. lxv. and lxvi. by the new heaven and the new earth, namely, a new world of the same kind.

According to this image, then, heaven, agreeably to the prophetic idea, will denote whatever is eminent in the universality of any kingdom or republic; the earth, on the contrary, what is lowest; the stars, those who obtain and fill a place in that exalted station. By which construction, the sun and moon, being the principal lights of heaven, the former will indicate the first and chief majesty and dignity of the kingdom, the latter the next in order to it; which indeed is so true, that the Chaldee paraphrast on the prophets substitutes afterwards, for the sun and moon, the kingdom and glory; as Isaiah, c. lx. v. 20. Jerem. c. xv. v. 9.

Let the sun, then, in the Roman kingdom of idols, in right of supremacy, be the dragon himself, or Satan, especially since from him the Holy Spirit, c. xii. denominates the whole Roman

empire in the state in which he was treating of it the seven-headed red dragon, as we shall there see.

The moon, the second luminary of this heaven, you may call the supreme pontificate, annexed to the imperatorial majesty, even from its first origin, and, as it were, a part of it; or, if you will, the emperor, as the pontifex of Satan, with the whole pontifical college, who, with the emperor as their head, formed one body, and they presided over the religious rites of the gods, and over the whole of the republic, and were not liable to render an account to the authority of the senate, or of any one as superior to themselves, and therefore in this kingdom were not undeservedly to be considered as second to the dragon himself. It is not always necessary, I confess, that so accurate an explanation of every thing in allegories of this kind should be required; but when it can be done, let us apply every minute particular. The sun then of which we have been speaking became dark at that time, and suffered an eclipse, and obscuration of his baneful majesty, when the Roman emperors, having abjured him by baptism, with all his angels, pomps, and worship, dedicated themselves to Christ, the sun of righteousness. The sun being thus darkened and deprived of light, how could the moon, which borrows her light from

the sun, be secure? And that very thing, or the office of pontifex maximus, Constantine, Constantius, Valentinian, Valens, immediately rejected, as it was fit they should, unwilling from thenceforward to work for the devil. The name, however, at which you may be surprised, they did not on that account despise, but retained for a short time inscribed among their titles. Gratian first refused the title, as well as the pontifical garments, when offered to him, according to custom, by the pontiffs, as unworthy a Christian man; (a good act, which deserves to be recorded.) And this indeed was a change of such importance, that the Holy Spirit will thenceforth consider the Roman Cæsar, thus divested of the pontificate, as a new head of the Roman beast and king, as we shall hear in c. xvii. But still this moon shone with some light, though melancholy and weak, till Theodosius the First, that destroyer of heathenism, took away at length the pontifical college itself, with the whole remaining crowd of priests, all their revenues being confiscated, by one edict, to the treasury. Now then was the time when Satan must seek another pontifex maximus for himself. But I proceed to the remaining circumstances.

"And the stars of heaven fell on the earth, as a fig-tree casts her unripe figs when shaken by a great wind, and the heaven departed as a book

when it is rolled up." Or, "the heaven vanished away," &c. That is, the stars of heaven disappeared, as letters vanish from a book rolled up in the manner of the ancients. For there is an ellipsis of the former substantive, on both sides common to the Hebrew language, as Deut. c. xx. v. 19; 2 Kings, c. xviii. v. 31; and elsewhere frequently to be found; so that this passage of the disappearance of the heaven, and that of the fall of the stars, mutually explain each other, and ought not to be separated from one another, as erroneously pointed, but ought to be included within the same comma. Indeed, the whole passage being from the thirty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, v. 4, where, evidently under the same image, though in an inverse order, the Holy Spirit paints the slaughter and ruin of the kingdom of Edom,—like this,—a kingdom of idols.

"The heavens," (says he,) " shall be rolled up like a book, and the whole host of them, (that is, the stars,) shall fall as a leaf from the vine, and as a deciduous fruitling from the fig-tree;" which sentence the Apocalyptical Spirit wished to render still clearer by the double addition of the words, ἀπεχωρίσθη, " it departed,” and ὑπὸ μεγάλου ávéμov σuoμévn, "shaken by a great wind." Moreἀνέμου σειομένη, over, Obadiah, Jeremiah, c. xlix. from v. 7 to 22; Ezekiel, c. xxxv. through the whole chapter, and c. xxv. v. 12, treat of the same Edomitish ruin, with

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circumstances not more mild than Isaiah, which I notice on this account, lest any one should think that the description of Isaiah is suited only to the great day of universal judgment.

But now, to return to the Apocalypse. The stars were the Roman heaven of deities, both the gods themselves, the chiefs of that kingdom, under Satan their prince, and the nobles, the priests, though of inferior rank; for even the stars differ from other stars in order and sublimity. These, therefore, are those who, in this wonderful commotion of the Roman state, shaken from their seats, "fell on the earth as a figtree scatters her unripe fruit, when it is shaken by a high wind."

Nor will this interpretation of the stars as of gods and priests of the gods, excite so much surprise in him who remembers that the gods of the heathen are every where spoken of in sacred Scripture as the host of heaven, and by Daniel, that the priests and elders of the glorious land, or of the people of Israel, whom Antiochus Epiphanes had cast to the earth, are called by that name. "He magnified himself (says he,) against the host of heaven, and cast down to the earth some of the host and of the stars, and trampled upon them." What he impiously did against the people of the true God, the very same the Christian emperors did against the people of