established the real presence of Christ in the eucharist and
then instigated the Elector of Saxony to seize, imprison, and banish
those who differed from them in sentiment, as a result of which Peucer
suffered ten years of the severest imprisonment and Crellius was put
to death. The Protestant Council of Zurich condemned Felix Mantz to be
drowned because he insisted that infant sprinkling was not baptism. In
England the "Bloody Six Articles" of Henry VIII are a silent testimony
to the intolerant spirit of that age, when the royal reformer
dragged dissenters forth to execution. Witness also the twelve years'
imprisonment of John Bunyan and hundreds of others confined in jails
throughout the country; the persecution of the Quakers; the relentless
opposition to the Covenanters of Scotland, who were hunted and
destroyed like beasts because they insisted on their right to worship
God in their own way. It was this intolerant spirit that drove the
Puritans to the inhospitable shores of America, where they might have
the free privilege of worshiping God according to the dictates of
their own conscience.

It is possible that the persecuting principle ascribed to the
two-horned beast may include both the literal and the ecclesiastical
cutting off, reference being made directly to the spirit of
intolerance which manifested itself first in literal slaughter and
later in an unwarranted ecclesiastical exclusiveness.

The "number of the beast" alludes to his pretentious claims and is
probably a symbol of division. The definite number 666 is said to be
also the number of a man, and since the pope is the most important man
connected with the papal system, it is natural to identify him with
the individual referred to. Paul doubtless pointed out the pope
particularly as the "_man of sin_," "the son of perdition" (2 Thess.
2:3). In former ages, before the modern system of notation was
introduced, the only method of denoting numbers was by employing the
letters of the alphabet, certain letters having the power of number
as well as of sound. We still employ the same system for certain
purposes. The number of a name was simply the number denoted by the
several letters of that name.

The pope has a special title. He wears in jeweled letters upon his
mitre the inscription, _Vicarius Filii Dei_--Vicar of the Son of
God. Taking from his name all the letters that the Latins used for
numerals, we have just 666.

The era of modern sects is also