erates through both during
the allotted period of 1260 years against the witnesses of Christ.
Sometimes, indeed, the nominal church is the more active and visible
instrument, and at other times the state, in opposing Mediatory
authority; and thus Babylon, or one of her streets, which is the
equivalent of a horn of the beast, becomes prominent. This second angel
confidently proclaims,--"Babylon is fallen, is fallen." So said Isaiah
of literal Babylon long before the event; (ch. xxi. 9,) and so said
Jeremiah, (ch. li. 8,) to whose predictions John obviously alludes. All
these three prophets speak in present time of a future event, simply
because of the settled and unalterable purpose of God, acting not
formally as a sovereign, but as a judge. The multiplied and aggravated
crimes of Babylon, literal or mystical Babylon, are the just grounds of
her deserved and awful doom. From ancient times God has declared by his
prophets the things that are not yet done. (Isa. xlvi. 10.) His counsel
stands and he doeth all his pleasure.

That the mystical Babylon emblematically represented the complex systems
of civil and ecclesiastical corruption and despotism organized in
Christendom, was in some degree understood by the reformers in Europe;
but the work of this second angel was carried on successively by men of
piety and learning, who were eminently qualified for systematically
arranging the doctrines of grace as deduced from the word of God. Their
pious labors we still have in the forms of Bodies of Divinity and
Confessions of Faith, in both which the unscriptural and antiscriptural
dogmas and heresies of Rome are condemned and solidly confuted by the
Scriptures. There is a wonderful "harmony of confessions" framed by
those who separated from the fellowship of the Romish church; which
harmony can be accounted for only by the fact that those who framed them
drew their materials from the Bible. But it was by their public
_covenants especially_, that the reformers lifted a testimony against
the heresies, immoralities and tyrannies of the church of Rome. And
among all the churches of the Reformation, that of Scotland is justly
entitled to the pre-eminence. In no nation or state in Christendom did
the witnesses of Christ,--the second angel, attain so nearly to a
scriptural model of organized society in church and state as in that
land, whose mountains and valleys were "flowered with martyrs" for a
"Covenanted Work of Reformation." As Zuin