This is no description of a personal Antichrist at all, but the characteristic description of the corporate power of the beast; Antichrist’s deadly wound, for example, was never healed. The haste which applies passages to an object, because there may be other passages which prove an important link of the subject of the former with that object, often deprives us of a vast deal of the instruction of the word of God, and deters those from pursuing that link, who have seized the neglected parts which are now, by a particular absorbing interest, all set aside. The terror of the day of Antichrist is not characteristic of the saint: he has, it seems to me, a consciousness of his union with the Lord and gathering to Him, which sets Him above the terror of Antichrist’s power, or of the day of the Lord upon him.
We have had the sign of Satan as the dragon in heaven, a secret for the Church, for those who saw things there.
We have had the beast arise out of the sea (the tumultuous movings of the nations, the mass of peoples), and, so formed, Satan give him his power, and throne, and great authority. Now, out of the formed arrangement of the scene of God’s moral providence, the subject-place of light and
