Now let us observe what the Chapter says, in which the text occurs, concerning Rome, and what we may deduce from it.
This great city is described under the image of a woman, cruel, profligate, and impious. She is described as arrayed in all worldly splendour and costliness, in purple and scarlet, in gold and precious stones, and pearls, as shedding and drinking the blood of the saints, till she was drunken with it Moreover she is called by the name of “Babylon the Great,” to signify her power, wealth, profaneness, pride, sensuality, and persecuting spirit, after the pattern of that former enemy of the Church. I need not here relate how all this really answered to the character and history of Rome at the time St. John spoke of it. There never was a more ambitious, haughty, hardhearted, and worldly people than the Romans; never any, for none else had ever the opportunity, which so persecuted the Church. Christians suffered ten persecutions at their hands, as they are commonly reckoned, and very horrible ones, extending over two hundred and fifty years. The day would fail to go through an account of the tortures they suffered from Rome; so that the Apostle’s description was as signally fulfilled afterwards as a prophecy, as it was accurate at the time as an historical notice.
This guilty city, represented by St. John as an abandoned woman, is said to be seated on “a scarlet-coloured monster, full of names of blasphemy, having seven beads and ten horns.” Here we are sent back by the prophetic description to the seventh chapter of Daniel, in which the four great empires of the world are shadowed out under the figure of four beasts, a lion, a bear, a leopard, and a nameless monster, “diverse" from the rest, “dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly;” ”and it had ten horns.” This surely is the very same beast which St. John saw: the ten horns mark it. Now this fourth beast in Daniel’s vision is the Roman empire; therefore “the beast” on which the woman sat, is the Roman empire. And this agrees very accurately with the actual position of things in history; for Rome, the mistress of the world, might well be said to sit upon, and be carried about triumphantly on that world which she had subdued, and made her creature. Further, the prophet Daniel explains the ten horns
