The Revelation of Jesus Christ - The Herald

Mary's reign; the extinction by fire and sword of the Reformation in Spain and Italy, in
Portugal, and Poland; the massacre of St. Bartholomew; the long and cruel persecutions of
the Huguenots and all the infamies and barbarities of the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, which flung its refugees on every shore of Europe, were perpetrated by Papal
Rome. Her victims have been innumerable. In Spain alone Llorente reckons as sufferers of
the Inquisition, 31,912 burnt alive, and 291,450 so-called penitents forced into submission
'by water, weights, fire, pulleys, and screws and all the apparatus by which the sinews
could be strained without cracking, and the bones bruised without breaking, and the body
racked without giving up the ghost.' A million perished in the massacre of the Albigenses.
In the thirty years which followed the first institution of the Jesuits, nine hundred
thousand faithful Christians were slain. Thirty-six thousand were dispatched by the
common executioner in the Netherlands, by the direction of the Duke of Alva, who
boasted of the deed. Fifty thousand Flemings and Germans were hanged, burnt, or buried
alive under Charles V. And when we have added to this the blood shed of the Thirty
Years' War in Germany, and the long agony of other and repeated massacres of Protestants
in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, we have to
remember that for all this, 'no word of censure ever issued from the Vatican, except in the
brief interval when statesmen and soldiers grew weary of bloodshed and looked for means
to admit the heretics to grace.'"
"And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the
martyrs of Jesus."
Chapter 39: Rev. 17:7-18
The Vision of the Scarlet Colored Beast
"And the angel said to me . . . The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend
out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition."--Rev. 17:7,8.
These words of explanation by the revealing angel very evidently describe in a general
way three states as well as three periods in the scarlet colored beast's career, the last of
which will witness its destruction. The first mention in the Apocalypse of this ten-horned,
seven-headed "beast" is in chapter 13, where we have its origin or rise in its ten-horned
state described. (Its rise as a universal empire is described in Dan. 2 and 7.) In chapter 13 it is
represented as ascending up out of the sea. The dragon that is seen standing on the shore
of the sea, is represented as giving to the beast its power, throne, and great authority. This,
we have interpreted to represent the Emperor Justinian's giving to the Papacy by a decree,
power over the saints of God. The eastern part of the Roman Empire afterward called the
Eastern or Greek Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, is named the dragon.
"The beast that was," according to this interpretation, would represent the Western part of
the Roman power during the long period of ecclesiastical and temporal authority
exercised by the Pope, beginning to end in 1799, and fully ending in 1870, when it lost all
vestige of temporal sovereignty. The "is not" state, would represent its condition since
1870--its present condition. Events of the near future will alone prove what the third state