artling statement to one who has been
educated to believe in a reign of Christ in person here upon the earth in
some future age of a thousand years' duration. Reader, will you please
notice that the devil and Satan, that was to be bound a thousand years, is
also called the dragon? Now the Scriptures do not always mean Beelzebub
when speaking of Satan. Jesus upon one occasion, because Peter was
remonstrating with him concerning his death, said, "Get thee behind me,
Satan." Christ did not mean to say that Peter was the devil, but he
addressed him as Satan, because the devil was using him as an instrument
to persuade the Savior to escape the death he came here to endure for all.
So Satan and the devil spoken of in Rev. 20:2 does not refer to the
personal devil, the prince of evil spirits, but to some great power
antagonistical to gospel light and truth as revealed in the church of God.

Now we feel ourself under obligation to the reader to give him the correct
interpretation of this binding of Satan a thousand years, and of his being
loosed at the end of that period. The term "dragon" is used to represent a
state power, which gives power to some religion antagonistical to the
religion of the Bible. However the original and real fundamental dragon
power was Rome, when she supported a heathen religion, and when the world
on the whole was so under the seducing charms of idolatrous worship that
it knew not the one true God and his relationship to man. The Syriac New
Testament, in speaking of this dragon in verse two, says, "Who seduced the
whole habitable world." The binding of Satan refers to some time when the
delusive charms of heathenish worship were largely cleared away and there
became a greater universal knowledge of the true God. At the end of that
thousand years, or long period of time, which time we have reached, the
true God and the pure religion will be lost or unknown to the generality
of mankind, and heathenish rites and customs and ceremonies will be the
universal religion. Do we not read that at the end of the thousand years
Satan shall again deceive the nations? We understand by this that the
world on the whole shall be reveling in the delusive seductions of a lewd,
lustful, idolatrous religion, making the times like it was in the days of
Noah. Let me again say we are now entering these times, and this world is
swiftly passing under awful and blinding delusions. So great are the
delusions that if possible the ve