f the three persecuting powers which went before
it; this may be a suitable place briefly to review the sufferings
inflicted by them upon the saints, that we may know what the witnesses
were taught to expect at the hands of this monstrous enemy.--"Israel is
a scattered sheep, the lions have driven him away: first, the king of
Assyria hath devoured him, and last, this Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon
hath broken his bones.--The violence done to me and to my flesh, be upon
Babylon, shall the inhabitant of Zion say; and, My blood upon the
inhabitants of Chaldea, shall Jerusalem say." (Jer. 1. 17; li.
35.)--"Haman, the son Hammedatha, the Agagite, the Jews' enemy,--thought
scorn to lay hands on Mordecai alone."--"If it please the king, let it
be written that they (the whole people) may be destroyed; and I will pay
ten thousand talents of silver,--to bring it into the king's
treasuries."--"Behold also the gallows, fifty cubits high, which Haman
had made for Mordecai, who had spoken good for the king, standeth in the
house of Haman. Then the king said, Hang him thereon." (Esth. iii. 1, 9;
vii. 9.) Such were the crimes and such the punishments of the enemies of
God's people in Babylon and Persia, as already matter of inspired
history: and had we equally full and authentic records of the
punishments as we have of the cruelties of Antiochus and other
successors of Alexander the Great, the king of Greece, we would see, as
in the other cases, "the just reward of the wicked." Of all these
idolatrous, tyrannical and persecuting powers, which the Divine Spirit
represented by beasts of prey, it was foretold that they were to be
removed in succession and with violence. This fourth beast, "dreadful
and terrible and strong exceedingly, was to devour and break in pieces,
and stamp the residue with the feet of it." (Dan. vii. 7.) Moreover,
while it is predicted of them that "they had their dominion taken away,"
it is also added,--"yet their lives were prolonged for a season and
time," (v. 12.) That is, though their distinct and successive
_dominions_ were severally swept from the earth, yet their _lives_,--the
diabolical principles by which they had been actuated survived; and
these passed, by a kind of transmigration, into the body of the fourth
beast. This transition of animating principles or imperial policy of
inveterate hostility to the kingdom of God, we think, is plainly
indicated by the three features of this beast of the sea, the "leo