orms, which, like the Council of Constance, combined the
imperial power of Rome, civil and ecclesiastic, that indomitable servant
of Christ gave a visible demonstration that "the Spirit of the Father"
animated and "spake in him," (Matt. x. 20.) Not less explicit was Luther
on the fundamental doctrine of the divine decrees; which, with other
Arminian dogmas of creature-merit, had been almost universally
propagated and stamped with the pretended infallible authority of Rome.
By the translation and circulation of the Holy Scriptures among the
people, the idolatries, impositions and profligacy of the priesthood
were extensively discovered. And after years of deference to
ecclesiastical authority, conditional proposals of submission to the
Pope upon conviction of error in his _theses_, or conscientious belief,
Luther in time arrived at the conclusion that the church of Rome was
irreclaimable, giving publicity to his deep convictions in a treatise
_De Captivitate Babylonica_,--"The Captivity of Babylon." In the 18th
chapter of this book, he discovered that Babylon is doomed to
destruction. He considered the church of Rome as answering to the
prophetic symbol, and of course not to be reformed. It was an obvious
inference--he ought to obey Christ rather than the Pope,--"Come out of
her, my people."--This call was indeed a sufficient warrant to separate
from the Church of Rome; and, acting on it, protestant churches have
ever since been organized: but the type or symbol, Babylon, was
unwarrantably restricted in import, as representing only the Church of
Rome. And it is to be deplored that most protestant expositors continue
to limit the inspired symbol in the same way till the present time. The
literal Babylon, a name common to the ancient city and empire by the
river Euphrates, was in no sense a church; and it would be anomalous and
incongruous to select either city or empire as an _emblem of a church_!
There is, however, in the Apocalypse a combining or blending of symbols
in order clearly and fully to represent a complex moral person. This has
been already exemplified in ch. xiii. 2, where the prominent features of
Daniel's first _three_ beasts, (ch. vii. 4-6,) are combined in John's
_first_ beast of the sea. Just so in this instance. The idolatrous and
tyrannical Roman empire, in alliance with an apostate church,
constitutes mystical Babylon. History demonstrates the fact of their
coalition. The great red dragon, the devil, op