Ambrose Lisle Phillipps

“ The destruction of imperial Rome was therefore not the destruction of any head of any beast, but the destruction of the imperial beast itself; and consequently cannot (on that ground alone) be represented, as Bishop Newton thinks, by the deadly wound of one of the heads of the Apocalyptic beast in question: not to add that the falsehood of this conclusion has already been proved by anticipation, when we showed that this beast could not represent the Roman empire at all. ”

“ Look upon the lively example of the holy fathers, in whom shone real perfection and the religious life, and thou wilt see how little it is and almost nothing that we do! Alas! what is our life, if it be compared with theirs! Saints and friends of Christ, they served our Lord in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness, labour and weariness, in watchings and fastings, in prayers and holy meditations, in frequent persecutions and reproaches. ”

“ True religion is from above, descending from the Father of Lights, but it is from the earth that all false religion springs. From the earth came paganism; and when God by His only Son had once more enlightened mankind, and brought many nations to the belief of His Divine truth, Satan raised up in the person of Mahomet, and by his agency, a new system of error to combat God's truth ”

“ The old Romans bore the eagle as their military standard, and no one can deny that the Roman eagle is another phrase to express "the Roman power." And the flight of the Roman eagle is used even by profane writers to symbolize the conquests of the Roman armies. When, therefore, the Prophet tells us that the wings of a great eagle were given to the Church for the very period of the little horn's dominion, and history tells us that the temporal sovereignty of Rome was at that very time given to the popes, we are surely justified in appealing to this great fact as the fulfilment of the prophecy. ”

“ Verse 10. "He that shall lead into captivity shall go into captivity: he that shall kill by the sword, shall be killed by the sword." And so it was, the heathen Turks bore down with resistless force and countless multitudes upon the empire of Mahomet, led his hosts into captivity, and slaughtered them by the sword. St. John then adds, "Here is the patience and the faith of the saints;" as much as to say, that the events that are to ensue upon these victories of the Turkish hordes will give ample scope to the Christian nations to exercise the virtues of patience and faith. ”

“ I therefore conclude that the territory of that empire had the same analogous relation to the Saracenic empire as the feet of a bear would hold to St. John's symbolical beast. Now in every animal the feet are the main instrument to effect its locomotion; and this is precisely the relation which the provinces of the Medo-Persian bear held to the Saracenic empire. Persia was, as we have already seen, the first kingdom to embrace Mahometanism, and it has been at all times from its Caucasian provinces that the chief strength of Mahometanism has issued forth. ”

“ If sportsmen hang up in their halls the horns and skins of the animals they have slain in the chase, well might the horns of a ram symbolize the origin and the character of a shepherd people, like the Ottomans, dwelling in tents, administering summary justice in the gate of a moveable camp, of which "the Sublime Porte" of modern Turkey hands on the memory and the tradition. But there is something else that these two horns of the ram remind us of; can we forget another Caucasian people and empire, which Daniel had seen under a similar image? ”

“ When we reflect upon this remarkable fact, and the effect produced upon the minds of men by the heavy guns and enormous cannon used by the Ottoman Turks with such deadly effect, we can hardly conceive a more appropriate symbol than the one used by the Apostle, "that the beast wrought great wonders, so that he made also fire to come down from heaven unto the earth in the sight of men." ”

“ And well might it wonder, for the Mahometan empire was dead, and was alive again! And well might the consequence be what St. John describes as ensuing thereon, "And they adored the dragon, which gave power to the beast: saying who is like unto the beast, and who shall be able to fight with him?"
Stricken with terror, the nations of Christendom fell before the beast one after the other, the victims of his rapacious ambition: and though for a season his rapid progress was checked by the crusades, it was but a momentary pause in that fearful career of conquest ”

“ The holy counsels of Jesus Christ were now eagerly embraced, we may say, without exaggeration, by countless millions of fervent Christian virgins and youths, whose hearts glowed so brightly with the love of Jesus, that they counted all things else but as dross in comparison of His service, and the continual contemplation of His blessed life and His adorable perfections. When we read the lives of St. Anthony and the other holy fathers of the deserts, we are filled with devotion, and the coldest hearts are kindled with the love of Jesus. ”

“ The Church's man-child is therefore evidently the sovereign pontiff, reigning from Rome over the Gentiles, and thus governing Messiah's spiritual kingdom. And whereas this man-child was said to be "taken up to God and to His throne," that may signify, that when the dragon stood before the woman to devour her child, he was taken up to the throne of God by martyrdom, for almost all the early popes, during the great Roman persecutions, laid down their lives for the testimony of Jesus, and so were taken up to the throne of God. ”

“ Catholics, however, who believe the Word of Christ, that the gates of hell shall never prevail against His visible Church, and that as our Divine Master has commissioned His Church to teach all nations, He must have guaranteed Her from the possibility of teaching error,—Catholics, we say, can never regard with any other feelings, than those of pity and horror, such blasphemous interpretations of Divine prophecy. ”

“ But this alternative is singularly unlikely, for the very preface of the Apocalypse leads us to look for a speedy, although a gradual accomplishment of the prophecy; and when we reflect that it is now more than eighteen centuries since the Apostle wrote his revelation, and that at least these great facts of history singularly accord with the prophetic statements, we confess that we at least cannot doubt that they are its fulfilment, and that it is quite vain to expect or wait for any other. ”

“ We have already demonstrated the beast to signify the Mahometan Saracenic empire; we, therefore, without hesitation, express our conviction that his bead, thus wounded to death, symbolized the extinction of the dynasty of the caliphs, which took place under Motassem, the fifty-sixth successor of Mahomet. So that, as we shall presently see, St. John describes a second beast coming up out of the earth, which evidently is but a development of the consequences resulting from the healing of the deadly wound inflicted on the principal head of the first beast. ”

“ Then by the ten horns I understand here not the ten kingdoms into which the Roman empire was ultimately subdivided, but the ten general persecutions of the Primitive Church, which are well compared to ten horns, because they aptly represent those ten furious assaults which Satan gave to the Church, by urging against her the whole physical force of the Roman empire in those ten great persecutions. ”

“ In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth verses, St. John continues to describe the mighty achievements of this Turkish beast, and he describes them in the same figurative but appropriate language. Thus, in the fourteenth verse, it is said "that he seduced them that dwell on the earth;" that is, that he perverted to the Mahometan faith all those whose "names were not written in the Book of Life of the Lamb" ... "saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make the image of the beast that had the wound of the sword and lived;" ”

“ I understand by that, first, in reference to Satan, that portion of the angels whom he dragged down from heaven to become his accomplices in warring against God along with himself upon the earth by trying to defeat the designs of God upon mankind; and secondly, in reference to the persecuting action of the pagan Roman empire upon the bishops of the Catholic Church, who are elsewhere in the Apocalypse compared to stars: "The seven stars are the angels" or bishops "of the seven Churches."— (Apocalypse i. 20.) ”

“ Satan, enraged at the failure of all his efforts to destroy the Church by the furious persecutions of the Roman emperors, still further infuriated by seeing that river absorbed by the earth in the conversion of those very emperors, and the manifold fruits of sanctity all over the earth, meditates a fresh war upon the seed of the woman, that is, the Church's children ”

“ The Church's child is every child of Adam, baptized in the sacred layer of regeneration, and she might well be described as travailing with pain, when the birth of her first children cost her so many cruel persecutions, as she endured during the three first centuries of her existence. The Prophet continues, "And there was seen another sign in heaven: and behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns ”

“ Forster, affirms that, in his opinion, this interpretation has higher claims to being the correct one than any other advanced by other commentators.
It must be borne in mind that the Apostle expressly tell us that "it is the number of a man," consequently it seems clear that we must seek for the solution of the mystic number in the name of a man, rather than of a nation or of a system ”

“ Peter, but it is not essential to the papacy. The popes were not always sovereigns of Rome, but they have always been the chief bishops of the Catholic Church, and they alone, amongst all other bishops, have jurisdiction over the whole Church. ”

“ By day they laboured, and a great part of the night they spent in prayer; and even while they laboured they ceased not to pray in spirit. They spent all their time profitably; the hours seemed too short to spend with God ”