around like the candlestick. The two witnesses, therefore, are not two individuals to be raised up during the course of the Church's history, that they may bear testimony to the facts and principles of the Christian faith. The Seer indeed may have remembered that it had been God's plan in the past to commission His servants, not singly, but in pairs. He may have called to mind Moses and Aaron, Joshua and Caleb, Elijah and Elisha, Zerubbabel and Joshua, or he may have thought of the fact that our Lord sent forth His disciples two by two. The probability, however, is that, as he speaks of "witnessing," he thought mainly of that precept of the law which required the testimony of two witnesses to confirm a statement. Yet he does not confine himself to the thought of two individual witnesses, however eminent, who shall in faithful work fill up their own short span of human life and die. The witness he has in view is that to be borne by all Christ's people, everywhere, and throughout the whole Christian age. From the first to the last moment of the Church's history in this world there shall be those raised up who shall never fail to _prophesy_, or, in other words, to testify to the truth of God as it is in Jesus. The task will be hard, but they will not shrink from it. They shall be _clothed in sackcloth_, but they shall count their robes of shame to be robes of honour. They shall occupy the position of Him who, in the days of His humiliation, was the "faithful and true Witness." Nourished by the Spirit that was in Him, they shall, like Him, be the light of the world,[257] so that God shall never be left without some at least to witness for Him. Having spoken of the persons of the two witnesses, St. John next proceeds to describe the power with which, amidst their seeming weakness, their testimony is borne; and once more he finds in the most striking histories of the Old Testament the materials with which his glowing imagination builds.