Light is thus thrown also upon the second point above mentioned: the particular conflict referred to in these verses. The statement that _there was war in heaven_, and that when the dragon was defeated he was _cast down into the earth_, might lead us to think of an earlier conflict between good and evil than any in which man has part: of that mentioned by St. Peter and St. Jude, when the former consoles the righteous by the thought that "God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment,"[310] and when the latter warns sinners to remember that "angels which kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation, He hath kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgment of the great day."[311] The circumstances, however, of the war, lead rather to the thought of a conflict in which the Son, incarnate and glorified, takes His part. For _this_ "Son" is the opponent of the dragon introduced to us in the first paragraph of the chapter. "Heaven" is not so much a premundane or supramundane locality as the spiritual sphere within which believers dwell even during their earthly pilgrimage, when that pilgrimage is viewed upon its higher side. And the means by which the victory is gained--for the victors _overcame by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony_--distinctly indicate that the struggle referred to took place after the work of redemption had been completed, not before it was begun.