And the woman whom thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.”--(Rev. xvii. 1--18.) All these several predictions have been fulfilled with the most striking completeness; and we may have to refer to them in the course of this work; but the descriptions in those from the Revelation require our very special notice, as they lead us more particularly to the Romish hierarchy, and to the terrible court of inquisition. The Rev. Mr. Elliott, in his “Commentary” on this chapter, says:-- “This vision represented pictorially a gaudily dressed drunken harlot, seated on a beast of monstrous form, with _seven_ heads, and on the seventh _ten horns_. The beast, in respect of its body, depicted the papal empire of the ten western European kingdoms; and in respect of the seventh, or rather, eighth head, the succession of Roman popes, constituting, from after the sixth century, that empire’s spiritual rulers. So the _woman_ represented _Rome_ in its character of the papal see, and mother-church of Western Christendom; including, doubtless, as part and parcel of herself, the ecclesiastical state, or Peter’s patrimony, in Italy, and vast dominions, convents, churches, and other property appertaining to the papal church elsewhere, both in Europe and over the world. “1. As the beast’s body both upheld and was subject to the woman, the rider, so the empire, as a whole, with the power of its secular kingdoms and many peoples, upheld, and was also at the same time ruled by papal Rome, the mother-church of Christendom. “2. As the woman was here depicted before St. John under a double character, viz., as a harlot to the ten kings, and a vintner or tavern-hostess vending wines to the common people, just according to the custom of earlier times, in which the harlot and the hostess of a tavern were characters frequently united; so the church of Rome answered to the symbol in either point of view; interchanging mutual favours, such as might suit their respective characters, with the kings of Anti-Christendom; and to the common people dealing out for sale the wine of the poison of her fornication, her indulgences, relics, transubstantiation-cup, as if the cup of salvation, &c. (see the Pope’s own medal, holding out the cup of her apostacy, struck at Rome on occasion of the Jubilee in 1825), therewith drugging and making them besotted and drunk.