“3. With regard to the portraiture of the woman, robed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold, and precious stones and pearls, it is, as applied to the Romish church, a picture, characteristic and from life; the dress specified being distinctively that of the Romish ecclesiastical dignitaries, and the ornaments those with which it has been bedecked beyond any church called Christian; nay, beyond any religion, probably, that has ever existed in the world; not to add that even the very name on the harlot’s forehead, _Mystery_, (a name allusive, evidently, to St. Paul’s predicted _mystery of iniquity_,) was one, if we may repose credit on no vulgar authority, once written on the Pope’s tiara; and the apocalyptic title, ‘Mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth,’ the very parody, if I may so say, of the title Rome arrogates to herself, ‘Rome, mother and mistress.’ “4. As to the harlot’s being depicted ‘drunken with the blood of the saints,’ its applicability to the Romish church, throughout the latter half, at least, portion of the beast’s 1260 predicted years of prospering, is written in deep-dyed characters on the page of history.” Nothing can be more evident than that “Babylon the Great” designs the mystical city of the papal commonwealth, a regnant system of spiritual wickedness--an idolatrous church. This was the judgment of all the chief reformers in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and Scotland. Some even of the Roman Catholics had the same conviction; and Petrarch, the celebrated Italian poet, calls the papal court “The Babylonian harlot, mother of all idolatries.” Bishop Newton, having reviewed the prophecy, says, “Moreover, the woman, like other harlots who give philters and love-potions to inflame their lovers, hath ‘a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations, and filthiness of her fornication,’ to signify the specious and alluring arts wherewith she bewitcheth and inciteth men to idolatry, which is ‘abomination and spiritual fornication.’ It is an image copied from Jeremiah li. 7, ‘Babylon hath been a golden cup in the LORD’S hand, that made all the earth drunken.’ And is not this a much more proper emblem of _pontifical_ than of _imperial_ Rome?