No! 'non studiose, sed ironice commendavit Irenæus'. Indeed it is ridiculous to suppose that Irenæus was in earnest with 'Teitan'. His meaning evidently is:--if not 'Lateinos', which has a meaning, it is some one of the many names having the same numeral power, to which a meaning is to be found by the fulfillment of the prophecy. My own conviction is, that the whole is an ill-concerted conundrum, the secret of which died with the author. The general purpose only can be ascertained, namely, some test, partaking of religious obligation, of allegiance to the sovereignty of the Roman Emperor. If I granted for a moment the truth of Heinrichs's supposition, namely, that, according to the belief of the Apocalypt, the line of the Emperors would cease in Titus the seventh or complete number (Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, being omitted) by the advent of the Messiah;--if I found my judgment more coerced by his arguments than it is,--then I should use this book as evidence of the great and early discrepance between the Jewish-Christian Church and the Pauline; and my present very serious doubts respecting the identity of John the Theologian and John the Evangelist would become fixed convictions of the contrary. P. 91. Rev. xvii. 11. Among other grounds for doubting this interpretation (that 'the eighth' in v.11. is Satan), I object, 1. that it almost necessitates the substitution of the Coptic [Greek: aggelos] for [Greek: ogdoos] against all the MSS., and without any Patristic hint. For it seems a play with words unworthy the writer, to make Satan, who possessed all the seven, himself an 'eighth', and still worse if 'the eighth': 2. that it is not only a great and causeless inconcinnity in style, but a wanton adding of obscurity to the obscure to have, first, so carefully distinguished (c. xiii. 1-11.) the [Greek: drák_on] from the two [Greek: tháeria], and the one [Greek: thaeríon] from the other, and then to make [Greek: thaeríon] the appellative of the [Greek: drák_on]: as if having in one place told of Nicholas 'senior', Dick and another Dick his cousin, I should soon after talk of Dick, meaning old Nicholas by that name; that is, having discriminated Nicholas from Dick, then to say Dick, meaning Nicholas! Rev. xix. 9. These words might well bear a more recondite interpretation; that is, [Greek: outoi] (these blessed ones) are the true [Greek: lógoi] or [Greek: tékna Theou], as the Logos is the [Greek: huiòs Theou]. Ib. 10. According to the law of symbolic poetry this sociable angel (the Beatrice of the Hebrew Dante) ought to be, and I doubt not is, 'sensu symbolico', an angel; that is, the angel of the Church of Ephesus, John the Evangelist, according to the opinion of Eusebius. P. 294. Rev. xx. 'Millennium'.