But the Babylon of the book of Revelation comprehends more than the Babylon of the Hebrew prophets. The dangers which beset the Christian would be far less than they are if the Babylon of this world, which opposes itself as a rival to the kingdom of Christ, had no fascinations beyond those which the great city by the Euphrates could offer. The wily enemy of mankind is too subtle to depend upon any such powers of attractiveness as were embodied in the capital of the Chaldean Empire. And in describing the counterfeit of the kingdom of Christ the writer of the Apocalypse adds to his portrait of Babylon features which are used by Ezekiel as characteristic of another great capital, Tyre. Babylon was never a center of commerce; in no sense could it be described as a city whose merchants were princes. The same is also true of Rome, and is thus adverse to the opinion that John meant to describe the city of the Cæsars and of the popes. His delineation of Babylon would apply to Corinth or Carthage in ancient times, and to Venice or Amsterdam or London in more modern days, with greater aptness than to the metropolis on the Tiber. In this alteration of the emblem in which the writer of the Revelation indulges, in the blending and interweaving of details descriptive of both the Babylon and the Tyre of the Old Testament into the composite figure of the Apocalyptic Babylon, in the transition from Isaiah’s sublimely ironical shout of triumph over the metropolis by the Euphrates to Ezekiel’s sad and pathetic dirge over the fall of the commercial emporium of Phœnicia, a clew is given us to the interpretation of his meaning. The influence of Tyre upon the Hebrew people and religion was always deleterious, almost disastrous. The intercourse which began in the magnificent Solomon’s love of show and splendid state and luxury, and which was increased by the intermarriage of the royal houses of Ahab and Jehoshaphat with Tyrian princesses, was fruitful of moral degeneration. From the spiritual pesthouse upon the Mediterranean came, first, Tyrian art, then, Tyrian wares, then, Tyrian idols, and, then, the unbridled and lawless sensualities for which Tyre was notorious, until Baal had displaced the golden calves set up by Jeroboam in Bethel and had well-nigh overthrown the altars of Jehovah in the city of the great King. The Babylon which John saw and whose rise and fall he predicts was one that embraced in itself the unbounded pride, the self-sufficingness, the love of sorceries and dark arts of magic, along with the demoralizing practices of a great mart of commerce――a mongrel figure into which all forms of evil and sin were woven.