This relation appears in the words, _I saw a woman sitting upon a
scarlet-coloured beast_, and in later words of the chapter: _the beast
that carrieth her_. The woman then is not subordinate to the beast,
but is rather his controller and guide. And this relation is precisely
what we should expect. The beast is before us in his final stage, in
that immediately preceding his own destruction. He is no longer in the
form of Egypt, or Assyria, or Babylonia, or Persia, or Greece, or
Rome. These six forms of his manifestation have passed away. The
restrainer has been withdrawn,[475] and the beast has stepped forth in
the plenitude of his power. He has been revealed as the "ten horns"
which occupy the place of the seventh head; and these ten horns are
ten kings who, having now received their kingdoms and with their
kingdoms their diadems, are the actual manifestation in history of the
beast as he had been seen in his ideal form in chap. xiii. The beast
is therefore the spirit of the world, partly in its secularising
influence, partly in its brute force, in that tyranny and oppression
which it exercises against the children of God. The woman, again, is
the spirit of false religion and religious zeal, which had shown
itself under all previous forms of worldly domination, and which was
destined to show itself more than ever under the last. To the eye of
St. John this spirit was not confined to Christian times. The woman,
considered in herself, is not simply the false Christian Church. She
is so at the moment when _we_ behold her on the field of history. But
St. John did not believe that saving truth, the truth which unites us
to Christ, the truth which is "of God," was to be found in
Christianity alone. It had existed in Judaism. It had existed even in
Heathenism, for in his Gospel he remembers and quotes the words of our
Lord in which Jesus says, "And other sheep I have, which are not of
this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice; and
they shall become one flock, one Shepherd."[476] As then Divine truth,
the light which never ceases to contend with the darkness, had been
present in the world under every one of its successive kingdoms, so
also perversions of that truth had never failed to be present by its
side. All along the line of past history, in Heathenism as well as in
Judaism, the ideal bride of Christ had been putting on her ornaments
to meet the Bridegroom; and not less all along the same line had the
harlot been arraying herself in purple and scarlet and decking herself
with gold and precious stones and jewels, that she might tempt men to
resist the influence of their rightful King. The harlot had been
always thus superior to the beast. The beast had only the powers of
this world at his command; the harlot wielded the powers of another
and a higher world. The one dealt only with the seen and temporal, the
other with the unseen and eternal, the one with material forces, the