Will remove thy candlestick. ‘Its candlestick has been for centuries removed out of his place; the squalid Moham- medan village which is nearest to its site does not count one Christian in its insignificant population; its temple is a mass of shapeless ruins; its harbor is a reedy pool; the bittern booms amid its pestilent and stagnant marshes; and malaria and ob- livion reign supreme over the place where the wealth of ancient civilization gathered around the scenes of its grossest supersti- tions and its most degraded sins” (Farrar, ‘ Life and Work of Paul,” ii., 43, 44).
John employs the verb xivéw remove (Rev., move) only in the Apocalypse, and only once besides the present instance, in ch. vi. 14, where, as here, it signifies moving an judgment.
The Nicolaitans. From wxdv to conquer, and Xads the people. There are two principal explanations of the term. The first and better one historical. A sect springing, according to credible tradition, from Nicholas a proselyte of Antioch, one of the seven deacons of Jerusalem (Acts vi. 5), who apostatized from the truth, and became the founder of an Antinomian Gnostic sect. They appear to have been characterized by sen- suality, seducing Christians to participate in the idolatrous feasts of pagans, and to unchastity. Hence they are denoted by the names of Balaam and Jezebel, two leading agents of moral contamination under the Old Testament dispensation. Balaam enticed the Israelites, through the daughters of Moab and Midian, to idolatry and fornication (Num. xxv.; xxxi. 16). Jezebel murdered the Lord’s prophets, and set up idolatry in Israel. The Nicolaitans taught that, in order to master sensu- ality, one must know the whole range of it by experience; and that he should therefore abandon himself without reserve to the lusts of the body, since they concerned only the body and did not touch the spirit. These heretics were hated and ex- pelled by the Church of Ephesus (Apoc. ii. 6), but were tol- erated by the Church of Pergamum (Apoc. ii. 15). The other view regards the name as symbolic, and Nicholas as the Greek rendering of Balaam, whose name signifies destroyer or cor- eupter of the people. This view is adopted by Trench (‘Seven