Babylon. See on 1 Pet. v.13. Tertullian, Ireneeus, and Jerome use Babylon as representing the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages Rome is frequently styled the Western Babylon. The sect of the Fraticelli, an eremitical organization from the Franciscans in the fourteenth century, who carried the vow of poverty to the extreme and taught that they were possessed of the Holy Spirit and exempt from sin—first familiarized the common mind with the notion that Rome was the Babylon, the great harlot of the Apocalypse (see Milman, “Latin Chris. tianity,” Book xii., ch. vi.). On the passage cited from Dante (ver. i.), Dean Plumptre remarks: “The words have the inter- est of being a medieval interpretation of Revelation xvii. 1-15, in which, however, the harlot and the beast seem somewhat strangely blended. The harlot is the corrupted Church of Rome; the seven heads are the seven hills on which the city is built; or perhaps, with an entirely different exegesis, the seven gifts of the Spirit, or the seven sacraments with which that Church had, in its outset, been endowed: the ten horns are the ten com- mandments. As long as the Church was faithful to her spouse, she had the moral strength which came from those gifts, and the divine law which she represented. When that failed, she became as a harlot, and her whoredom with kings was the sym- bol of her alliance with secular powers for the oppression of the nations” (On “ Inferno,” xix., 110).
6. Saints—martyrs. The saints include the martyrs or witnesses, but the latter word emphasizes the testemony of the saints which has been the cause of their death. For martyr, see on 1 Pet. v. 1.
8. To go into perdition (imdyew). Some good texts read imdyes gocth. For the verb, see on John vi. 21; viii. 21,
In the book (és). Lit., wpon.
From the foundation of the world. In ordinary New Testament Greek these words would belong to are written. Construe with the words immediately preceding. Compare ch. xiii. 8, and Matt. xxv. 34.
Vou, IL—35