was the serpent that cast it out?  Others apply it to errors that the Pagan party introduced baptized with the name of Christianity, when they professed to become converts at a later period.  It is certainly an appropriate figure of speech to say a flood of error or of false doctrine; but whether a flood of water is a proper symbol of the same is another question.  I do not think it is.  Water, being an object of nature, would point us to something political.  False doctrines are usually symbolized by something different from objects in nature.

There is considerable difficulty in verifying the symbol, but I will submit what up to the present has seemed to me as the most satisfactory explanation.  It appears from the description that this was about the last great public effort the dragon made to overwhelm the church and that he was exasperated to this supreme effort by the humiliating defeat he had suffered.  The means he employed was water, an object of nature; hence we are to look for some great political event by which the dragon made his master-effort to destroy the woman shortly after her flight into the wilderness.  In A.D. 284 Diocletian, a Pagan, succeeded to the imperial throne.  Before the close of his reign (305), the Christians suffered the most terrible persecution ever received at the hands of Pagan Rome.  It continued ten years—­A.D. 302-312.  It was the design of this emperor to completely extirpate the very name of Christianity, and his unfortunate victims were slain by the thousands throughout the empire.  “But the master-piece of [his] heathen policy was the order to seek and burn all copies of the Word of God.  Hitherto the enemy had been lopping off the branches of the tree whose leaves were for the healing of the nations; now the blow was made at the root.  It had once been the policy of Antiochus Epiphanes, when he madly sought to destroy the Jewish Scriptures.  It was both wise and wicked.  It had but one defect, it could not be carried into complete execution.  The sacred treasure was in too many hands, and too many of its guardians were brave and prudent, to make extermination possible.  An African bishop said, ’Here is my body, take it, burn it; but I will not deliver up the Word of God.’  A deacon said, ’Never, sir, never!  Had I children I would sooner deliver them to you than the divine word.’  He and his wife were burnt together.”  Butler’s Eccl.  History, p. 66.

But “the earth helped the woman”—­another unlooked-for political event.  Worn out with the cares of State, boasting that the very name of Christ was abolished, and dying with a loathsome disease, the tyrant abdicated his throne.  A number of individuals claimed imperial honors; but Constantine, the ruler of Gaul, Spain, and Britain, fought his way against contending rivals and finally entered Rome, the capital, in triumph.  Enthroned as emperor of the West, he immediately issued an edict of toleration favorable to the Christians (A.D. 313) and soon became