forth her chief childe, and the devil seeketh to destroy him. He is pictured 1. A great red Dragon. Old Pharaoh who sought to devour new born Israel is much of the like character, Isa. 27.7. Psal. 74.13, &c. 2. With seven heads: So many had the persecuting Monarchies, Dan. 7. the Lion one, the Bear one, the Leopard four, and the fourth beast one. 3. And ten horns, Parallel to the Syrogrecian persecutors, Dan. 7.7, &c. 4. With his tayl he drew and cast down the third part of the starres; As the Tyrant Antiochus had done, Dan. 8.10. So that by these allu∣sive descriptions, phrases of old stories fetched to expresse new, is shewed the acting of the devil now, by his mischievous and tyrannicall instruments, with as much bitternesse and bloody-mindednesse as he had done in those. The womans fleeing into the wildernesse, alludes to Israels getting away into the wildernesse from the Dragon Pharaoh, Exod. 14. &c. And her nourishing there a thousand two hundred and sixty daies, speaks Christs preservation of that Church in the bitterest danger and daies, like the daies of Antiochus. This Vision aims at the great opposition and oppression the Church and Gospel underwent from the first rising of it, to the ruine of Ierusalem: and their preservation in all that ex∣tremity.
The battel betwixt Michael and the Dragon, is of the same aim and time with the former; but it speaks thus much further, that the Church is not only preser∣ved, but the Dragon conquered and cast to the earth. Heaven all along in this Book is the Church, the earth therefore may be properly understood of the world, and here more especially of that part of worldly ones, the unbeleeving Jews; and that the rather, because the Gentiles here are called the wildernesse, as they be also in severall other places in Scripture. The devil therefore is cast out of the Church by the power of Michael, the Lord Christ, that he cannot nestle there, and he goes into the rest of the Nation that did not beleeve: much like the tenour of that parable, Matth. 12.43, 44, 45. The Woman hath Eagles wings [alluding to Exod. 19.4.] and gets into the wildernesse, the persecuted Church and Gospel gets among the Gentiles: The devil casts venom as a flood after the Woman-Church, and the earth swallows it up: the unbeleeving Jews do as it were drink up all the poyson of the devil, and together with raging against the Church they grow inraged one against another, and against the Romans, till they become their own destroyers. And indeed though it were a most bitter time with the Church while she was among the combustions that that Nation had within it self, yet their raging one against another the more is increased in their particular quarrels, the more it avenged her quarrell, and turned their edge from off her, upon themselves. The devil seeing this, betakes himself to fight against the Wo∣mans seed, the Church of the Gentiles: and the Treatise of that begins in the next Chapter.