There are three ways of expounding all the visions of this revelation, from the end of chap. iii. to the end of ver. 10. chap. xx. all of which seem grounded on the opinions of the ancient Fathers.
According to the first, all these visions are only to be fulfilled in antichrist's time, a little before the end of the world.
According to the second, the visions may be applied to particular events, which happened in the first three or four ages, under the persecuting heathens, till by Constantine, and the succeeding Christian emperors, idolatry by degrees was extirpated, and the faith of Christ triumphed over all its enemies, whether Jews or pagans.
According to the third, by the great city of Babylon, is mystically and metaphorically signified all wicked great cities in the world, all the multitude of the wicked dispersed in all nations, their short and vain happiness, their persecutions and oppressions of the good and faithful servants of God, who live piously in this world, and who are called to be citizens of the celestial Jerusalem in the kingdom of God, where he reigneth for ever with his Angels and saints, and where they all reign with him, happy in his sight and enjoyment. Third one is most probable considering what SS Jerome and Augustine.
Of the great harlot. Nothing can be better applied than this epithet to ancient Rome, which had conquered almost all the kingdoms of the known world, as it is said in ver. 18. she is the great city, a kingdom which hath dominion over the kings of the earth; ver. 9. it was built upon seven mountains; ver. 6. was watered with the blood of the saints and martyrs of Jesus Christ; and in fine, ver. 5. it was the great Babylon, as S. Peter, in his first epistle, pleases to call it.
Come, I will shew thee the condemnation of the great harlot, . . . Babylon . . the mother of the fornications. By this harlot, and this Babylon, is signified the multitude of all the wicked of all times and places, who have abandoned themselves to sensual pleasures, and sought for their happiness in riches and worldly grandeur; for this reason she is said to carry on her forehead this inscription, a mystery; that is, to be understood in a mystical sense of all the wicked, who make up as it were one city, as S. Aug. observes, which may be called Babylon, the city of confusion, the city of idolatry, and of all manner of vices.
The beast, that is, the devil, carries her, whose suggestions the wicked follow. He comes out from the bottomless pit. He was, i.e. had a much greater and more extensive power over the wicked world before Christ's coming and incarnation; and he is not, i.e. according to S. Aug. his power hath been much extenuated and lessened since that time. He is bound or chained up for a thousand years, as it is said, c. xx. 2. By which may be understood all the time from Christ's coming, and the establishing of his Christian Church, till the last and severest persecution under antichrist. See S. Aug. l. xx. de Civ. Dei. c. vii. And when he shall come again, and be let loose, as it were, in antichrist's time, he must continue a short while: for all the ancient fathers agree, by the interpretations they give to the Scripture, that antichrist, and consequently the devil with antichrist, must reign but a short time. The scarlet coloured beast, the devil, called the prince of this world, on whom the harlot gilded with gold sat; that is, all the wicked, and particularly all wicked kings and princes, with their worldly greatness, who were drunk with the wine of her prostitution; that is, who abandoned themselves and indulged their passions with all sensual pleasures, and contented themselves with the vain and deceitful happiness of this life; to be convinced of which, the Angel is said to have taken S. John in spirit into a wilderness from the company of the wicked world, the better to see and contemplate the vanity of their short and false happiness.