Revelation 17:18

18. The woman… is that great city The harlot is Babylon, and Babylon is the beast, for all three are different aspects of the same one antichrist.

Yet the woman survives the city and the beast survives both, Revelation 19:20.

We refer the Babylon-symbol to the politico-ecclesiastical organism of this ever-enlarging antichristic system a system which finds its immediate symbol in Rome as the seventh head, but its inherited totality symbolized in the eighth. Note Revelation 17:11. It is secular and ecclesiastical CESARISM, which, essentially pagan and atheistic, usurps the place of the true King, and tyrannizes over the consciences and rights of mankind and subjects them to the despotism of antichrist.

The harlot symbol is that unity of corrupt doctrine with corrupt character and conduct once eminently belonging to the ancient Baal system, (see note on Revelation 2:20,) by which whoredom, united with dogma, became a common name for a false and corrupt religionism. This harlotry is a compound of false theology with a debauchery and depravation of mind and manners.

The organic combination falls first, has fallen, and is falling. Men are gaining freedom of conscience; and religious despotism, with its religious wars and inquisitions, is going down by force of right asserting itself. But the purification of thought and life, the banishment of false theology and of all practical depravities and vices, social and individual, is a later reformation. Its fullest earthly completion will not be attained till Satan himself is bound and banished, and the millennial reign is inaugurated.