'isterial right either to grant or to withhold from the mass of the people the means or the power of attaining knowledge; so that the term still conveys the idea of official prerogative. A passage still more pertinent to our purpose occurs Is. 22: 22, 'And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open;' rendered in the Chaldee Targum,-" And I will deliver the key of the house of the sanctuary, and the government of the house of David into his hand." Upon this passage Lowth remarks:- "That as the robe and the baldric (girdle) mentioned in the preceding verse were the ensigns of power and authority, so likewise was the key the mark of office, either sacred or civil." The import of the expression doubtless is, that Eliakim should act by an authoritative commission, as the prime minister, or rather perhaps the high steward, of the house of David, having all the subordinate officials of the royal palace so entirely under his control, and so obedient to his nod, that his will was to be to them an absolute law. The laying of the key therefore upon his shoulder was merely the symbol of the transfer of this delegated authority; which still farther illustrates the import of the key as a hieroglyphic.* Again it is said, Rev. 9: 1, ‘And I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.' The office of the key in this instance was to open instead of shut, but it still throws light upon the gen * In like manner, in the classic writers, the priestess of Juno is called douxos "Hoas, key-bearer of Juno. Esch. Suppl. 299. A female high in office under a great queen has the same title: Ku2λιθύη κλειδώχος Ολυμπιάδος βασίλεις, Callithæ the key-bearer of the queen Olympias. Anc. Phorion,. ap. Clem. Alex. p. 418. This mark of office was likewise among the Greeks, as here in Isaiah, borne on the shoulder, wherefore it is said of the priestess of Ceres, zαTwμúdiav eye zhrida, she had a key upon her shoulder. Callim. Ceres, v. 45. eral symbol. It denotes in the present connexion a providential license given to some apostate agent, represented by the falling star, to be the means of releasing from confinement some destructive power which was to issue forth and to desolate a considerable portion of the Apocalyptic earth. The key is mentioned in order to indicate that the work executed by the prophetic agents was performed in consequence of an official designation emanating from a higher power. This is clearly implied also in the force of the word ¿dón -was given. The grand event depicted by the symbol was undoubtedly the irruption of the Saracens under Mohammed and his successors against the Roman empire. "This," says Daubuz, "expresses well a hidden multitude of confused men arising on a sudden, and breaking out to make incursions, as a subterraneous flood when broken out; and that according to the analogy that the Deep or the Sea signifies a multitude in war and tumult, and the Pit the most vile, lowest, and contemptible sort of men, like the slaves that are in the pit. I think then that the Holy Ghost did design to show by the key of the bottomless gulf which was given to this star fallen from heaven upon the earth, that this rebellious prince or upstart would set the slaves at liberty, and all such sorts of despicable men; and by setting himself at the head of them, lead on that mixed multitude to prosecute the purposes mentioned hereafter carrying on their designs by a continual and prodigious war, and incursions upon others. The Saracens were as hell broke loose. Mohammed was sent to punish corrupted Christendom with the vilest sort of men, the most despicable nation." It will be seen in the sequel that we differ from this commentator, for whom we have greater respect than for any other, in our explication of * Perpet. Comment. p. 398. the symbol of the bottomless pit,' but the citation is important for our main purpose. From what has now been said, we are better prepared to understand the drift of the emblematic scenery under consideration. The circumstance of the angel's coming down from heaven having the key of the bottomless pit in his hand, denotes that the action to which his coming has reference, viz. the apprehension, binding, and imprisonment of the Dragon, was to be performed by a delegated power, an authorized and official ministry, or in other words, in consequence of an imperial edict. The evident scope of this part of the vision is to point out to us the fact, that the power symbolized by the Dragon was forcibly expelled from the territories in which it had hitherto subsisted, and that through the instrumentality of some commissioned organ acting in the name of the supreme authority. Now as a matter of historical verity, Paganism did not go out of the Roman empire, but it was driven out. The majesty of the law commanded its expulsion, and the reader who may have access to the Theodosian Code containing the enactments against Paganism, is in possession of the genuine 'key' of the passage and to the passage before us. The historian so often cited, speaking of the attempts of the idolaters by subtle distinctions to elude the laws enacted against the heathen sacrifices, says,-"These vain pretences were swept away by the last edict of Theodosius, which inflicted a deadly wound upon the superstition of the Pagans. This prohibitory law is expressed in the most absolute and comprehensive terms. 'It is our will and pleasure,' says the emperor, 'that none of our subjects, whether magistrates or private citizens, however exalted or however humble may be their rank and condition, shall presume, in any city or in any place, to worship an inanimate idol "As the temples by the sacrifice of a guiltless victim.'"* had been erected for the purpose of sacrifice, it was the duty of a benevolent prince to remove from his subjects the dangerous temptation of offending against the laws which he had enacted. A special commission was granted to Cynegius, the prætorian præfect of the east, and afterward to the Counts Jovius and Gaudentius, two officers of distinguished rank in the west, by which they were directed to shut the temples, to seize or destroy the instruments of idolatry, to abolish the privileges of the priests, and to confiscate the consecrated property for the benefit of the emperor, of the church, or of the army." This then was the binding of the Dragon, another name for the authoritative suppression of Paganism, an event which from its very nature cannot be tied down to the space of a month or a year, though we may still approach near enough to a definite epoch to answer all the grand purposes of exposition. So conclusive is the proof that if the Dragon be Paganism, the Millennium, which was to be mainly distinguished by his binding, is long since past. "And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years; and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled; and after that he must be loosed a little season." The Greek term vooos, translated in our version' bottomless pit,' is derived from the privative a and Búdos, which in the Ionic dialect is changed into fuooos. It is originally * Decl, and Fall, p. 468. † Ibid. p. 465. Among the monuments of idolatry which were destroyed on this occasion, the historian mentions particularly an emblematic monster, having the head and body of a serpent, branching into three tails, which were again terminated by the triple heads of a dog, a lion, and a wolf. an adjective, signifying deep, profound, unfathomable, immense, inaccessible. As a substantive with zúga, region, understood, it denotes a place of indefinite, indescribable depth or extent, a place incapable of being explored. It occurs in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament thirty-nine times, in thirty-six of which the original Hebrew term to which it answers is inn tehom, usually rendered the deep, the great deep, etc. In the New Testament it occurs nine times; seven of the passages in which it is met with being in the Revelation. In a majority of the cases above specified it cannot be doubted that it contains an allusion to waters; in others it is equally evident that it refers to cavernous recesses in the earth, in which there is no implication of the presence of waters. Thus Rom. 10: 7, "Who shall descend into the deep (Gr. tis rv äßvoσor), that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead?" where the allusion is plainly to the sepulchral vaults in which the dead were entombed. So in Rev. 9: 2, where it is said, “ he opened the bottomless pit (Gr. τὸ φρέαρ τῆς ἀβίσσον the well, pit, or shaft of the abyss)," as it is not said that water issued forth, but first smoke and then locusts, which we know are not of aquatic origin, it is doubtful whether the abyss' in this connection, literally understood, denotes anything more than a vast subterranean recess with which the pit or well had a secret or direct communication, as some of the wells in Egypt communicate with the excavated chambers of the Pyramids. In like manner it may be justly questioned whether the abyss,' in the passage before us, in which the Dragon was to be shut up, will admit of being understood in any other sense than as an immense cavern in the earth, such as were employed among the nations of the east for the double purpose of places of interment for the dead, and confinement for state criminals. As to the sense popularly affixed to the phrase, in which it is considered as an appellation of the place of torment for |