Revelation 13:14

deceiveth Revelation 19:20. There is still a reminiscence of St Matthew 24:24.

an image We cannot tell how, or how literally, this prophecy will be fulfilled in the last days: but it is certainly relevant to remember how the refusal of worship to the Emperor's image was made the test of Christianity in the primitive persecutions perhaps especially by humane and reluctant persecutors like Pliny (see his famous letter to Trajan) who acted not from fanaticism, but from supposed political necessity. And the king-worship of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the maxim, earlier acted on than avowed, cujus regio ejus religio, shews us the really Antichristian element in the persecutions of that age. To the ingenious theory, that the second Beast is the Papacy, and "the image of the first Beast" the mediaeval Empire, it is a fatal objection that, though the Popes may be said to have madeand vivifiedthe "Holy Roman Empire," they certainly did not make the world worship it; they might more plausibly be charged with making it worship them.