The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 3

VI. Allwood-Apocalyptic Beast Is Papal Rome

There is nothing new presented by PHILIP ALLWOOD (1769-1838), lecturer and author. He was educated at St. Paul’s and Harwich, and then at Magdalen College, Cambridge, from which he received a B.A. in 1791, an M.A. in 1794, and a B.D. in 1802. ¹³¹ He was author of Twelve Lectures on the Prophecies Relating to the Christian Church, and especially to the Apostasy of Papal Rome (1815). He also wrote A Key to the Revelation of St. John, the Divine (1829), bearing the text “Blessed is he that readeth ... for the time is at hand.” PFF3 577.2

1. JOHN’S BEAST SAME AS DANIEL’S LITTLE HORN

Following the general interpretations of the time, Allwood believed the ten horns of the beast of Revelation 13 to be the ten kingdoms “which were to spring up within the limits of the Western Empire, after the division of the whole Empire into two parts in the year 365.” ¹³² The seven heads are the seven forms of Roman government, and the crowns on the horns “demonstrate that these ten kingdoms were so many absolute and independent sovereignties.” ¹³³ After the wounding of the imperial beast, it was succeeded by that “spiritual dominion which is denominated the ‘Little Horn’ by Daniel, and ‘the Beast of the Earth’ by St. John.” It is none other than “the BISHOP of ROME, that spiritual tyrant, who, in the year 606, was placed supreme over the Church of God, into whose hands, ‘the saints of the MOST HIGH’” were then given. ¹³⁴ PFF3 577.3

2. SECOND BEAST EMBRACES PRIESTLY ORDERS

As the first beast was the “temporal Roman Empire,” so he held that the two horns of the second, or ecclesiastic, beast represent the “regular and secular Orders in the Romish Church, which is the spiritual Empire here intended.” ¹³⁵ PFF3 578.1