# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S294
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

294 The Twentieth Chapter of the Revelation of St. John.

...the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city, and fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them."

This is the brief history of the gigantic exertions which Satan made, after those thousand years, to destroy God's people once and for all — the mouse that the swelling mountain of old, laboring under his very chair, at last brought forth. — Here, then, we pick up again the thread which, as it were, got lost at the beginning of the chapter amid the whirring of the wheel on the spool, as sometimes happens when the spinning-woman reaches for the distaff.

"And they went up on the breadth of the earth" — well now, does such a lord, with such an army, still have to go up in the first place? I should have thought he had long since been at the summit of his power. And what mountain, then, is this supposed to be, which he has chosen for himself in order to appear more splendid than has hitherto been the case? Has the holy city of Rome become pregnant once again? None of that at all: it was the breadth of the earth that he wanted. He lusted after that more than after the papal crown. Indeed, that was, for him, a summit — more glorious than the crest of fair Lebanon. Has he perhaps been mistaken? He can, after all, paint a lump of cow-dung for his favorites so skillfully that they take it for a piece of gold jewelry; perhaps something of the sort has happened to him as well. He has sat imprisoned a long time; the unaccustomed daylight may easily have dazzled his eyes a little. Yet I do not believe it. It is simply his taste. Whatever belongs to the earth is his heaven, and even the faintest reflection of heavenly glory seems to him a swamp, or rather the very pit of hell. Because, when he went out to deceive the nations, he still could not entirely do without a few remnants of the Most High's sanctuary, he sat on them as if on burning coals. They had to go. He worked his way, along with the whole world, out of that hole, and behold, he succeeded — he won "the breadth of the earth," which the whole world looked up to as if he were the one administering heaven. He had good reason to fear the nearby sea: the sand might easily have grown soft and slid away beneath him. He is cunning, and gladly sacrifices even a crown if by doing so he can save his life, or at least prolong it. — The sense is simply this: the devil schemed it ever more skillfully, so that the "places" where at least the appearance of a heavenly mind and character had once prevailed — the episcopal sees, churches, and altars — so that everything might be leveled to the ground, became mere playgrounds of the earth, of earthly passions and human wisdom. For he knew exactly how to bring to such places people who were minded of the earth and earthly. That is the kernel of the nut. The shell is this: the pope and the Turk divided the government of the world between them, and the devil, in his own fashion, pocketed the prize with which he had lured them on, when he said to them: "All this will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me." Because, being the old serpent — who of course must say everything twice, being forked-tongued — he had promised the same thing to both, it came to a lawsuit; and he could settle it in no other way than by pretending that he too, after all, deserved something for his trouble, and so pocketing the very thing that was being disputed over.