Agnes, and woven by their sacred hands, that it might be bestowed on those whom the Popes delighted to honour, for the purpose, as one of themselves expressed it, of "joining them to our society in the one pastoral sheepfold." *
* GIESELER, "Papacy"). The reader who peruses the early letters of the Popes in bestowing the pallium, will not fail to observe the wide difference of meaning between "the one pastoral sheepfold" above referred to, and "the one sheepfold" of our Lord. The former really means a sheepfold consisting of pastors or shepherds. The papal letters unequivocally imply the organisation of the bishops, as a distinct corporation, altogether independent of the Church, and dependent only on the Papacy, which seems remarkably to agree with the terms of the prediction in regard to the beast from the earth. Thus commissioned, thus ordained by the universal Bishop, they did their work effectually, and brought the earth and them that dwelt in it, "to worship the beast that received the wound by a sword and did live." This was a part of this beast's predicted work. But there was another, and not less important, which remains for consideration. Chapter VII
Section IV
The Image of the Beast
Not merely does the beast from the earth lead the world to worship the first beast, but (v 14) he prevails on them that dwell on the earth to make "an IMAGE to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live." In meditating for many years on what might be implied in "the image of the beast," I could never find the least satisfaction in all the theories that had ever been propounded, till I fell in with an unpretending but valuable work, which I have noticed already, entitled An Original Interpretation of the Apocalypse. That work, evidently the production of a penetrating mind deeply read in the history of the Papacy, furnished at once the solution of the difficulty. There the image of the beast is pronounced to be the Virgin Mother, or the Madonna. This at first sight may appear a very unlikely solution; but when it is brought into comparison with the religious history of Chaldea, the unlikelihood entirely disappears. In the old Babylonian Paganism, there was an image of the Beast from the sea; and when it is known what that image was, the question will, I think, be fairly decided. When Dagon was first set up to be worshipped, while he was represented in many different ways, and exhibited in many different characters, the favourite form in which he was worshipped, as the reader well knows, was that of a child in his mother's arms. In the natural course of events, the mother came to be worshipped along with the child, yea, to be the favourite object of worship.