17 Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, 2 with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk.” 3 And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. 4 The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. 5 And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth's abominations.” 6 And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. When I saw her, I marveled greatly.
The danger of specific and exclusive interpretations is to curtail and limit the vision, and often bring it into disrepute. Extremists who during the last world war confidently identified these sinister figures in Revelation with Adolf Hitler, working out elaborate calculations to prove that his number was 666, were only fantastic in the sense that they were too exclusive in their interpretation. They did hit upon the truth, as John and Luther did before them. It is a thousand pities that wild and fantastic assertions tended to obscure and discredit real insights into the meaning of Holy Writ. The fact that there might still be other, and even more serious and sinister manifestations of the principle beyond their time does not seem to have occurred to them as a possibility. But the repetition of heads and horns in the vision should serve to tell us of the multiplicity of expressions of this evil in the world. And we in our turn must beware, even if we read the menace and spectre of Communism in these pages as we have been doing lest we say that it is the last, final manifestation - it could be, but it need not be. There may be something far more terrible than even this bestial, devilish thing that has terrorised our post-war age, who knows. But it is one expression of it, and we must be content with recognising the principle in this vision, and be prepared to apply it to any and every eruption in history or in our own time.