Page:Sermons on the Ten Commandments.djvu/125

 was commanded to take to wife a harlot. Thus, in Hosea, first chapter and second verse, we read, "And the Lord said to Hosea. Go take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms; for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord." Here by the land committing whoredom is signified the Church in a state of falsified truth, that is, a state in which the true meaning of the Word has been corrupted, and so interpreted as to defend falses and evils. So, in the New Testament, in the Apocalypse, Babylon, that is, the Christian church corrupted, is called the "Great Harlot." Thus in the fourteenth chapter,—"Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." "To make all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication," means to seduce men's minds by the falsification of the Word: wine, in a good sense, signifies spiritual truth, but here, truth falsified. So in the seventeenth chapter: "There came one of the seven angels, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will show thee the judgment of the great harlot that sitteth upon many waters; with whom the kings of the earth have committed whoredom." By the kings of the earth are signified the truths of the Church, and by committing whoredom with them is meant to falsify or pervert them. It follows, "So he carried me away in the spirit, into the wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, and upon her forehead a name was written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, mother of harlots and abominations of the