[10] But revelation was designed to reveal and, given adequate attention to detail, he believed a single shining truth would emerge to human understanding.
His justifications for apostolic authorship were:- Edward Elliott believed Irenaeus was correct to say that Revelation was written "towards the end of the reign of Domitian", perhaps 95 CE.
[17] Finally, he believed Laodicea to have been destroyed by an earthquake in 60CE and not completely rebuilt for at least another ten years so, if John wrote to a complacent and prosperous church there, it must be at a later date.
[18] As a result, Elliott suggested that Revelation was an attempt to use Daniel to provide comfort for those congregations dismayed by the apparent failure of parousia.
None of this was ornamental, but emblematic and choreographical of "the combined secular and ecclesiastical history of Christendom"[22] having a proper unity of effect, as significant as it was beautiful.
Reverend Elliott quoted John Milton, "millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, unseen both when we sleep and when we wake."
The link between history and Revelation was shown by illustrations of coins, medals, antiquities and inscriptions from the catacombs, as well as by quotations from classical authors.
The true faith of "the vicarious and propitiatory atonement of the Son of God"[31] was replaced by ritualism, by Platonist allegory and by superstitious practices "as if the sacraments when duly accepted from the priest's hand were potent drugs, or chemical antidotes, infallibly dispersing the poison inherited from Adam!
"[32] When Edward Elliott revisited the topic, in connection with Revelation 14:3, it was to emphasise that, even under the Protestant dispensation, only an elect remnant understood free grace and could "learn the new song".
The third in question he identified as Britain, Gaul, Spain, Italy and North Africa as this was one part of the threefold split of the Empire between Constantine, Lucinius and Maximin.
Specific superstitions of apostasy were the invocation of saints, purgatory, imposition of a priesthood between the people and God, prayers for the dead, private confession and indulgences.
[35] Elliott acknowledged that many of the figures involved in the Roman apostasy, such as Pope Gregory the Great, were men of high piety and scholarship.
[36] These prophecies are said to be brought to conclusion when Mehmed II united the Ottoman Empire with the incorporation of Baghdad in 1530[37] and the killing of one-third was said to be achieved by the taking of Constantinople (1453) by the use of cannon fire.
On the civic side, there was But, on the spiritual side, there was Reverend Elliott devoted nearly forty pages to a detailed description of the scene at the papal election (10 March 1513) of Leo X, drawing out how he felt it was a perfectly inverted parody of the vision of the mighty angel at Revelation 10: 1-4 and thus confirmed the papacy in the role of antichrist and usurper of Christ's prerogative and glory.
[39] The appearance of the angel in the prophecies caused Edward Elliott to part company with his great forerunner in interpretation, Joseph Mede.
Reverend Elliott set out what he saw as the history of "Christ's secret ones" or "the Church in the wilderness" by which the spirit of primitive Christian doctrine was kept alive during the epoch of the Beast.
Witnesses listed (amongst others) were Alcuin, Claude of Turin, the Paulicians, Peter de Bruys, and the Poor Men of Christ who had originated in Cologne.
Again, Reverend Elliott preferred a slightly different wording, "where also their Lord hath been crucified"[45] thus the witnesses were murdered in Rome in remembrance of Christ's death and the precise occasion was the Fifth Council of the Lateran of 1512.
For the witnesses' resurrection, Edward Elliott quoted Pope Adrian VI, "The heretics Huss and Jerome seem to be alive again in the person of Luther.
This pointed to the replacement of the traditional military-style emperor by an oriental-style absolute monarch and this happened under Diocletian who thus began the term of the seventh head.
Elliott quoted Flavio Biondo "The princes of the world now adore and worship, as perpetual dictator, the successor not of Caesar but of the fisherman Peter: that is, the supreme pontiff, the substitute of the afore-mentioned emperor.
"[52] The ten horns are the Romano-Gothic kingdoms: the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Allemans, Burgundians, Bavarians, Vandals, Suevi, Heruli, Visigoths and Ostrogoths.
[54] Further, Jean Gerson's statement "The people think of the pope as the one God who has power over all things in heaven and earth" fulfilled Revelation 13:3 "All the world marvelled after the Beast."
With the end of the war of the Ottoman empire with Austria and Hungary, the third woe came quickly in the form of the 'earthquake' of the French Revolution which completely fulfilled the prophecy of the nations being angry.
A wide selection of historical 'evils' was identified with these: the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, the attacks on established institutions which accompanied the passage of the Reform Act 1832 (although no stand was taken on the franchise issue itself) the atheist element in the Chartist press, Essays and Reviews, Bruno Bauer and David Strauss, the 'papal aggression' which resulted in the Ecclesiastical Titles Act 1851, the reliance of British governments upon the Commons' votes of Irish MPs, the expulsion of the Dutch from Belgium, John Keble's The Christian Year, "the pretended creations and transformations of Crosse, Darwin, etc" and the removal of restrictions upon trade with India which, he said, meant "the opportunity was seized to send out thither bales of the works of Tom Paine" and that these ideas were woven by Muslim writers into their criticisms of Christianity.
His contemporaries were divided between those who saw them as a mercy upon the good (a harvest should be a time of joy and celebration) or as a judgment on the bad (as the warlike language used implies).
He felt this answered the pre-millennial question, "For how could the saints' blessedness and reward be viewed as imminent if a millennium of the spiritual evangelization of the world were expected to precede it?
Edward Elliott expected a polluted moral atmosphere to corrupt normal society but admitted this figure of speech to be unusual in prophetic writing.
Edward Elliott's last task was to show that Revelation provided the exact fulfilment of all prophecy in Daniel, Isaiah, Ezekiel and others.
[64] "In summing up and comparing these several prophecies, the first conclusion that we are I think irresistibly led to respecting them, is that one and all refer to that same great crisis of the consummation: - that which is to be marked by the apostate nations' last conflict against God's cause and people; and to end in the Jubilean blessedness of a regenerated world.