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"The roll of Popes foretold by Archbishop Malachy in the twelfth Century either a clever piece of demon-work, or else a fiction characterized by extraordinary coincidences is implicitly believed in at Rome. each Pope, from Celestin II in 1143 to the last Pope that shall ever be, is described in a motto of two or three pregnant, expressive words; and one hundred and twelve are thus depicted to the end of time. Some of these mottoes have proved curiously true: others seem to have had no fulfillment whatever...Six Popes are all that now remain; and these remarkable lines conclude the prophecy, - 'During the last persecution of the Holy Roman Church, shall sit the Roman Peter who shall feed the sheep in many tribulations; and when these are over, the seven-hilled city shall be utterly destroyed, and the awful Judge will judge the people.'
Now the moral identity of Rome and Babylon is one of the vital clues of prophecy. Babylon was the capital of all the great world-empires, except the Roman; and Rome - the Holy Spirit says - IS Babylon: but MYSTIC Babylon, or Babylon disguised; for whatever is off its own base in the Apocalypse, out of its proper place, is always presented under a figure. All that is corrupt in the Roman Church has come bodily from Babylon: the peacock fans (to take but one example) that wave over the Pope's sedan-chair, actually first conducted pagan pontiffs over the bricks of Babylon The early Church saw this truth. 'Babylon,' says Tertullian, 'is a figure of the Roman city.'....two cities will receive the separate judgments of God. Rome goes down in the wasting fires of Antichrist (Rev. xvii.15); and Babylon, some three years later, is engulfed by the greatest earthquake of the ages (Rev.xvi.19; xviii.21).
[Footnote: In the facts accumulated by Alexander Hyslop...we have Babylon begetting Rome: in the Vision of the Ephah (if I mistake not) we have Rome re-absorbed into Babylon.]
Now the vision that strikes Zechariah is a city in rapid flight: 'a woman' - a woman, in parabolic prophecies, is always a city...the ephah (Zech.v.7) - the symbol of commerce, the centre and source of wealth. It is a swiftly-moving Ephah....and the woman, when first seen, is in mid-air, being transported from land to land...She is the counterpart to the Wicked One, the Bride of Antichrist, as Jerusalem is the Wife of the Lamb...The Woman is in rapid flight, fleeing from the burning embers of Rome; and the lust of wealth and power, on which Rome has ever enthrone herself, flowers at last into the hugest commercial metropolis of all ages re-constructed in Shinar. From 'seven mountains on which the woman sitteth' (Rev.xvii.9), the borrowed base, of two thousand years, she is restored to 'her OWN base' (Zech.v.11) in the plains of Mesopotamia....
...That the traditional destruction of Babylon by lightning was not her final doom is made certain by the fact that long after Pentecost the Holy Spirit names Babylon as a still unexterminated city (1 Peter v.13)...So as all the mystery passes, MYSTIC Babylon disappears, re-absorbed into her ancient parent, actual Babylon; and human fire is replaced by divine; for the earth opens beneath her... [Footnote:...the Roman Pontiff will become at last what he was at the first - Pontifex Maximus of Babylon].