Page 81 - Demo

77Now let us examine and find out who the Little Horn is. Having once definitely ascertained the identity of this eleventh king, the identity of the Bar Nasha will be settled per se. The Little Horn springs up after the Ten Persecutions under the reigns of the emperors of the Roman Power. The empire was writhing under four rivals, Constantine being one of them. They were all struggling for the purple; the other three died or fell in battle; and Constantine was left alone as the supreme sovereign of the vast empire.The earlier Christian commentators have in vain laboured to identity this ugly Little Horn with the AntiChrist, with the Pope of Rome by Protestants, and with the Founder of Islam. (God forbid!) However, the later Biblical critics are at a loss to solve the problem of the fourth beast that they wish to identify with the Greek Empire and the Little Horn with Antiochus. Some of the critics, e.g. Carpenter, consider the Medo-Persian Power as two separate kingdoms. But this empire was not more two than the late Austro-Hungarian Empire was. The explorations carried on by the Scientific Mission of the French savant, M. Morgan, in Shúshan (Susa) and elsewhere leave no doubt on this point. The fourth beast can be, therefore, no other than the old Romanworld.To show that the Little Horn is no other than Constantine the Great, the following arguments can safely be advanced:(a) He overcame Maximian and the other two rivals and assumed the purple, and put an end to the persecution of Christianity. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is, I think, the best history that can instruct us about those times. You can never invent four rivals after the Ten Persecutions of the Church, other than Constantine and his enemies who fell before him like the three horns that fell before the little one.