3088.— The Beast and the Pope
It is stated in a book before me that Seventh-day Adventists teach that the pope is the beast. Is this true?
INQUIRER. Emphatically it is not. Seventh-day Adventists do not teach that any one man is the beast. The correct and true teaching is that the beast is that system of church and state power which has existed from Babylon down to the present time. The beast stands for a monstrosity in both church and state, a union of the two. God never made them for each other, nor were they ever designed to unite. From that horrible union comes as wretched monstrosities as Milton represents coming from the union of Satan and Sin. Sometimes this beast has existed in very mild form under various dynasties. One of the strongest, most aggressive, and worst of these forms under which that union has been a curse to the world, has been with the Papacy. The popes or the men that compose the Catholic Church are not different from other men; they are just the same as other men, with all the ambitions and failings of other men. But men led by wrong principles will always produce evil; and sometimes the more conscientious the men following the wrong principle, the worse the evil produced, and so it was all through the Dark Ages. The Roman Catholic Church is not the beast. That is an ecclesiastical organization, with just the same rights to exist as any other ecclesiastical organization. The church connected with the state forms the beast. Protestantism connected with the state power be-comes in that very sense a part of the beast regime. Upon this we shall have more to say in our study of the Revelation. The beast of Revelation 13 in its papal phase lies at the present time under a deadly wound, but ecclesiastically the Church of Rome was never stronger than at the present time; yet it will not be the papal Roman beast until that church is again given power by the civil author-ities.