BEHOLD LORD HERE ARE TWO SWORDS
To the chief musician; do not destroy; of David; a golden psalm.
1 Is it true that you speak in righteousness, O brood of rulers, or that you judge the children of men uprightly?
2 Certainly you work out in your hearts iniquitous acts to be performed in the earth and measure out the violence that your hands are to commit.
3 The wicked become alienated from truth when they leave the womb; the speakers of falsehood begin to err as soon as they have left the womb.
4 They have poison of the type of the poison of a serpent; they are like a deaf adder that has stopped up its own ears
5 That will not listen to the voice of charmers, of the wisest snake-handlers.
6 O God, break their teeth in their mouth! Break out the fangs of the young lions, O LORD!
7 Let them evaporate as water does while moving along; as they are directing their projectiles let them be as already cut off.
8 Let them become like a stream evaporating as it goes along; like the stillbirth of a woman let them not see the sun.
9 Before your thorns can even understand it, O thornbushes, whether young or old He shall cause a whirlwind to remove them all.
10 The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked --
11 So that men shall say, “There certainly is a reward for the righteous! There certainly is a God who judges in the earth!”
— Psalm 58
Whoever has ears, let him hear the voice of one who cries in the wilderness, and of One who has no place to lay down His head — “Every valley will be filled in, and every mountain and hill brought low; and what is warped will be straightened, and the uneven roads made smooth; and all flesh will see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:5-6) — for the sections of the Scripture that speak openly of revolution parallel and illuminate each other; and so the time of patience of James 5:7-12 during which the worst offense will be the swearing of any oath to avoid the swearing of an oath of allegiance to a new ruler is that of the Millennium to follow the fall of Babylon and the raising of the holy martyrs from the dead (that is those “shot,” literally “killed by a flattening thump,” of Revelation 20:4 during the course of the great world rising to come, and they shall be truly blessed, as in 14:13), that being the period to immediately precede the war of Gog and Magog, “the coming of the Lord” (James 5:8) and the descent of the new Jerusalem; and therefore James 5:1-6 in truth prophesies the fall of Babylon and applies the condemnation of the great city to the wealthy of the whole world in the same way in which we find the vision of the fall of Rome within Revelation 17:1-19:10 universalized and applied to the whole of the beast in 19:11-21 of the parallel unit 19:11-22:9, where the sword proceeding forth from the mouth of Christ in the Heavens symbolizes that same command of war that He gave to His saints in 18:6-7 to be responded to by the formation of His army, as in Psalm 110:3, “For Your people will offer themselves willingly on the day Your army is to form,” and where the beast is clearly distinct from “the kings of the earth” and so represents the elitist elements of all the societies of these last days. Ancient Rome, the same as ancient Babylon, though occupied was never destroyed by a hostile army; but Babylon as used in Revelation is a name of mystery, “Mystery, Babylon the Great” (17:5) and represents the wealthy of all lands (and see 12:9 and 13:7); and those are the children of the evil one to be uprooted from the field of the world by the messengers of the Son of Man, as in Matthew 13:41. These are human messengers and not angels (the Greek word in question can bear either meaning), though, because they cannot uproot the wicked in the initial stages without uprooting the righteous as well, a difficulty that would not exist for angels.
The Roman Empire was divided in two in 330 A.D. by the decree of Constantine the Great (the numerical equivalent of whose name written in Hebrew characters being 666) in fulfillment of Daniel 2:41, “the kingdom shall be divided,” and the appearance of the distinct Western “Catholic” and Eastern “Orthodox” churches, the two horns like a lamb, though not the body, of the second beast of Revelation 13:11-18 (the mark in the right hand being the palm of Palm Sunday and that in the forehead the ashes of Ash Wednesday of the Catholic ritual) which is the composite false prophet — and surely we have heard it speak with the voice of the dragon and the hiss of the ancient serpent from time immemorial — also has its ultimate origin in this event. (The much later elitist-dominated Protestant bodies are, of course, subsumed within the Western unit; but these are all one in the last analysis, anyway. “I’m sorry, we’re not set up for that.” “But for me, Father, what is your message for me?” “But for me, Reverend, what is your message for me?” “I’m sorry, we’re not set up for that. You’ll have to excuse me now.” And he is to be excused to a fire whose fuel is kings and priests and all who were mighty and spent their days in comfort and honor and never knew hunger.) And so we find two years of blessing and hope specifically referred to in prophecy and both of them now centuries past. The first came 1290 years after the period of the Roman siege of Jerusalem of 66 to 70 A.D. culminating in its destruction, as the Scripture says in Daniel, “And from the time when the continual offering is taken away and the abomination that makes desolate placed, there shall be 1290 days” (12:11). And that year was also 1260 years (also 42 30-day months and the time and times and half a time, which is a year, two years, and half a year) from the date of the giving of the book of Revelation and the martyrdom of the last apostle, John, in 98 A.D. (though his spirit was to enter this world and prophesy again in an age far removed from his own, like the reappearance of the spirit of the ancient prophet Elijah in the body of John the Baptist who came “with the spirit and power of Elijah,” as in Luke 1:17 — “ ‘Are you Elijah?’ And he said, ‘I am not’ ”; but, “This is Elijah who was to come” of John 1:21 and Matthew 11:14 — for he was told, “You must prophesy again before many peoples and nations and tongues and kings” in Revelation 10:11; and he did not appear alone when he came again, as in 11:1-14, but he and his companion, the last of all prophets, fulfilled many signs; and surely at times of dreaming in the Garden — and the God is dreaming too — the spirits of the sleepers can cross the chasm He has fixed between dimensions and reenter this world, if He decrees that; and also in the realm of impurity, the wealthy of past ages, overtaken now by the vengeance of that fire they never doubted was a myth, children of the evil one, can at times of fitful drowsing shrouded in terror and the great darkness throw their spirits into this our world, and those are the demons spoken of in the Scripture, whose true reality has been confessed by the whole of the peasant world for years of the count of sandgrains by the shore), ushering in the universal spread of the influence of that second beast, which is the false prophet, which is the composite antichrist, symbolizing the false and Satanic ideologies and the agents and institutions of “culture” and “civilization” of that worldwide metamorphosed form of the Fourth Kingdom, the Kingdom of Rome, of our time, known to us as the Western Civilization; the great city being called under this aspect Jerusalem, where the elect have been nothing but ground under foot by the march of civilization and “progress” time out of mind, but yet can never be subdued within, as in Revelation 11:1-2, 8. In 16:17-21 as well, we find the great city divided into three parts after the description of the machine gun bursts and radio contact between planes and the sound of the dive bombers of World War II and that greatest explosion (the literal sense of the Greek word in question), that of 1945 over Hiroshima, and before that of the fall of the cities of the nations, the outpouring of wrath against the great city under its aspect of Babylon, and the hail of great bombs to fall during the course of the war of Gog and Magog at the conclusion of the Millennium, as in 20:9 (and compare 16:20 to 20:11 and 21:1, and note also the reference to fire in the prophecy of the second harvest of 14:17-20); and that is the ideological division into the Western, Marxist and Third Worlds of this our time. And the first indigenous lower class insurgency free of elitist participation and intended solely to further the peasant interest did occur 1260 years after 98, that is in 1358, which date is also 1290 years from the time of the above-mentioned siege — and that was the Jacquerie uprising in France, the first true revolution to occur in the western portion of the Christian world as then constituted. And that transpired at the conclusion of the “time and times and half a time” of Daniel 12:7 as well, for “when the scattering of the power of the holy people is accomplished, all these (units) shall have been completed.” And this year, 1358, was also “the even of the dawn” of Daniel 8:14 foreshadowing the world rising of these last days, “Until the even of the dawn shall be 2300; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed” (and see 8:26), for 1358 came 2300 years after 942-941B.C., the twenty-fourth regnal year of King Solomon, being twenty years after work was begun on the Jerusalem Temple, as in I Kings 9:10; 6:1, 37-38, including its appurtenances and those of its court, as in 7:1, 13-8:2 (and note the sequence of events of 6:1-9:11), and being also the year of its formal dedication signaling the assumption of its function and that of its mountain as the divine dwelling place; for it is generally accepted that Solomon came to the throne in 965 B.C., twenty-four years before 942-941, and so it was trodden down until this “sanctuary and true tabernacle, that the Lord pitched, and not man” (Hebrews 8:2) was cleansed 1260 years after 98, 1290 after 68, and 2300 from the date of the completion of the appurtenances of its court and its dedication in 942-941 B.C. “Happy shall he be who waits and reaches 1335 days” (Daniel 12:12), that being the second date, for 1335 years did elapse between the establishment of the Eastern Roman Empire in 330 A.D., the historical root of the existence of the Eastern Church and the Byzantine-Russian eastern portion of the Fourth Kingdom, and the first indigenous rebellion of the lower class of Russia, namely the massive rising of the Old Believers against all who owned estates or were nobles or priests in 1667-71 under the guidance of Stephan Razin; and we may presume with confidence that the agitation throughout that vast land leading directly to the revolution began in 1665. It would be appropriate to add that the peasants of Russia have known since that day of a hill on the lower Volga that will reveal the secret of Razin to any peasant who climbs it by night — and his secret was class war.
“ ‘Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers, that they do not rise up and possess the earth and fill the face of the world with enemies. For I will rise up against them,’ says the LORD of hosts, ‘and cut off from Babylon their name and remnant, and son and grandson,’ says the LORD” (Isaiah 14:21-22) — such is the judgment against those of the great city whose yoke weighs heavily on the lower class and is applied without pity in an atmosphere of terror; and we have no need to search for other grounds of condemnation, but it is enough that their skins could almost burst with arrogance, rapacity and sadism. He calls out to the victims of these, “Shake the dust off yourself; arise, O captive of Jerusalem; free yourself from the bonds about your neck, O captive daughter of Zion.” “Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion, for I will make your horn become iron and your hoofs brass, and you will beat in pieces many peoples; and will consecrate their plunder to the LORD, and their wealth to the Lord of the whole earth” (Isaiah 52:2; Micah 4:13).
“Blessed is the one who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep what is written in it, because the time is near.” “ ‘And behold, I am coming quickly. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book’” (Revelation 1:3; 22:7). So begins and so ends the book that has no equal, that opens the seal stamped on the mystery of all the ages; and we are commanded in it only to tear this Babylon down with our own hands.
The concept of the antichrist distorting, obscuring and suppressing the truth contains implicitly within itself recognition of the need for the ultimate restoration of prophecy to the earth, and we find the Scripture in Revelation 10:11-11:14 predicting in the clearest imaginable terms the appearance together of two prophets long after the Biblical period and yet long before the last days to undo the work of the second beast and function as a foreshadow of the universal restoration to be accomplished at the conclusion of the age, that being “the restoration of all things that God has spoken of through the mouth of His holy prophets since the ancient days” (Acts 3:21); and these were the two prophets referred to above, the first called John of Leyden and the second Bernard of Munster, this latter bearing the spirit of Peter to whom my Lord said, “When you will be old, you will stretch your hands out and another will flay you and bear you up where you have no wish to be” (John 21:18).
Surely it is the instantaneous recognition of self-evident truth that is most prized in the sight of the Holy One, but yet for all that come and see how many signs the prophets of Munster fulfilled! For they bore the first of the two swords, smiting off with it the right ear of Malchus (whose name means Empire), for the image of the beast of Revelation 13:14-15 represents the successor polities to the Roman Empire with the so-called Holy Roman Empire the type of them all, and they converted the entire city of Munster into a commune, the life of the commune being the first degree of beatitude (Mark 10:29-30), and raised insurrection against all the forces of Babylon — “and then they feared greatly, because Gibeon was a great city, as one of the main cities of the kingdom” (Joshua 10:2) — and were therefore besieged by an army led by a Catholic bishop to the south of the city and by a second one under the command of Martin Luther himself, his hands already stained with the blood of hundreds of thousands of peasants exterminated in accordance with his directives in 1524-25, to its north, and to superimpose the head of Malchus over the map of that Empire would place his right ear at Munster; but the ear was healed for then, and the second sword has been held in abeyance all this while for the world rising of these last days, now that the Time has come. And they prophesied the three and a half predicted years (initially at Leyden), and those were years of drought in that region, but clothed in sackcloth, for the gore of all the world was yet splattered over the maw of Grendel and he shrieking in delight; and he soon broke into Munster and could not now bear the crushing of men by one blow as was his custom but tore off the skin of the prophets piece by piece, his kidneys tingling with pleasure all the while, the hag named Progress, that second of his kind, standing by and smirking, now with the thought of the convent and now with that of the laboratory to come; and this was in January of 1536. When they escaped the horror of the fiends’ lair, a horror compared to the crucifixion of their Lord, and entered again into His joy and the dimension of the Garden, their corpses were then suspended in cages from the spires of the Munster cathedral, that effervescence of green and purple streaked with red — surely He spurns the temples made by hands — breaking surface over the lair of the fiends sunk far below in the depths of the gloom, “over the broad square of the great city, which is called according to the spirit of it Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified” (Revelation 11:8); and this continued for three and a half centuries to fulfill 11:9-10 and no one, not Catholic, not Protestant, not French libertarian, thought it proper to bring the corpses down and bury them until the time had come, and that was in 1881, 345 years after the date of their martyrdom, so great was the fear that their ministry had awakened in the hearts of all the rulers of Europe, not a man of them excepted, and that it had been centered in a city as well, and they had thought that surely all cities were theirs alone and that men would only groan from out of the cities forever (Job 24:12) and that in them by their nature could be found only darkness with no admixture of light at all; and how great was their joy that they could by this symbol demonstrate their victory over the prophets, if only for a while, and repress the sure knowledge their ministry had brought them of the doom to come of their class.
Therefore this teaching of revolution, like all other components of the doctrine of the ancient Gospel, now restored, is not the result of speculation or of whim, but is absolute truth confirmed by three noble witnesses, emanations of His Spirit and will, whose substance and true reality are in the Hidden World but whose projections have been cast on this screen of the world of men, being the Scripture of truth, the manifestations of the Holy Spirit that operates in and through the lower class of all the societies, and that most ancient Faith, given to all the world at once when there was no impurity or stumbling block in it, ages and ages before the first of the children of the evil one.
He shall bring those who dwell on high down, even those of the lofty city; He shall lower it; He shall lower it to the earth, and shall bring it down to the dust. The foot shall tread it down, even the feet of the poor and the steps of the needy.
— Isaiah 26:5-6
— Barry I. Hyman
CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY BROTHERHOOD
To the chief musician; do not destroy; of David; a golden psalm.
1 Is it true that you speak in righteousness, O brood of rulers, or that you judge the children of men uprightly?
2 Certainly you work out in your hearts iniquitous acts to be performed in the earth and measure out the violence that your hands are to commit.
3 The wicked become alienated from truth when they leave the womb; the speakers of falsehood begin to err as soon as they have left the womb.
4 They have poison of the type of the poison of a serpent; they are like a deaf adder that has stopped up its own ears
5 That will not listen to the voice of charmers, of the wisest snake-handlers.
6 O God, break their teeth in their mouth! Break out the fangs of the young lions, O LORD!
7 Let them evaporate as water does while moving along; as they are directing their projectiles let them be as already cut off.
8 Let them become like a stream evaporating as it goes along; like the stillbirth of a woman let them not see the sun.
9 Before your thorns can even understand it, O thornbushes, whether young or old He shall cause a whirlwind to remove them all.
10 The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked --
11 So that men shall say, “There certainly is a reward for the righteous! There certainly is a God who judges in the earth!”
— Psalm 58
Whoever has ears, let him hear the voice of one who cries in the wilderness, and of One who has no place to lay down His head — “Every valley will be filled in, and every mountain and hill brought low; and what is warped will be straightened, and the uneven roads made smooth; and all flesh will see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:5-6) — for the sections of the Scripture that speak openly of revolution parallel and illuminate each other; and so the time of patience of James 5:7-12 during which the worst offense will be the swearing of any oath to avoid the swearing of an oath of allegiance to a new ruler is that of the Millennium to follow the fall of Babylon and the raising of the holy martyrs from the dead (that is those “shot,” literally “killed by a flattening thump,” of Revelation 20:4 during the course of the great world rising to come, and they shall be truly blessed, as in 14:13), that being the period to immediately precede the war of Gog and Magog, “the coming of the Lord” (James 5:8) and the descent of the new Jerusalem; and therefore James 5:1-6 in truth prophesies the fall of Babylon and applies the condemnation of the great city to the wealthy of the whole world in the same way in which we find the vision of the fall of Rome within Revelation 17:1-19:10 universalized and applied to the whole of the beast in 19:11-21 of the parallel unit 19:11-22:9, where the sword proceeding forth from the mouth of Christ in the Heavens symbolizes that same command of war that He gave to His saints in 18:6-7 to be responded to by the formation of His army, as in Psalm 110:3, “For Your people will offer themselves willingly on the day Your army is to form,” and where the beast is clearly distinct from “the kings of the earth” and so represents the elitist elements of all the societies of these last days. Ancient Rome, the same as ancient Babylon, though occupied was never destroyed by a hostile army; but Babylon as used in Revelation is a name of mystery, “Mystery, Babylon the Great” (17:5) and represents the wealthy of all lands (and see 12:9 and 13:7); and those are the children of the evil one to be uprooted from the field of the world by the messengers of the Son of Man, as in Matthew 13:41. These are human messengers and not angels (the Greek word in question can bear either meaning), though, because they cannot uproot the wicked in the initial stages without uprooting the righteous as well, a difficulty that would not exist for angels.
The Roman Empire was divided in two in 330 A.D. by the decree of Constantine the Great (the numerical equivalent of whose name written in Hebrew characters being 666) in fulfillment of Daniel 2:41, “the kingdom shall be divided,” and the appearance of the distinct Western “Catholic” and Eastern “Orthodox” churches, the two horns like a lamb, though not the body, of the second beast of Revelation 13:11-18 (the mark in the right hand being the palm of Palm Sunday and that in the forehead the ashes of Ash Wednesday of the Catholic ritual) which is the composite false prophet — and surely we have heard it speak with the voice of the dragon and the hiss of the ancient serpent from time immemorial — also has its ultimate origin in this event. (The much later elitist-dominated Protestant bodies are, of course, subsumed within the Western unit; but these are all one in the last analysis, anyway. “I’m sorry, we’re not set up for that.” “But for me, Father, what is your message for me?” “But for me, Reverend, what is your message for me?” “I’m sorry, we’re not set up for that. You’ll have to excuse me now.” And he is to be excused to a fire whose fuel is kings and priests and all who were mighty and spent their days in comfort and honor and never knew hunger.) And so we find two years of blessing and hope specifically referred to in prophecy and both of them now centuries past. The first came 1290 years after the period of the Roman siege of Jerusalem of 66 to 70 A.D. culminating in its destruction, as the Scripture says in Daniel, “And from the time when the continual offering is taken away and the abomination that makes desolate placed, there shall be 1290 days” (12:11). And that year was also 1260 years (also 42 30-day months and the time and times and half a time, which is a year, two years, and half a year) from the date of the giving of the book of Revelation and the martyrdom of the last apostle, John, in 98 A.D. (though his spirit was to enter this world and prophesy again in an age far removed from his own, like the reappearance of the spirit of the ancient prophet Elijah in the body of John the Baptist who came “with the spirit and power of Elijah,” as in Luke 1:17 — “ ‘Are you Elijah?’ And he said, ‘I am not’ ”; but, “This is Elijah who was to come” of John 1:21 and Matthew 11:14 — for he was told, “You must prophesy again before many peoples and nations and tongues and kings” in Revelation 10:11; and he did not appear alone when he came again, as in 11:1-14, but he and his companion, the last of all prophets, fulfilled many signs; and surely at times of dreaming in the Garden — and the God is dreaming too — the spirits of the sleepers can cross the chasm He has fixed between dimensions and reenter this world, if He decrees that; and also in the realm of impurity, the wealthy of past ages, overtaken now by the vengeance of that fire they never doubted was a myth, children of the evil one, can at times of fitful drowsing shrouded in terror and the great darkness throw their spirits into this our world, and those are the demons spoken of in the Scripture, whose true reality has been confessed by the whole of the peasant world for years of the count of sandgrains by the shore), ushering in the universal spread of the influence of that second beast, which is the false prophet, which is the composite antichrist, symbolizing the false and Satanic ideologies and the agents and institutions of “culture” and “civilization” of that worldwide metamorphosed form of the Fourth Kingdom, the Kingdom of Rome, of our time, known to us as the Western Civilization; the great city being called under this aspect Jerusalem, where the elect have been nothing but ground under foot by the march of civilization and “progress” time out of mind, but yet can never be subdued within, as in Revelation 11:1-2, 8. In 16:17-21 as well, we find the great city divided into three parts after the description of the machine gun bursts and radio contact between planes and the sound of the dive bombers of World War II and that greatest explosion (the literal sense of the Greek word in question), that of 1945 over Hiroshima, and before that of the fall of the cities of the nations, the outpouring of wrath against the great city under its aspect of Babylon, and the hail of great bombs to fall during the course of the war of Gog and Magog at the conclusion of the Millennium, as in 20:9 (and compare 16:20 to 20:11 and 21:1, and note also the reference to fire in the prophecy of the second harvest of 14:17-20); and that is the ideological division into the Western, Marxist and Third Worlds of this our time. And the first indigenous lower class insurgency free of elitist participation and intended solely to further the peasant interest did occur 1260 years after 98, that is in 1358, which date is also 1290 years from the time of the above-mentioned siege — and that was the Jacquerie uprising in France, the first true revolution to occur in the western portion of the Christian world as then constituted. And that transpired at the conclusion of the “time and times and half a time” of Daniel 12:7 as well, for “when the scattering of the power of the holy people is accomplished, all these (units) shall have been completed.” And this year, 1358, was also “the even of the dawn” of Daniel 8:14 foreshadowing the world rising of these last days, “Until the even of the dawn shall be 2300; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed” (and see 8:26), for 1358 came 2300 years after 942-941B.C., the twenty-fourth regnal year of King Solomon, being twenty years after work was begun on the Jerusalem Temple, as in I Kings 9:10; 6:1, 37-38, including its appurtenances and those of its court, as in 7:1, 13-8:2 (and note the sequence of events of 6:1-9:11), and being also the year of its formal dedication signaling the assumption of its function and that of its mountain as the divine dwelling place; for it is generally accepted that Solomon came to the throne in 965 B.C., twenty-four years before 942-941, and so it was trodden down until this “sanctuary and true tabernacle, that the Lord pitched, and not man” (Hebrews 8:2) was cleansed 1260 years after 98, 1290 after 68, and 2300 from the date of the completion of the appurtenances of its court and its dedication in 942-941 B.C. “Happy shall he be who waits and reaches 1335 days” (Daniel 12:12), that being the second date, for 1335 years did elapse between the establishment of the Eastern Roman Empire in 330 A.D., the historical root of the existence of the Eastern Church and the Byzantine-Russian eastern portion of the Fourth Kingdom, and the first indigenous rebellion of the lower class of Russia, namely the massive rising of the Old Believers against all who owned estates or were nobles or priests in 1667-71 under the guidance of Stephan Razin; and we may presume with confidence that the agitation throughout that vast land leading directly to the revolution began in 1665. It would be appropriate to add that the peasants of Russia have known since that day of a hill on the lower Volga that will reveal the secret of Razin to any peasant who climbs it by night — and his secret was class war.
“ ‘Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers, that they do not rise up and possess the earth and fill the face of the world with enemies. For I will rise up against them,’ says the LORD of hosts, ‘and cut off from Babylon their name and remnant, and son and grandson,’ says the LORD” (Isaiah 14:21-22) — such is the judgment against those of the great city whose yoke weighs heavily on the lower class and is applied without pity in an atmosphere of terror; and we have no need to search for other grounds of condemnation, but it is enough that their skins could almost burst with arrogance, rapacity and sadism. He calls out to the victims of these, “Shake the dust off yourself; arise, O captive of Jerusalem; free yourself from the bonds about your neck, O captive daughter of Zion.” “Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion, for I will make your horn become iron and your hoofs brass, and you will beat in pieces many peoples; and will consecrate their plunder to the LORD, and their wealth to the Lord of the whole earth” (Isaiah 52:2; Micah 4:13).
“Blessed is the one who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep what is written in it, because the time is near.” “ ‘And behold, I am coming quickly. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book’” (Revelation 1:3; 22:7). So begins and so ends the book that has no equal, that opens the seal stamped on the mystery of all the ages; and we are commanded in it only to tear this Babylon down with our own hands.
The concept of the antichrist distorting, obscuring and suppressing the truth contains implicitly within itself recognition of the need for the ultimate restoration of prophecy to the earth, and we find the Scripture in Revelation 10:11-11:14 predicting in the clearest imaginable terms the appearance together of two prophets long after the Biblical period and yet long before the last days to undo the work of the second beast and function as a foreshadow of the universal restoration to be accomplished at the conclusion of the age, that being “the restoration of all things that God has spoken of through the mouth of His holy prophets since the ancient days” (Acts 3:21); and these were the two prophets referred to above, the first called John of Leyden and the second Bernard of Munster, this latter bearing the spirit of Peter to whom my Lord said, “When you will be old, you will stretch your hands out and another will flay you and bear you up where you have no wish to be” (John 21:18).
Surely it is the instantaneous recognition of self-evident truth that is most prized in the sight of the Holy One, but yet for all that come and see how many signs the prophets of Munster fulfilled! For they bore the first of the two swords, smiting off with it the right ear of Malchus (whose name means Empire), for the image of the beast of Revelation 13:14-15 represents the successor polities to the Roman Empire with the so-called Holy Roman Empire the type of them all, and they converted the entire city of Munster into a commune, the life of the commune being the first degree of beatitude (Mark 10:29-30), and raised insurrection against all the forces of Babylon — “and then they feared greatly, because Gibeon was a great city, as one of the main cities of the kingdom” (Joshua 10:2) — and were therefore besieged by an army led by a Catholic bishop to the south of the city and by a second one under the command of Martin Luther himself, his hands already stained with the blood of hundreds of thousands of peasants exterminated in accordance with his directives in 1524-25, to its north, and to superimpose the head of Malchus over the map of that Empire would place his right ear at Munster; but the ear was healed for then, and the second sword has been held in abeyance all this while for the world rising of these last days, now that the Time has come. And they prophesied the three and a half predicted years (initially at Leyden), and those were years of drought in that region, but clothed in sackcloth, for the gore of all the world was yet splattered over the maw of Grendel and he shrieking in delight; and he soon broke into Munster and could not now bear the crushing of men by one blow as was his custom but tore off the skin of the prophets piece by piece, his kidneys tingling with pleasure all the while, the hag named Progress, that second of his kind, standing by and smirking, now with the thought of the convent and now with that of the laboratory to come; and this was in January of 1536. When they escaped the horror of the fiends’ lair, a horror compared to the crucifixion of their Lord, and entered again into His joy and the dimension of the Garden, their corpses were then suspended in cages from the spires of the Munster cathedral, that effervescence of green and purple streaked with red — surely He spurns the temples made by hands — breaking surface over the lair of the fiends sunk far below in the depths of the gloom, “over the broad square of the great city, which is called according to the spirit of it Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified” (Revelation 11:8); and this continued for three and a half centuries to fulfill 11:9-10 and no one, not Catholic, not Protestant, not French libertarian, thought it proper to bring the corpses down and bury them until the time had come, and that was in 1881, 345 years after the date of their martyrdom, so great was the fear that their ministry had awakened in the hearts of all the rulers of Europe, not a man of them excepted, and that it had been centered in a city as well, and they had thought that surely all cities were theirs alone and that men would only groan from out of the cities forever (Job 24:12) and that in them by their nature could be found only darkness with no admixture of light at all; and how great was their joy that they could by this symbol demonstrate their victory over the prophets, if only for a while, and repress the sure knowledge their ministry had brought them of the doom to come of their class.
Therefore this teaching of revolution, like all other components of the doctrine of the ancient Gospel, now restored, is not the result of speculation or of whim, but is absolute truth confirmed by three noble witnesses, emanations of His Spirit and will, whose substance and true reality are in the Hidden World but whose projections have been cast on this screen of the world of men, being the Scripture of truth, the manifestations of the Holy Spirit that operates in and through the lower class of all the societies, and that most ancient Faith, given to all the world at once when there was no impurity or stumbling block in it, ages and ages before the first of the children of the evil one.
He shall bring those who dwell on high down, even those of the lofty city; He shall lower it; He shall lower it to the earth, and shall bring it down to the dust. The foot shall tread it down, even the feet of the poor and the steps of the needy.
— Isaiah 26:5-6
— Barry I. Hyman
CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY BROTHERHOOD