and rites, to the ordinances of heaven: wherefore, when the Lord
comes to fight against her with the spirit of his mouth, he saith,
'The stars of heaven [shall be darkened], and the constellations
thereof shall not give their light' (Isa 13:10); because he will slay
that spirit of Antichrist that is in them (Isa 34; Rev 6:13,14).

Take things therefore more distinctly, thus: The antichristians'
spirit, is the heaven of antichristians; their sun, moon and stars,
are their superstitious ordinances; their earth is the body or
flesh of Antichrist, otherwise called the church and synagogue
of Satan. Now as the earth cannot live, and be desirable, without
the influences of the spirit of the heavens; so neither can Antichrist
live, when the Lord shall darken the light of his heaven, and shall
slay the spirit thereof. Hence you read, as I touched before, that
when his heaven shall be rolled together as a scroll, 'all the
host thereof,' unto which I compare the ordinances of Antichrist,
'shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as
a falling fig from the fig-tree' (Isa 34:4). But how, or why doth
the leaf, or the fig fall from the tree? Why, because the spirit,
or sap of the tree, is gone from them.

Therefore, the first and chief proceeding of the Lord with the man
of sin, is to slay his soul, that his body may also be consumed:
And when the spirit of Antichrist shall be made to leave both the
body and ordinances of Antichrist, 'twill be easy to deal both
with the one and the other. And first, for the ordinances of
Antichrist; because the spirit of error is in them, as well as in
the body itself. When that spirit, as I said, has left them, they
will of themselves even moulder away, and not be: As we have seen
by experience here in England, as others also have seen in other