Writing concerning the four Hellenic Kingdom horns, Daniel says: “And out of one of them there came forth another horn, a small one, and it kept getting very much greater toward the south and toward the sunrising and toward the Decoration.

25. (a) What relationship did the ‘small horn’ have with the Roman Empire, and what did it prove to be? (b) How was it a “king fierce in countenance”?

²⁵ What, then, does history show to be the symbolic ‘small horn,’ that aggressive “king fierce in countenance”? It was a northwestern offshoot of the Roman Empire, namely, Britain, forasmuch as there were Roman provinces in what is now England down till the early part of the third century C.E. In the course of the following centuries England came to be the seat of an empire, which, from the seventeenth century onward, included colonies in North America. By the year 1763 the British Empire had defeated Spain and France, both of which were powerful sections of the Holy Roman Empire. From then on, the British Empire demonstrated herself to be the mistress of the seas and the Seventh World Power of Bible prophecy. Even after the thirteen American colonies broke away to establish the United States of America, the British Empire grew to embrace a quarter of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. The Seventh World Power gained still greater power when the United States of America collaborated with Britain to form the Anglo-American Dual World Power. Economically and militarily it was indeed a “king fierce in countenance.”

26. How did the symbolic ‘small horn’ grow great “toward the Decoration,” and so what question arises regarding that Decoration as a location for fulfillment of prophecy?

²⁶ In the year 1917 this Anglo-American Dual World Power did grow “very much greater . . . toward the Decoration.” How? By the capture of Jerusalem on December 9, and bringing Palestine under British control. In the year 1920 the League of Nations assigned the mandate over Palestine to Great Britain, to continue until May 14, 1948. In Bible times the Promised Land that Jehovah gave to his chosen people was so beautiful that it was called the Decoration, that is, of the entire earth. In Ezekiel 20:6, 15, Jehovah calls it “the decoration of all the lands.”