Divided Europe — iron and clay

See it

The statue does not end in a fifth empire. It ends in fragments, and the fragments are still standing when the stone strikes. Rome was never conquered by a successor — it was broken into pieces, and those pieces are the nations of western Europe and everything that has grown out of them.

Iron and clay — church and state

The feet are not iron alone. “Partly strong, and partly broken” — iron is the civil power that Rome bequeathed to Europe; clay is a religious element mixed into it. Scripture supplies the meaning of clay: God's professed people in the hand of the potter (Isaiah 64:8; Jeremiah 18:6). So the feet picture the one arrangement that has governed the whole era — a religion leaning on the sword of the state, and a state borrowing the authority of a church.

Why the mixture will not hold

“They shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another.” Iron and clay can be pressed together; they cannot fuse. Every marriage of church and state has therefore been unstable by prophetic decree — not because the ambition is weak, but because Heaven said the bond will not take. The failure is written into the material.

The ten divisions

Daniel 7 gives the same feet as ten horns on the fourth beast, and the historians count the tribes that carved up the western empire: Alemanni, Franks, Burgundians, Suevi, Visigoths, Saxons, Lombards, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Heruli. Three were plucked up by the roots as the little horn rose (Daniel 7:8, 24) — the Heruli, the Vandals and the Ostrogoths. The surviving seven are the ancestry of modern Europe: Germany, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, England, Italy.

Britain, and the daughter she bore

One of the toes is England, and England is the progenitor of the United States — the nation Revelation shows coming up out of a quiet place with two lamb-like horns and a dragon's voice (Revelation 13:11). America is not a fifth metal added to the statue; it is the newest and strongest expression of the iron-and-clay era, carrying Rome's legacy of civil power and Protestant Christianity into the last chapter. Read that way, the toes do not stop at the Rhine: the final iteration of the divided-kingdom era is the modern West, with America at its head.

The failed unions

Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler, and the treaty-built unions of our own time have each tried to reassemble the whole. Every attempt has ended in fragments — on schedule, and against every reasonable expectation, for one iron word in a Babylonian dream.

Where we live

This is the era the reader occupies. There is no eleventh metal and no sixth empire coming. The next event on the statue is the stone cut out without hands — which is why Daniel 2 ends with a kingdom rather than a crisis.

The mixture is a system, never a people. Naming church-and-state union as the flaw of the age is not an accusation against any neighbour who worships.