Thyatira stood forty-eight miles east of Pergamos. It was a city of Lydia on the Lycus, a branch of the Hyllus, anciently called Pelo- pia, but now Akhissar by the Turks: that is, “the White Castle,” from the great quantity of white marble there abounding. Only one ancient edifice is left standing. The rest, including the clerical bazaars, or “churches,” are so destroyed that no vestiges of them are to be found. The principal inhabitants are Turks, who have eight mosques in Akhissa, while the Greeks, calling themselves Christians, have no edifice indicative of the former pre-eminence of their mistress, “the woman Jezebel, ” among Thyatirans. So effectively has “the Son of the Deity, whose eyes are as a flame of fire, and his feet like to incandescent brass,” fulfilled the threatening, saying, “Behold, I cast her into a bed, and them committing adultery with her into great tribulation; and I will slay her children with death.” The only vestige of Christianity there is a few ignorant and superstitious Greeks calling themselves by the name “Christian,” to which they are no more entitled than the Turks.
In the inscriptions of these apocalyptic epistles, none of the cities are addressed, as if each city were an ecclesia. In the English Version, that to the Ephesian saints is inscribed “to the Angel of the Church of Ephesus.” This style of address is in accordance with the notions which prevail in the synagogue of the Satan, where a city or a nation are regarded as synonymous with a church. Hence, in the nomenclature of “the Satan, as the speak,” we have the titles, “the Church of Rome,” “the Church of England,” “the Church of Scotland,” “the Church of Ireland,” and so forth; so that all born of the flesh, and of the will of man, in these places, not avowing themselves dissenters, are regarded and claimed as bona fide members of “the church by law established”—established by the law of flesh and blood, which is the Devil. But the scriptures recognize no such churches. They contain no epistles addressed to such. These are the several branches of the Synagogue of the Satan, whose angels are the men constituting the “Holy Orders” of the apostasy. The apocalyptic epistles are severally addressed “to the Angel of the Ephesian ecclesia,” “the ecclesia of Smyrneans,” “the ecclesia in Pergamos,” “the ecclesia among Thyatirans,” “in Sardis,” "in Philadelphia,” and “the ecclesia of Laodi- ceans;” but, whether saints of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, or Laodicea, they were all, who held fast the name and denied not the faith of the Spirit, the ecclesia, or invited ones, “in the Deity, the Father, and the Lord Jesus Anointed.” They boasted not in the ecclesiasticism of their native cities or countries, but in the Lord.