Horae Apocalypticae, Vol. 4 (Third Edition) (1847)

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THIS BOOK BELONGED TO BOB DELAISSÉ AND WAS GIVEN TO THE LIBRARY BY HIS FAMILY

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DEPARTMENT OF

THE HISTORY OF ART

OXFORD

THIS BOOK BELONGED TO

BOB DELAISSÉ

AND WAS GIVEN TO THE LIBRARY

BY HIS FAMILY

4.

HORAE APOCALYPTICE,

OR,

A COMMENTARY ON THE APOCALYPSE,

CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL;

INCLUDING ALSO AN EXAMINATION OF THE CHIEF PROPHECIES OF DANIEL.

ILLUSTRATED BY AN APOCALYPTIC CHART, AND ENGRAVINGS FROM MEDALS AND OTHER EXTANT MONUMENTS OF ANTIQUITY.

BY THE REV. E. B. ELLIOTT, A.M. LATE VICAR OF TUXFORD, AND FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

THIRD EDITION, REVISED, CORRECTED, A IMPROVED;

WITH AN APPENDIX,

CONTAINING, BESIDES OTHER MATTER,

A SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF APOCALYPTIC INTERPRETATION,

AND INDICES.

VOL. IV.

SEELEY, BURNSIDE, AND SEELEY; FLEET STREET, LONDON. MDCCCXLVII.

"Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things that are written therein : for the time is at hand." Apoc. i. 3.

"The word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn." 2 Peter i. 19.

Leonard Seeley,

Thames Ditton, Surrey.

TABLE OF CONTENTS TO VOL. IV.

PART VI.

CHAP.

I. REVIEW OF EVIDENCE . . . . .

APPENDIX.

No. I.—HISTORY OF APOCALYPTIC INTERPRETATION.

§ 1. FROM ST. JOHN TO CONSTANTINE . 307

§ 2. FROM CONSTANTINE TO THE COMPLETED FALL OF ROMAN EMPIRE . 324

§ 3. FROM FALL OF ROMAN EMPIRE A. D. 500 TO A. D.

1000 . . . . . 338 CONTENTS.

§ 4. FROM A. D. 1000 TO THE REFORMATION . 369

§ 5. THE ÆRA AND CENTURY OF THE REFORMATION . 415

§ 6. FROM END OF REFORMATION TO THE PRESENT TIME 450

No. II.—EXAMINATION AND REFUTATION OF THE FOUR CHIEF COUNTER-SCHEMES OF APOCALYPTIC INTERPRETATION.

§ 1. ROMISH PRÆTERIST COUNTER-SCHEME . 490

§ 2. GERMAN PRÆTERIST COUNTER-SCHEME . 499

§ 3. FUTURIST'S COUNTER-SCHEME . 518

§ 4. CHURCH-SCHEME OF THE SEALS . 556

§ 5. EXAMINATION OF DR. ARNOLD'S INTERPRETATIVE PRINCIPLE 573

PLATES TO VOL. IV.

PLATE PAGE

XXIII. THE THREE FROGS - - - - - - - - 64

XXIV. ROME HOLDING OUT HER CUP OF APOSTACY - - - - 95

XXV. DIAGRAM SHOWING THE CONVERGENT ENDINGS OF THE GREAT PROPHETIC PERIODS - - - - - - 267 PART VI.

FROM APOC. XIV. 6, AND XVI. 13, TO THE END.

THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE.

FROM A.D. 1830 TO THE MILLENNIUM AND FINAL JUDGMENT.

CHAPTER I.

REVIEW OF THE EVIDENCE IN THE PARTS PRECEDING; AND HIGH PROBABILITY OF OUR PRESENT POSITION BEING UNDER THE LATTER HALF OF THE SIXTH VIAL.

We are now about to enter on the vith and last Part of this Commentary:—a Part to which, having mainly reference to things future, very much of a new character must of course attach: as we shall no longer (at least after the present and next chapters) have the verifying test to appeal to, point by point, of agreeing prophecy and history: but only from the prediction itself to infer, with more or less of the uncertainty of conjecture, the nature of the things predicted.—Preparatorily, however, to entering on this new field of inquiry, I have to request the reader to look back with me; and to consider attentively (though as much as possible in brief) each principal step of the way we have travelled thus far, and the strength and sufficiency of the evidence that has guided us on it. It will be of infinite advantage towards a right commencement of the consideration of the future, if we enter on it with a deliberate and thorough conviction of our having been right all along on main points in our interpretation of the past : and of our being almost beyond a question at that precise position in the Apocalyptic prophecy asserted at the head of this chapter ; from the which position it will be our next duty to commence our glancings into futurity.

On looking back, then, he will observe that on the simple theatric scene 1 (if I may so call it) of a temple like that of Jerusalem, in the foreground, with its court, and holy place, and holy of holies, to represent the Church in its various parts and characters,—and a world outstretched beneath and around, in miniature but living landscape, with its land and seas and rivers, to represent the world of the Roman Empire,—the first act of the prefigurative drama (a drama written apparently on a scroll within and without, and divided into septenaries of Seals, Trumpets, and Vials, of which the Trumpets were all included in the 7th Seal, and Vials in the 7th Trumpet,2 )—I say that the first act of this drama began by the going forth, one after the other, on the successive openings of the four first Seals in the scroll of futurity, (and probably upon that Roman world in landscape,) of four horses, white, red, black, and livid pale : each bearing its own rider, marked by his proper badge ; and with brief explanatory words accompanying the exhibition. After which, on the opening of the fifth Seal, a voice, as from murdered ones beneath the great altar in the temple-court, was heard crying out, " How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not avenge our blood against them that dwell on the earth :"—and then presently, on the sixth Seal's opening, a revolution sudden and universal appeared before the Evangelist to pass upon the symbolic earth, and its associated heaven and heavenly luminaries : a revolution whereby the enemies of the Lamb, it was declared, were overthrown ; and consequently, it might be inferred, their political supremacy and system done away.—So ended the FIRST ACT of the drama.

And in explanation of the four earlier of these prefigurative visions it was supposed, as a first preliminary, that the horse in every case represented the Roman people, in their character of a martial military nation: this supposition being made not gratuitously, or merely because of the otherwise general fitness of the symbol; but on various classical evidence of its propriety, especially when associated with a rider bearing such badges as in the first Seal. Which premised,—forasmuch as the colour on the successive horses, interpreted agreeably with the Roman and Greek understanding of them, did conjunctively with certain explanatory words in each case accompanying, indicate states respectively of national triumph, happiness, and prosperity, of bloody civil war, of impoverishment and want, and of extraordinary mortality,—this last by the agencies of sword, famine, pestilence, and wild beasts, such as to cause in the horse the hue of a body in dissolution,—it was inferred that successive æras of prosperity, civil war, impoverishment, and mortality corresponding, were portended to the Roman Empire: the first to begin very soon, according to the revealing Angel's express pre-intimation, after the time of St. John's banishment in Patmos; the rest to follow in succession. Can we well have been wrong in these our inferences as to the meaning of the symbols?—And what then the result of appeal to history, in verification of them? It was found that Gibbon marked out four æras, or epochs, in the Roman imperial history, precisely agreeing with the preparations:—the 1st one of both early and later signal triumphs, and moreover of a prolonged general happiness and prosperity unexampled, he says, in the world's history, beginning from Nerva's accession, the very next year after St. John's seeing the vision in Patmos, and lasting eighty years and more, to the death of the second Antonine:—the 2nd, one of civil war and bloodshed,

1 See Vol. i. p. 122.

almost as remarkable, begun with the murder of Antonine's son and successor Commodus, near the end of the second century, and extended, with intervals of intermission, far onwards into the aeras of the two next Seals:—the 3rd, one of fiscal oppression, and consequent impoverishment and distress of the Roman people, dated by Gibbon from a memorable edict of the Emperor Caracalla, issued towards the close of the first quarter of the third century, and noted by him as one of the permanent causes of the empire's decline:—the 4th, beginning about twenty years later, one of some twenty years and more of continued mortality, through three chiefly out of the four predicted agencies of destruction; to an extent, such, he says, that we might suspect from certain statistical tables, "that war, pestilence, and famine had consumed in a few years a moiety of the human species;" and with such effect on the empire as to make it seem as if "approaching to the last and fatal moment of its dissolution."—Yet more, whereas it seemed reasonable to suppose that in perfect prefigurative pictures, such as all must be that have a divine original, not the mere nature only, but the instrumental causes also, of these states of prosperity or of suffering, might probably be revealed, and the riders of the horses, characterized by their respective badges in the vision, appeared to be the fit symbols to foreshow it,—a comparison was instituted in each vision between the prophecy and the history on this point also.—And on examination it appeared that whereas, according to Gibbon's declaration, the instrumental causes of the white of the first aera were the five good emperors from Nerva to the 2nd Antonine inclusive (a line united as one by successive adoptions, and, as traced up to Nerva its head, of Cretic original,)—of the red of the second aera those that had the power of the sword, i.e. the military power, including its chief Generals very specially,—and of the black of the third aera the Provincial Governors, in their several provinces of administration,—so 1st the crown (the imperial crown) given to the rider of the white horse did in fact mark

him out as the representative of Emperors, and the bow in his hand (strange as this might appear) as the representative, according to clear antiquarian evidence, of persons of Cretan provincial origin :—2nd the sword given to the rider of the red horse (the word given, where used and where omitted, should not be unnoticed)1 marked him out as the representative of the soldiery generally, and more particularly of the Prætorian Prefects and Imperial Lieutenants ; these being at Rome and in the provinces respectively the only functionaries invested with the judicial power of the sword, over the soldiers, as well as military use of it against the enemy, and in token thereof solemnly presented with a sword, within or outside of the walls of Rome :—3rd, the holding of the balance, and the words addressed to him from the throne respecting the corn, wine, and oil, did as distinctively mark out the rider of the black horse to be the representative of Roman Provincial Governors: the balance being the emblem struck by them frequently on their own coins, in promise of equity of administration, upon their appointment to office, (on which, as on other points, medals were exhibited to the reader's eye in evidence,) and the words from the throne almost the very words addressed by the Roman law (as well as by that equity which is ascribed to God's throne in Scripture) to these provincial administrators.—As to the rider of the fourth horse, his name and appearance Death, might have been supposed sufficient of itself to indicate that he was the personifi-

cation of every destroying power of human life. As if however to guard against the view of him as a mere destroyer of political life, Hades, or the Grave, was seen to follow as his badge; the gaping recipient of the spoil of corpses.1

Such was the conclusive, I may say the extraordinary, evidence, (with above twenty searching tests to try it, 2 ) on which our interpretation of these first four Seals rested; and by them we were brought down, in the Apocalyptic figuration of the fortunes of the Roman Empire, to within a very few years of Diocletian's accession :—of Diocletian, the restorer of the fallen and all but dissolved empire; though with a new form of government thenceforward, and under a tetrarchy of emperors, not (as before) imperial monarchy. And still the same conclusive evidence from history attended us in our exposition of the visions of the two Seals remaining. For as, on the fifth prophetic Seal opening, the cry of souls under the altar betokened an α ra of martyrdom and bloody persecution of Christians, to follow quickly after the mortality of the seal preceding, so we found from history that Diocletian's reign was famous (or rather infamous) for the most terrible, bloody, and effective of all the imperial persecutions of Christianity: insomuch that its α ra was named and celebrated in after ages as the " α ra of martyrs;" and that imperial monuments of the day, still extant, boasted its success in the extermination of Christianity.—And whereas the vision of the sixth Seal prefigured, as next to follow, a revolution in the Roman world, whereby the enemies of Christ and their whole supremacy and polity would be swept away, so, immediately after Diocletian's persecution, the ever-memorable revolution took place under Constantine :—a revolution sudden, and accomplished through fierce wars, in which the forces on either side were recognized as respectively the champions of Paganism and Christianity :the result of which was, that within some ten or fifteen years after, the whole power of Paganism was swept from its elevation in the political heavens ; and ere the lapse of a half century more, nearly the whole Roman Empire, in respect of religious profession, converted into a Christianized kingdom.

On the whole I can scarcely conceive any thing more perfect and complete than the direct evidence on which our interpretation of these six Seals, constituting the first act of the Apocalyptic drama, was founded. And the proof by exhaustions will only appear in every way confirmatory and corroborative. For (not to speak of the other Seals) I will venture to say there can be found no empire, or political body, in the whole history of the world, to which the emblems of even the one first Seal can with strict propriety be applied but the Roman; nor any one era in Roman history, but that to which I have applied them. And if, turning aside from the Roman application, we consider the attempts made by some (in the want of a satisfactory Roman solution, heretofore unknown) to explain the visions of the six first Seals as prefigurations of the fortunes of the Church, there will be found in all the attempted solutions such disagreement with fact, such inconclusiveness of reasoning, such a perversion of the plain meaning of the symbols, such self-contradiction, and even, it may be added, such unsound and hazardous theology,—that a reasonable mind will only, I think, turn back the more deeply convinced from them, that the Roman solution which I have given is, and can alone be, the intended and true solution of the six first Seals of the Apocalypse.1 The evidence of our first part having appeared thus convincing, and the fulfilment of the Apocalyptic presfigurations been thus clearly traced down in history to the memorable epoch of Constantine and his successors overthrowing the before-dominant Paganism, and Christianity becoming established in the Roman Empire,—we were immediately after it called to consider another very different and most remarkable vision; without the right understanding and constant recollection of which, it will be impossible to enter fully into the meaning, spirit, and (if I may so say) philosophy, of the series of presfigurations following.

The inhabitants of the Apocalyptic or Roman world were now alluded to under the emblematic appellation of the twelve tribes of Israel; (the one designation and the other being applied indifferently to the people marked out as the object of the coming judgments 1;) and at the same time the Angels of the four winds depicted before St. John, as agencies charged with a destroying commission (destruction from abroad, it might seem from the figure of the winds) against them:—of the former of which intimations the obvious explanation was seen in the historic fact of the Roman world having become Christianized in profession, in the course of the wonderful previously-depicted revolution: of the latter in the fact of a notable departure from the Christian life and faith occurring in the Church, soon after its establishment on the ruins of paganism in the Roman Empire; such indeed as to constitute an incipient apostacy. And then, ere the Angels could let loose their tempests, another and greater Angel, described as having the seal of the life-giving God, appeared rising from the East; who, after charge to the destroyers to refrain till the sealing work was done, proceeded to seal a certain small, but perfect number, 144,000; as an election, not out of the heathen world, but out of the mass (so it was proved on grammatic evidence 2) of the professing Israel.

Consequent on which there was added another evidently connected, and as evidently prospective or anticipative vision, respecting the ultimate salvation and introduction into paradisiacal blessedness of a certain palm-bearing company; depicted as a multitude innumerable, out of every nation and kindred and tongue, that had washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb: the which company, it was evident, was of the same class as the sealed ones; only made up, as would seem from its number, of their many successive generations, and gathered (in part at least) out of a world larger and more various in its population than the then world of vision. So the continuous preservation of this election of grace was foreshown to the Evangelist, through all the seductions of the apostacy within, and the desolating judgments from without, even to the final consummation:—it being further intimated however, that they would be thus preserved to blessedness, only as saved ones out of a great,—indeed the great tribulation; the same that had been predicted to the souls of the martyrs under the fifth Seal, and which was to be greater even than that experienced by those martyrs themselves.—These three points, viz. the early apostatizing of the Christianized Roman Empire,—the consequent issuing forth of Providential judgments against it,—and the preservation of a faithful remnant through them all, were facts, I conceive, hereby made as clear as they were important. And they constituted in fact, the triple heads of all that followed in the prophecy.

Besides which there was reflected back from the ecclesiastical history of the period, such a light on this vision, as to suggest its having a yet further meaning; and its furnishing hints on two other points of very great interest and importance, concerning both the apostacy and the election saved out of it. Thus, first, there appeared evidence of its foreshowing the very nature of the incipient apostacy; as originating in an undue and unscriptural estimate of external church privileges, (especially of the opus operatum of baptism,) and of the priesthood as the necessary and only channel of grace:—the proof arising out of a most remarkable parallelism,1 in respect of some eight or ten particulars, between what is noted in the sealing and palm-bearing visions as effected by Christ and his Divine Spirit in the 144,000, the election of grace, or true Israel, distinctively and alone, and that which history reports to have been more and more regarded, in the current estimation of the age referred to, as effected through priestly agency in all baptized Christians by the very baptismal ceremonial, and the subsequent application of other sacraments in case of those Christians' correct observance of church ordinances.

It was just such a parallelism of particulars, in the way of allusive contrast, (I beg the reader to mark the sufficiency of the test,) as at once convinces the student, in the absence of direct historic testimony, that the Athanasian Creed must have been drawn up with allusion to, and in condemnation of, the heresies of the Arians, Eutyches, and Nestorius; and would convince him also, if their history were wanting, (which it is not,) that the Articles of the Church of England were drawn up in opposition to those of Popery and Trent.—Secondly, the very manner and means seemed also hinted, by which Christ's remnant would be preserved, both then and thenceforward, from the infection and deadening influence of this ever-growing ritualist apostacy: viz. by a discovery, at that era to be specially vouchsafed the true Church, of the doctrines of grace—of electing, enlightening, life-giving, justifying, saving grace, according to God the Father's choice, by God the Spirit's influence, and through God the Redeemer's blood and righteousness:—precisely such a revelation as the sealing and palm-bearing visions conjointly signified. For just as, at this point in the Apocalyptic presigurations, the electing and sealing vision was pictured before St. John, so, at the corresponding historic period of which I speak, a revelation of precisely similar character was made, through the great Augustine principally, to the true Church of God : a revelation which is found to have furnished, for centuries after, the doctrine on which it fed, and through which mainly it was preserved alive, in the wilderness state of a general surrounding apostacy.

Nor must I omit to add that, as the appended vision of the palm-bearers carried St. John's views far onward, when they looked into the probable future fortunes, duration, and extent of Christ's true Church, until its presentation before God, after perhaps a long time of tribulation, and entrance into blessedness,—so at the end of the fourth century, when the storms of invasion were on the point of sweeping over the Roman Empire, the views of Christians, which had before limited the earthly duration of the church, and its time of trial in the world, to that of the then Roman Empire, became enlarged, and looked far onward to the final blessed issue: still chiefly through the teaching of Augustine.1

In the conclusions thus formed respecting the Apocalyptic visions shown to St. John, as not merely prefiguring facts, but facts as they would be seen by the true Church of the time figured, it was presumed that he saw these visions, not as a mere individual, but as a symbolic man; i.e. as the representative of Christ's true Church, or of its chief ministers and seers of the true apostolic succession, in each successive age presignified. But this was no unwarranted presumption. It was one shown to be agreeable to the analogy of other prophecies, above all (as afterwards strikingly illustrated 3 ) to that of the Apocalyptic prophecy itself :—not to add that it accorded also with the belief and interpretation (however imperfectly carried out) of the earliest patristic, as well as of many of the more eminent later expositors.

And so (after a brief introductory notice of a vision of incense-offering in the Apocalyptic temple, which on the same principle of allusive contrast seemed to hint that, while the saints still approached God in prayer through Christ as their Mediator, the rest, though called Christians, would have forsaken and be neglecting his mediatorship,—an intimation verified in the sad and ever-increasing tendency of the professing church at the close of the fourth century to saint-mediatorship,1)—I say, after this the prophecy was seen to proceed to the development in symbolic visions of the judgments of the seventh Seal, now at length opened:judgments sevenfold in number, as marked in limine by the provision of seven trumpet-angels, to sound forth the appointed times, successively of their infliction; and in character judgments as of tempests, from the agency of the four tempest-angels charged, we before saw, with the fury of the four winds of heaven against apostate Christendom.Those of the first four trumpets being depicted as judgments of desolation on the third of the Apocalyptic (or Roman) earth,the third of the sea,third of the rivers,and third of the sun and stars, corresponding,—in the which the local scene of infliction was the thing most strikingly marked in the prophetic description,—they were explained of the four several successive and not uncorrespondent desolations of the Roman Western Empire,by Goths,Vandals,Huns and Herulians,on its land territory,maritime colonies,frontier river vallies,and high authorities of state,respectively:a celebrated tripartition of the Roman world,(elsewhere in the prophecy strikingly referred to,) the Western third of which embraced the provinces of what was afterwards the Western Empire,2 furnishing a precise literal explanation of the Apocalyptic third part; and the principle of construing such territorial divisions, and the localities of land,sea,and rivers,literally,3 albeit in symbolic pre-

' See Vol. i. p. 306-313.

dictions, being proved accordant with the general analogy of Scripture prophecy:—not to add that the truth of our interpretation was further corroborated by the equally successful application of the same principle of interpretation to prophecies very similarly expressed in the four first Vials.1—Next came the judgment of the fifth Trumpet. And we had the test of its position in Apocalyptic chronology, the Arabian character of its prefigurative symbols,2 its accompaniment by, and origination out of, some false religion from the pit of the abyss, as well as the general character of the plague, its well-defined period of intensity, and well-defined limits to its destroying power,—we had, I say, all these concurrent marks,—marks which I think cannot reasonably be mistaken,—whereby to identify it with the irruption and desolations in Roman Christendom of the Mahometan Saracens.—Nor was the evidence dissimilar or inferior on which we explained the sixth Trumpet's plague of the Turks. Its declared local origin from the Euphrates, its apparently implied connexion with the plague of the previous Trumpet, the several particulars of its composite symbol, some very remarkable,—as that which described sulphur, fire, and smoke to proceed from the mouths, and authority and power of injuring to attach to the tails, of the symbolic horses in vision,3—its destined office of destroying the third part of men, (the Eastern or Greek third, nearest Euphrates, it would seem) and the remarkable period of time that was to elapse from the commencement to the final accomplishment of its work,—all concurred to assure us that we could not be in error in interpreting this plague of the Seljukian and Ottoman Turks.

On the sufficiency of the evidence of the third part of our Exposition, and certain reference of the prophecies it embraces to the Reformation, the reader, if satisfied thus far, will not, I think, long hesitate. The prophecy turns from speaking of the destruction of "the third part of the men," or Eastern Roman Empire, to what it calls "the rest of the men,"1 i.e. of the Roman world; which can only mean those of Western or Papal Christendom. And after briefly sketching their religious state as that of an awful apostacy, long before begun, and even yet unrepented of and persisted in,—an apostacy exhibiting itself chiefly in five several points, all and each of which were shown, on the fullest clearest evidence of history, to have characterized Papal Christendom, both during the 400 years (from 1057 to 1453) of the Turkman's destroying progress from Euphrates to Constantinople, and also throughout the remainder of the 15th century, which followed after the fall of that Greek capital,—there was next after this, I say, a vision exhibited on the Apocalyptic scene,2 as sudden as glorious, of Christ descending on the earth, revealed in light as the Angel of covenant-mercy and Sun of righteousness, with a book opened in his hand, as if for men to read it,—apparently the Bible or gospel part of the Bible:—a picture as fit, I think, as could have been devised, to depict the heaven-sent outbreak of gospel-light at the Reformation, on the opening of the 16th century. Then,—whereas the Angel's planting his feet on land and sea, as if to claim them to himself, and his roaring like a lion, as if against some enemy, seemed to imply the fact of some usurper having at the time appropriated his rights and kingdom,—so we saw from history that not only did such a usurping Antichrist then exist and triumph: but that actually, at the exact epoch corresponding with the vision, he permitted himself to be represented before Europe in gorgeous paintings, on a high festival day at Rome, almost precisely as Christ was represented here; his face radiant as the Sun of Righteousness, the

1 Apoc. ix. 20.

2 Apoc. x. 1.

covenant-rainbow formed by the refraction of his solar light, his feet planted one on the land, the other on the sea, and his voice uttered as of a lion roaring, against all opposing enemies. Can we conceive evidence, of the nature of allusive contrast, more extraordinary? As to the sequel of the vision, we saw that it needed but the application of the expository principle before noted, of St. John's seeing and hearing what he did as a symbolic character, the representative of Christ's true Church, or more eminent ministers at the time figured, to solve all its difficulties, and trace in it, point by point, the chief successive steps and epochs of the Reformation. Just as St. John saw and hailed that vision of gospel-light, so Luther (and other servants of God after him) saw and hailed the similar revelation given in their time of Christ as the Sun of Righteousness. It was the first epoch of the Reformation. Just as St. John heard and re-echoed the cry of the Lion of the tribe of Judah, vindicating the world to himself, and when seven extraordinary thunders, with pretensions as from heaven, sounded in answer, though at first about to receive and write them, was presently taught to view and seal them up as of no heavenly origin,—so we saw most strikingly, that after Luther had sounded forth with lion-like cry Christ's rights and claims against the opposing Romish claims preached by Tetzel, when the Papal thunders from the seven hills pealed against him, he was in the first instance prepared to receive and submit to them as a voice from heaven, but was presently taught his error, and to recognize them as the voice of Antichrist: this being the second epoch of the Reformation. Just as (after an animating intimation of the time of Christ's final coming and triumph being not so very far off, an intimation realized in the prophetic views of Antichrist's near destruction next given to the Reformers) St. John was bidden to take the open book out of the Covenant-Angel's hand, and, after eating it, afresh commissioned

to fulfil the prophet's office,—so Luther, excommunicate and degraded from holy orders by the Pope and Papal prelates, was in the Wartburg castle monished from heaven to take the Bible in hand, digest, and translate it, as the only rule for Christ's ministers and people; and then, as under a new sufficient and special commission from his Master, to fulfil (together with others similarly excommunicate and interdicted from Papal orders) the functions of reformed preacher and evangelist.1—Just as St. John had next a rod, the emblem of princely or ecclesiastical authority, given him, with command to rise and measure (or define) the mystical Apocalyptic Temple, and at the same time authoritatively to eject as heathen certain occupants of the outer court (together with the outer court itself) who, it was added, had been for some time before trampling down the Holy City, or Polity of the saints,—so we saw that, as the next step in the history of the Reformation, the rod of authority was, in Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburgh, and other kingdoms, given into the hand of Luther and other anti-Papal ministers, with a view to the definition and constitution of Christ's orthodox Church,—its re-formation in fact,—and the casting out from its pale of the Papists and their religious system, as antichristian and heathenish.2—Once more, just as St. John's attention was next directed to the history of the two Witnesses, retrospectively narrated by the Covenant-Angel, as of those that had borne commission to testify for Him through the darkness and dangers of the 1260 predestined days (or years) of Gentile domination,—so, very quickly after the regular ecclesiastical constitution of the Reformed Church, its doctors and ministers were directed to explore, and at length to set forth in writing the history of a line of witnesses for Christ, from the early commencement of the apostacy, through all the dark succeeding ages of the domination of the Papal Antichrist.3

3 Ib. 194-196.

As to the fact of such a witness-line having existed, the evidence in proof, which detained us for a length of time, appeared sufficient; though for the earlier centuries not perfect, or without lacunæ. And on the rest of their history, figuratively given in the Angel's narrative, viz. with respect to the Beast from the abyss (an antichristian enemy now first spoken of) making war upon the two symbolic Witnesses, so soon as they should have completed their testimony, and conquering, and at length killing them, and amidst a gathered concourse of its partizans triumphing over their dead corpses, and then, in just three and a half days after this, their reviving to the enemy's dismay in strength and vigour greater than before,—on all these points, turning to our line of actual evangelic witnesses, we found the historic parallel complete even to the minutest accuracy: persecuted as it appeared they were by the Popes, whom that Beast from the abyss (it was afterwards shown) figured, so soon as they had completed their protestation by denouncing Rome as Antichrist, and at length exterminated or reduced to silence;—of which last fact evidence having appeared at a very notable and well-defined epoch, the victory was then forthwith proclaimed and rejoiced over: viz. in the conclave of the celebrated 5th Lateran Council at Rome; precisely three and a half years, even to a day, before Luther's protest, and the ever-memorable outbreaking again of anti-Papal witnessing at the REFORMATION.

At this point the Angel's retrospective narrative having been brought down so far, as to blend both in time and subject with that of his own previous figurative descent, revelation of Himself the Saviour, exposure of Rome's seven mock thunders, re-commissioning of the apostle John in his symbolic character to the prophetic office, and direction of his regard to the subject of the Witnesses,-the course of emblematic figurations was resumed. And whereas the resumed vision, combining

1 lb. 209, &c.

2 Ib. 373—375.

4 Ib. 407, &c.

3 Ib. 403.

the two subjects, did next represent the two revived witnesses as summoned to rise up, in the cloud which formed the Angel's mantling, to the firmamental heaven of vision,1 and thereupon an earthquake occurring. and a tenth of that great city falling by it wherein the witnesses had been slain, and seven chiliads also being destroyed, apparently of the same great city,—so we saw, in the history of the times of the Reformation, that its next marked step of progress was in the ascent of the Protestants, (or, according to the word Protestant's etymological meaning, of anti-Papal witnesses,) to power and dignity in the political heavens of Western Christendom; alike in Saxony, Hesse, Prussia, England: —connected with which last event was the Revolution in which Papal England, the tenth kingdom of the Pope-dom, fell; followed by the loss to the Popedom of the seven Dutch United Provinces, presently after also: each state an ancient European tribual subdivision, analogous to the Jewish Chiliad.2

A chronological note was added at this close of the vision; "The second woe hath passed away: behold the third woe cometh quickly." Just agreeably with which it appeared that the earthquake of the Reformation, and wars which rose out of it, did not end, nor the consolidation of the Reformation become complete, in Germany, Holland, and England, till the Peace of Westphalia, A.D. 1648, and accession of William the Third, A.D. 1688, to the English throne:—an aera immediately preceding those defeats of the Turks by Prince Eugene, after which they were never more a terror or woe to Christendom.3 By this chronological Note the conclusion of this division of the prophecy was distinctly defined, and its evidence too made complete. Nor, on reviewing the latter as a whole, do I fear that it will seem presumption if I confidently ask the reader, Is it possible that in our application of the prophecies so reviewed to the Reformation, (the chief subject of our second Volume,) we can have been mistaken?

1 Ib. 410, &c. 2 Ib. p. 418, &c. Ib. 432, 433.

And so we were brought to the fourth part of the prophecy: that whereof the great subject was the Beast from the abyss; the same that had slain Christ's two Witnesses.—The Apocalyptic series of prefigurative visions, thus far (as explained by me) continuous, was broken off abruptly, we saw,1 to introduce it: immediately after a passing mention of the seventh Trumpet's sounding on the scene of vision, and a certain significant opening of the temple-gate, and also certain attendant thunderings, lightnings, and voices, which together gave no equivocal anticipatory indication of what that Trumpet would include; viz. destruction to Christ's enemies, and triumph to his Church. And in the supplemental Part now begun, containing the Beast's history, we saw evidence of chronological parallelism with the two Parts preceding, (especially from its including the same notable period of the 1260 days, or years, previously mentioned,) such as could not be mistaken: the which structure of the prophecy in two parallel lines would, it seemed, most exactly suit the form of the scroll whereon the prophecy was written, by supposing the former series of visions, with their sequel, to have been written on its one side, the present series on its other; agreeably with the specification, otherwise almost meaningless, of the seven-sealed scroll being written both within and without.2

As to the seven-headed ten-horned Beast itself, or rather that which the Angel (by a common figure) used as its equivalent, and chiefly or altogether regarded in his description, I mean its eighth or last ruling head, 3 —the fact of its symbolizing the line of Roman Popes, from soon after the rise of the Romano-Gothic kingdoms of the 5th and 6th centuries, appeared on the following evidence :—1st. Their throne was locally the seven-hilled city ; so as was the Beast's. 4 —2nd. Their supremacy, like the Beast's, was chronologically the eighth regularly constituted authority that held supremacy on those seven hills.

The which notable fact appeared thus. Kings, consuls, dictators, decemvirs, and military tribunes made up the first five, reaching to the time of Augustus; and the Imperial regime then introduced, agreeably with the Angel's notice of it as the ruling head in St. John's time, the sixth. Then the seventh,—a head which was to come afterwards and to continue but a short time, was shown to be the short-lived imperial tetrarchical form of government introduced by Diocletian: this being the next new form according to Gibbon; and answering to the Apocalyptic type, not merely in the two above-noted points, but also in respect of two other most notable characteristics as follows. The first was that of being the last ruling Pagan government established in Rome, and the same that fought the imperial battle with Christianity: just as the Apocalyptic Dragon, the Beast's precursor, and symbol of Rome's Pagan rulers, fought the battle against the sun-clothed travailing woman in vision under his last or seventh head, for he had but seven heads in all: (a head identical evidently with the Beast's original seventh, which already on his first emergence appeared as that which had been cut down by a sword:—the second that of having the diadem for a badge, a badge assumed by Diocletian, in contravention of all the old Roman habits and feelings; which selfsame badge the pictured Dragon wore in his conflict with the woman, and until his dejection from the symbolic heaven, presently following. After which,—this seventh head having been "wounded to death" by the Christian imperial sword, and a local interregnum, if I may so speak, having followed of some two centuries, during which, most remarkably, the ruling Christian power forsook, even as if it shunned, the seven-hilled city for the capital of its residency, after this, I say, an eighth head appeared on that same locality, in the Bishops or Popes of Rome: it being under them (as Papal writers themselves represent it) that Rome again rose to supremacy, had its deadly wound healed, and became thenceforward a second time mistress of the western world.

So, I say, was the second point of parallel proved between the Popes and the Apocalyptic Beast.—3. The Popes received in the sixth century the allegiance of the ten Romano-Gothic kingdoms that had then risen in Western Europe, as their acknowledged spiritual head; just as the Beast's eighth, or new seventh head, had ten kingly horns growing out of it.2—4. The Popes had even at that early time assumed the extraordinary title, and asserted pretensions to the extraordinary authority of, Christ's Vicar:3 a title and character so precisely accordant with that of the predicted Antichrist, (whose empire, it is allowed on all hands, the Apocalyptic Beast's signified,) that even men's imagination itself has failed of suggesting any other equally so.4—5. Their character answered to the Beast's, in respect both of their speaking great things (great such as no mortal man ever before presumed to speak) and blasphemies:5 and also of their oppressing, conquering, and destroying Christ's true saints.—6. With regard to the time of their religious supremacy, it continued established in Western Christendom, from its rise in the 6th century, before mentioned, to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, a period of just 1260 years:6 the very same that was declared to attach to the supremacy of the Beast in vision.

Besides all which evidence, there was the subsidiary proof of the Papal Antichrist having for his main-prop the allegiance of the long apostatized Western Clergy, regular and secular; just as the Beast had the two-horned lamb-like Beast, or False Prophet, for its chief supporter; and of their jointly recurring to the artifice 1 Ib. 112. 113. 2 Ib. 114. &c. 3 Ib. 124—133.

of representative General Councils of the Popedom, to strengthen it; just as the Beast and False Prophet to the Beast's Image:—to which symbolic Image these General Councils were shown to answer, in all the six or seven particulars predicated of it in the prophecy; 1 as also the Papal Clergy to the four or five predicated of the Lamb-personating Beast, or False Prophet. 2 —Finally, there was the evidence of the name Lateinos (the Latin man) that which contains the enigmatic numeral 666, and was suggested by Irenæus as very probably the Beast's name intended in the prophecy,—being the very most appropriate appellative of these Popes of the Latin empire; and a name, in solution of the Apocalyptic enigma, altogether as unobjectionable, it was shown, as appropriate. 3

By this description of the Beast and Beast's kingdom and people, and a brief counter-sketch of the Lamb and his kingdom and people,—especially with reference to some joyful epoch, ecclesiastical and political, in their history, during the Beast's reign, just such as occurred at the Reformation, as well as to a period of religious lukewarmness and want of understanding, on the part of many of its professed supporters, following it, such as in the new Protestant churches too soon had its fulfilment,4—we were brought down nearly to that epoch of the seventh Trumpet's sounding, at which the former prophetic series some little time before, had broken off; and by the vision next immediately following, viz. of an Angel flying through heaven with the gospel to preach to every nation and people, into its very era:—one principal characteristic of the seventh Trumpet being that of a Trumpet of coming jubilee to the world, when the temple of his true Church would be wide opened to it; and one principal vision, connected with the period of its judgment-vials outpouring on apostate Europe, that of harpers of the same class as the Lamb's followers, preserved and detached from the apostacy, singing songs of missionary spirit and jubilean anticipations.1

As to the evidence on which we explained the earthquake of this Trumpet, and judgments of its first five Vials, of the French Revolution and desolating European wars that arose therefrom, it will be yet fresh in the reader's remembrance. Suffice it therefore to suggest how those judgments were shown to have fallen geographically on the land, sea, old boundary rivers, symbolic sun, and seven-hilled throne of Anti-Christendom, (very much as on corresponding localities under the corresponding Trumpets,) alike in the order of the presfigurative Vials, and with that kind of infliction that they respectively indicated: moreover how we were thereby brought down in European history to the very eve of the drying up of the Turkman dominion, which commenced A.D. 1820, in Europe; an event which so strikingly answers to the sixth Vial's symbol, (the drying up of the flood from the Euphrates,) as almost, even independent of the context, to force itself on the mind as that prophecy's fulfilment.²—Besides which, the whole era was shown to have been one of revival of religion in Protestant Christendom, or at least Protestant England, resulting in an outburst of evangelic missions unprecedented in history; just such (I beg attention to this palpable coincidence) as we saw a moment since was also prefigured in the Apocalyptic prophecy as an accompaniment of the era of the seventh Trumpet, and its constituent Vials.

So ends our review of evidence. And I trust the reader's conclusion, after testing each link of the chain, will like my own be this:—that, continuously from St. John's time to the present, the chain is unbroken; that the Apocalyptic visions are proved, in a double line of prophecy, to have depicted with the most wonderful accuracy the chief events, secular and ecclesiastical, in the history of Christendom; and that our position in the prophecy began from the year 1820 to be under the sixth Apocalyptic Vial, and its primary symbol of the drying up of the Euphrates, in the one series; as we were also then, and had been for some thirty years previous, under that of the Angel flying abroad with the everlasting gospel, in the other.—The only question at this point seems to be, whether we may not in the course of the last ten or fifteen years have advanced a step further: viz.

in the last-mentioned series to the vision of the second Angel crying against Babylon; in the former to the notice, next following that respecting Euphrates, which describes three unclean spirits like frogs as appearing to issue out of the mouths of the Dragon, Beast, and False Prophet, towards the close of the same sixth Vial; to the effect of gathering together the kings and people of the whole world to the war of the great day of God Almighty.—The consideration of this point, with a view to the more exact fixing of our precise present position in the prophecy, will be the fit sequel of the present chapter; and fit preparation for looking into the future, in those that follow.

CHAPTER II.

PRESENT POSITION OF CHRISTENDOM UNDER THE THREE FROGS OF APOC. XVI, AND THE SECOND OF THE THREE ANGELS FLYING IN MID-HEAVEN OF APOC. XIV.

\textcircled{1} I. THE THREE FROGS.

" And I saw come out of the mouth of the Dragon, and out of the mouth of the Beast, and out of the mouth of the False Prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs : for they are spirits of Dæmons, working miracles, (or signs 1 ) which go forth to the kings of the whole world, 2 to gather them together to the war 3 of the great day of God Almighty." Apoc. xvi. 13, 14.

πνευματα δαιμονίων ποιοντα σημεία.

2 So Scholz and Tregelles ; reading simply βασίλεις τῆς οικομένης δλπs.

3 eis τον πολεμον. The idea of continuity may attach to this word πολεμος, or By this very remarkable symbol, which I think it may be well to consider first in this Chapter, there seems evidently intended some most extraordinarily rapid, wide-spread, and influential diffusion, throughout the whole Roman, or perhaps rather the whole habitable world, of three several unclean or unholy principles, suited in character to the Dragon, Beast, and False Prophet, from whom respectively they appeared to emanate: but all alike directed and speeded on their course by spirits of hell; and all alike, in respect of the earthly agencies employed to propagate them, resembling frogs, the well-known type of vain loquacious talkers and agitators, deluding and seducing the minds of men.

Now by the Dragon we know to have been meant (for the Angel tells us so) that old Serpent the Devil; in earlier days enthroned (in place of the heavenly rightful monarch) in the Paganism of ancient Rome: and thus, in a vision picturing it as at the opening of the fourth century, represented with the covering skin, characteristic of that Pagan Empire, of a seven-headed ten-horned Dragon: of which covering however, from after the time when he delivered up his seven-hilled throne and power to the Beast, we may probably suppose him to have appeared divested. Again, by the Beast, or rather (according to the Angel's definition of the thing intended in his description') the Beast's eighth ruling head, we saw, on I think irrefragable evidence, that the Popes of Rome were meant, from and after the time of their occupying the Dragon's throne and empire in Western Christendom:—and, once more, by the two-horned lamblike Beast, or False Prophet, the apostate Hierarchy and Clergy of the Patriarchate of Western Europe, from and after the time of its subjection and official attachment to the Romish Popedom.2—What then (if this be correct) the three spirits, or principles, that may be considered most fitly characteristic of these three several actors on the scene;—I mean the Devil abstractedly, the Papal Antichrist of Rome, and the Clerical corporate Body of the apostate Romish Church?

To myself, with reference to the two first, the answer seems simple and obvious:—viz. that the one from the Dragon's mouth is the principle of infidelity, with its proper accompaniments of blasphemy and proud rebelliousness of spirit against rightful authority, alike divine and human; "By which sin fell the angels:"3—and the one from the Beast the pure direct principle of Popery, based on its fundamental antichristian dogma of the Roman Pope's being Christ's Vicegerent on earth. Nor again can I hesitate as to the third spirit intended. For, although at first sight there might seem some difficulty in assigning to it a sufficiently distinct character from the second, seeing that the two-horned Beast was before described as very much the organ, agent, and instrument, as well as chief supporter, of the Beast, its principal, yet I think that the new name now given to this agent on the prophetic scene itself suggests clearly enough the solution of the difficulty.

For "the False Prophet" is the generic appellation of an apostate Priesthood in the professing Church; and of an apostate Priesthood, what the most characteristic spirit but that o.priestcraft? A spirit this which is distinct from and independent of that of direct Popery, though naturally its ally. Its essential acting in any Priesthood is traced in their exalting themselves and the church of their ministrations,—with its rites, sacraments, authority, dogmas, and traditions,—to the disparagement and even supercession of Christ's own word, work, and Spirit, in the things of salvation. It was thus in effect that it acted in the 4th and 5th centuries, long before its organization under the particular form of the two-horned lamb-like Beast of Apoc. xiii. But it thereby all the while prepared the way for a sacerdotal earthly Antichrist in Christ's place; then acted naturally afterwards, under the particular organization that I spoke of, in devoting itself as his chief support. And what then more natural, than that after the loosening of the strong binding ties of the Papal authority by the events of the French Revolution, it might very possibly rise up and act again, with a measure of distinctness and independence, though still Romanist in its tendencies, on the theatre of Christendom?

Such, I say,—if the Dragon, Beast, and False Prophet mean what I think it is proved that they mean, 4 appear to me to be the three principles or spirits intended :— spirits in regard of which the prophecy intimates that they would act with unity of effect, if not of purpose; viz.

so as to gather the powers of the world, (just as Ahab 1 was seduced by a lying spirit to Ramoth Gilead,) whether altogether as antagonists against Christ and his cause, or in part as antagonists, in part spectators only,2 to the coming great day of conflict. And if these be the spirits intended,—spirits to go forth, let it never be forgotten, after a certain progress made in the drying up under the sixth Vial of the Turkman flood from the Euphrates,—can we well mistake in believing that within the last ten or fifteen years, the precise period marked out in the prophecy, there has been an outgoing of that which has remarkably answered to them?

Let our retrospective sketch commence from about the year 1830; at which time, it may be remembered, the predicted drying up of the mystic Euphrates had exhibited itself alike in Greece, in the trans-Danubian Turkish provinces, and in Algiers. I commence from that epoch, although the risings of each of the three spirits might indeed be dated somewhat earlier, because about that time there occurred certain momentous political changes in France and England, the two most influential powers of Western Christendom,—in France that of its second democratic Revolution, in England those of the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act and the Reform Bill, whereby the issuing forth of the three unclean spirits (already spawned) in that new relationship to each other of which I shall presently have to speak as indicated by the Apocalyptic prophecy, was eminently accelerated and helped forward.

And in our sketch let us more especially mark their actings in our own country: not merely because it is that about which we must ever nationally feel the greatest interest; but yet more because, it being the chief asylum of true religion, and central point whence the actings for the evangelization of the world had for some time previous been proceeding, we might almost à priori have expected that the Dragon would mark it out as, above all other countries, that in which it would need that he should exert his deepest subtlety and mightiest energies.

Thus then as to the first spirit,—that of democratic infidel lawlessness and rebellion,—when it had crossed the channel, after overthrowing the Bourbons in France, and the Dutch dynasty in Belgium, can we forget its sudden furious outbreak, as exhibited at the mooting and during the progress of the Reform Bill?—How the public mind in England was agitated and blindly impelled by it, almost like the herd that the legion of spirits impelled into the Lake of Gennesareth; and rank and property, church and state, alike endangered by it, till the Premier himself, the ostensible author of the Bill, quailed and fell before the tempest: how the too frequent conjunction of the radical and the infidel (the joint characteristics, as I conceive, of the spirit from the Dragon) was both within Parliament and without it, under the falsely assumed appellative of liberal, marked prominently; and their incessant croaking cry, like that of the frogs from the Stygian pool of the Greek dramatist, heard addressing itself to the masses, Agitate, Agitate!—how legislators, and even peers, as men infatuated, stood in their places in Parliament advising passive resistance to the law; and others, with yet clearer token of the spirit speaking in them, suggested recourse to physical force, and even murder: how our Church, a Church in its scriptural Articles and Liturgy surely the very pillar and ground of the faith, was marked as the special object of enmity and attack; its property saved with difficulty, its prelates insulted, and even within the House of Lords itself admonished to set their house in order: how the general mass of the dissenting body was infected with the spirit; and many dissenting ministers (not of the Socinians only, but even of the more orthodox sects) instead of confining themselves, like the most illustrious of their predecessors, to the work of evangelists at home, and the promotion of evangelic missions abroad, became strangely known as political agitators: latitudinarianized in their religious associations, if not their religious profession, to an extent such as to make them seem partizans of infidelity; and with language too often of the very gall of bitterness against the English Church.

By many, I am persuaded, what was said and done was all under a temporary infatuation. But this only the more strikingly illustrates the influence on them of a mighty spirit of delusion. Nothing, but an hypothesis, like what the text suggests to us, of the outgoing of such a spirit over the land, can account for the phenomenon. "I never said," are the reported words of a late lamented man of genius, "that the vox populi was of course the vox Dei. It may be. But it may with equal probability be the vox Diaboli.

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