Continued from Chapter XIV. Resurrection Of The Witnesses

BEFORE describing the third and last woe, we must speak of the object of that woe. We have had no occasion to do so till now, because he has not appeared on the Apocalyptic scene. The next vision of John, however, brings him before us. Paul, as well as other apostles, had spoken of one whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power, and signs, and lying wonders—the Man of Sin, the Son of Perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. (2 Thess. 2:3,4) But when Paul wrote, as he himself tells us, there were lets and hindrances in existence, which obstructed the appearance of the Man of Sin, and would continue to do so for some ages to come. But the apostle intimated, at the same time, that these obstructions should in due time cease to exist—that the let (restraining force) would be taken out of the way, and then that that Wicked would be revealed, affording to the saints an opportunity of displaying their patience in the endurance of his tyranny, and to God of manifesting His power in breaking him in pieces.

The Roman empire, in its imperial form, was the grand let to the rise of Popery in Paul’s time, and for some time after. It was necessary that the throne of the Emperor should be abolished, in order that the chair of the Bishop might be erected in its room (designated position). And to what were the great acts of the drama we have been contemplating—the events falling under the seals and trumpets—directed, but just to break in pieces the fabric of imperial Rome, that, the let being taken out of the way, the Man of Sin might be revealed. Accordingly, in the vision to which we have now come, we witness his portentous rise.

This chapter contains an account of the rise of two beasts. The first beast is represented as rising out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns; the second beast is represented as rising out of the earth, having two horns like a lamb, and speaking as a dragon. We shall briefly indicate what we are to understand by these two beasts. This will enable us to enter with advantage upon the exposition of the details of the symbols.

The first beast—that which rose out of the sea —we take to be the secular empire, with its Papal head. The second beast—that which rose out of the earth—we take to be the hierarchy or ecclesiastical state. It was by the union of these two that the world was so long oppressed, and the Church brought to the very brink of extermination. Between the two branches of the Papacy there was as close and intimate alliance almost as between body and soul. The State served the same purpose to the Popedom which the horse does to the rider—which the hand does to the will. It was the beast on which the harlot rode; it was the arm by which the Papacy executed all its cruel and bloody decrees.

It appeared to John as if he were stationed on the seashore; and, as he gazed upon the waters, which at the time were agitated with tempest (the Gothic invasion), he saw a monster emerging from the deep. His appearance was sufficiently dreadful. He had seven heads, indicative of craft; ten horns, the symbol of power; crowns upon his horns, the emblem of royalty; on his head blasphemous titles, plainly indicating an idolatrous and impious character. Such was the frightful combination of evil qualities— craft, ferocity, power, impiety—which was apparent at the very first glance.

Spencer has well hit off the salient features of this monster:—

It is usual in Scripture to represent a tyrannical kingdom under the symbol of a wild beast. It is impossible not to admire the propriety of the symbol. It is the property of man to be ruled by reason, to be accessible to considerations of clemency and pity, and to have respect in his actions to the will of his Maker. It is the attribute of a beast, on the other hand, to be actuated only by brute passion and appetite. Now, have not the kingdoms of the world hitherto, and especially the four great Despotisms seen by Daniel in vision, acted more like the beast of prey than as associations of reasonable and accountable beings? Have they not exercised at lawless violence all along, and done whatever they listed, without regard to the will of Him who ruleth among men? The ascertained import of the symbol, then, renders it clear that it is the rise of a tyrannical and persecuting power that is here prefigured. A reference to the prophecy of Daniel will give us material aid in determining the kingdom here symbolized.

There is the closest resemblance, as any one may see who compares the two descriptions, between the fourth beast of Daniel and the beast of the sea seen by John. The description given by Daniel is such as to lead us to conclude that the fourth beast was a compound of the preceding three—that it had the teeth of the Babylonian lion, the claws of the Persian bear, and the spotted skin of the Macedonian leopard—that is, it possessed all the propensities of its predecessors, in addition to its own characteristic qualities. Now, such is precisely the appearance of the beast of the sea, verse 2:—

Hence we conclude that it is one and the same political association which is symbolized by the fourth beast of Daniel and the beast of the sea of John. But the fourth beast of Daniel is, by the universal consent of expositors, the symbol of the Roman empire; and it is this empire, therefore, that is symbolized by the beast of the sea; only we have mainly to do with it in its divided form, as held forth by the ten horns. We may note this farther point of resemblance—that the two beasts came to the same end: Daniel’s is slain, and his body is given to the devouring flame; John’s is taken prisoner at the battle of Armageddon, and is cast into the lake burning with fire and brimstone. A short commentary will make the application of the vision to the Papal empire exceedingly plain.

The beast rose out of the sea. The sea is the symbol of society in a state of agitation. The western world at this time was convulsed. The winds that agitated it blew from the north, and were formed of the Gothic nations, whose successive eruptions completely destroyed the fabric of the empire, and plunged society into frightful confusion. It was out of this social flood that the ten Roman kingdoms of modern Europe emerged.

“Having seven heads.” Let us here avail ourselves of the aid of an interpreter who, we are sure will not mislead us. In Revelation 17:9,10, we are told the seven heads have a twofold signification. First, they symbolize the seven hills which were to be the seat of the government of the kingdom. This, as Elliot remarks, “is a character as important as it is obvious. It binds the power symbolized, through all its various mutations, from its earliest beginning to its end, to that same seven-hilled locality, even like one adsciptus glebae (Latin, a tenant tied to the land), and as an essential part of his very constitution and life.” This leads us at once to the city of Rome.

In the passage just referred to, we are further informed that the seven heads also symbolize seven kings, i.e., seven forms of government. Now, such is the number of distinct forms of government which the Roman empire has assumed from first to last, as enumerated both by Livy and Tacitus—kings, consuls, dictators, decemvirs (official ten-man commissions established by the Roman Republic), military tribunes, emperors. Of these kings, or forms of government, it was said, “five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come.” Five of these had fallen before the days of John; the sixth—namely, the imperial—was then in being; and the seventh was then future.

It was intimated, “and when he [the seventh head] cometh, he must continue a short space.” Who is this seventh head, whose term of existence was to be so brief? On no point are Apocalyptic commentators more divided, or their conclusions more vague. Mead makes the seventh head the demi-Caesar, or western emperor. Bishop Newton thinks the dukedom of Rome, established after the conquest of the Heruli, is meant. Others suppose that the Christian emperors, extending from Constantine to Augustulus, constituted the seventh head, and had its wound by the sword of the Heruli. Mr. Elliot finds the seventh head in the change of government that took place under Diocletian, who, together with his successors, in place of emperor or general of the Roman armies, became king or lord; and, in place of the laurel crown and purple, assumed the diadem and robe of silk—the Asiatic symbols of absolute rule. This was followed by great and fundamental changes in the administration, and is marked by Gibbon as the “New Form of Administration.” The empire henceforward was under the joint administration of four princes—two supreme rulers, or Augusti, and two inferior ones, or Caesars. This was introduced, not as a temporary expedient, but as a fundamental law of the Constitution. These are the nearest approaches which have been made to the solution of the difficulty of the seventh head.

To our mind none of these expositions are satisfactory; and, therefore, we here adopt a line of interpretation which, we think, takes us clear of all these difficulties. There is no reason, as it appears to us, why we should confine our view to the last form of Satan’s idolatrous empire—the Roman, to wit—and seek in connection with it all these seven heads. Rather let us take Satan’s empire in its totality. The beast that rose out of the sea was no new monster; he had been seen on earth before. He had momentarily disappeared in a great catastrophe, but he rose again to resume his ravages. Idolatry was one continued confederacy from the beginning, being inspired all through by the same spirit—even the old serpent, the devil.

Nevertheless, it culminated in seven great empires or heads, which rose in succession. The first was Egypt— the earliest persecutor of the Church. The second was Assyria; the third was Babylon; the fourth was the Medo-Persian; then, fifth, came the Grecian Power; and, sixth, the Roman, which was in being at the time of the prophecy. Under the sixth head, the head then in being, was the beast destined to pass out of view for a short time—to suffer a brief extinction—it was to be slain by the sword of the Goths, and so to become “the beast that was and is not.” “And I saw one of its heads as it were wounded to death.” But it was to revive in the form of the Ten kingdoms of modern Europe.

It was essentially the same Pagan kingdom, Satan-inspired, which had lived in its five previous heads—Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Medo—Persia, and Greece; and which in John’s time was existing in its Roman head; which was to arise from its apparent death by the Gothic invasion—emerge from the weltering flood of the sixth century, and to live a second time, in the Ten kingdoms of Europe, under its head the Pope.

A sort of dual character was to belong to this head; for it is counted as both the seventh and the eighth. And in actual fact this duality of head or government has characterized modem Europe. In one aspect its ten kings were its head; in another its head was the Papacy. In the Papacy the ten kingdoms found a common bond of union, and a common center of action. Under their chief, the Pope, they were marshaled in one empire, which was inspired by one spirit, and ruled by one law, which obeyed one will, and pursued one grand aim—all having a common source in the chair of the Popes. Both a temporal and spiritual supremacy did the Pope wield over Europe. This supremacy is necessarily inherent in the fundamental dogma of the Papacy.

The Pope is the vicar of Christ, according to the Romish teaching; but to Christ has been given “all power in heaven and in earth.” He is a King of kings; and if the Pope be what Christ is, he must possess the power which Christ possesses——he must be a King of kings. And in fact he did claim this power for many ages; and in deposing sovereigns, releasing subjects from their allegiance, disposing of crowns, and annulling laws, the Pope demeaned himself as the Lord paramount of Europe, both in temporals and spirituals. This jurisdiction he exercised, not as the modern Popish gloss would have it, by the general consent and acquiescence of the kings and nations of the period; he claimed it as of divine right, and as one to whom the God of heaven had delegated His divine prerogatives, commissioning him to represent Him on earth; in short, as one who had been enthroned as vice-God, and into whose hands had been delivered all the kings and kingdoms of earth.

A singular, and apparently contradictory account is given of the beast—“the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.” How was it possible that both statements could be true—— that the beast had ceased to exist, and yet was in existence, i.e., when it was the object of wonder to all who dwelt on the earth? What we have already said will enable us to understand this. The beast was in the five idolatrous empires or heads which had already fallen. The beast is not, for its sixth head, the Roman, had followed its predecessors, and gone out of existence during the Gothic irruption. The beast is, that is, when the whole world wondered after it, and bowed down in worship before it, because it had returned from the abyss, and was living again in its last head, the Papal. It was the same infernal idolatrous beast throughout; but in respect of the successive eras at which its heads flourished, it was “the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.” “He is the eighth, and is of the seventh, and goeth into perdition.” This discloses its end. The eighth head will have no successor. The decem—regal form, such as is seen in modern Papal Europe, will be the last organization which Idolatry will be suffered to assume. When Rome imperial fell, Rome Papal rose. But this will not occur over again. The beast will have no second resurrection. In its form of ten kingdoms, under its chief the Pope, it will fill up its cup, and go to its own place. It “goeth into perdition”—final perdition; for never will it be seen coming up again from the abyss which will then open to receive it.

“And ten horns.” This is explained in chapter 17:12. “And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings”— not individual kings, but lines of rulers or kingdoms— “which have received no kingdom as yet; “—an intimation that their appearance was still future. The empire had to be broken in pieces by the shock of the barbarous nations, and out of what had been one undivided monarchy, ten distinct and independent kingdoms were to arise. It is well known that such was the origin of the ten Roman kingdoms of Europe. Let us trace the boundary line of the western empire. The wall of Adrian, dividing Scotland from England, forms the boundary on the north. This line we prolong across the German Ocean to the Rhine. We ascend that river to Baden-Baden; thence strike eastward to the source of the Danube, which we descend to Belgrade, and thence in a south-western direction, across the Adriatic and Mediterranean, to the great desert of Africa. This line will include the Roman empire of the west ; and on this platform were the ten kingdoms to arise. We should expect that these ten kingdoms would be formed not long after the Gothic invasion, for the beast emerged from the flood, with all the ten horns already apparent.

We are disposed to take the era A.D. 532. At that epoch we find the following ten kingdoms within the limits we have traced:—the Anglo-Saxons; the Franks of central, the Allaman-Franks of eastern, and the Burgundic-Franks of south-eastern France; the Visigoths; the Suevi ; the Vandals; the Ostrogoths in Italy; the Bavarians; and the Lombards. Great changes have occurred at various periods in Europe. Some of its states have fallen, and others have arisen; but from the Gothic invasion to the present era, ten has been the prevailing number of its kingdoms.

Of these ten kings or kingdoms it was said, that they “receive power as kings one hour with the beast.” The (Greek word), one hour, indicates not the duration of their power, but the time when they should receive it. Their formation as independent kingdoms, and the development of the beast, would synchronize; both should receive their power at one and the same time.

It was at the end of the fifth century, or rather the beginning of the sixth, that the formation of the ten Gothic kingdoms was completed; and by this time the Pope, supported by the decrees of councils and the acquiescence of kings, had asserted his character of vicar of Christ and vicegerent of God, and had begun to exhibit the antichristian characteristics of blasphemy against God, and rage against His saints.

No sooner had the beast of the sea appeared, than “the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.” The dragon recognized the beast newly arisen as the lineal descendant of Pagan Rome, and, as such, hastened to serve him heir to all the power, wealth, and dominion of that empire. By the seat of the dragon is denoted the countries over which Rome had swayed the sceptre, which included the richest lands and the wealthiest cities of the western world.

Of all these, once the possession of Pagan Rome, Papal Rome has long been mistress. She occupies the same seat as the dragon of old. “On his heads were names of blasphemy.” All the great empires, from Egypt downwards, were idolatrous. Blasphemy was written on every one of them. Every form of government which has arisen at Rome has assumed titles and arrogated powers of a blasphemous character.

The chief magistrate of the Romans from the first was the high priest—Pontifex Maximus—and the supreme authority in matters ecclesiastical. To come down to the emperors, some of them were addressed as the “august” and the “eternal one.” Most of them were worshipped as God after death, and some of them were so even before it. But the last head— the Papacy—has far surpassed its predecessors. There is nothing in the history of the universe that equals the blasphemous titles and powers which the Popes have assumed. They have openly laid claim to be regarded as vicar of Christ, the vicegerent of the Creator, and governor of the world; and on that claim is built up the tremendous and monstrous fabric, partly civil and partly ecclesiastical, that constitutes the Papacy.

“And all the world wondered after the beast.” This was partly owing to what is stated before, namely, that “his deadly wound was healed.” The event was so marvelous, that it drew the admiration of all that dwelt upon the earth to the beast that was the subject of it. When it was pierced by the sword of the Goths, men thought there was now an end of that terrible kingdom, which had shed so much blood and devoured so much flesh; but when they saw it revive in its ten horns or kingdoms—occupying the same territory, governed by the same laws, as its predecessor, and finding a new bond of union in the Papacy—it appeared to them as if Rome had returned from her grave —so completely had the wound been healed. This appeared little less than a miracle in the eyes of a blinded world, which accordingly fell down before the beast. They had worshiped the dragon—given unbounded admiration and implicit obedience to every edict of Pagan Rome, whether it regarded things civil or things spiritual—it had dictated supremely both law and religion. And when they saw the beast sitting on the same throne, and wielding the same power, as the dragon, they could render nothing less to the beast than they had given aforetime to the dragon.

“And they worshipped the dragon, which gave power unto the beast; and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” The religion of Papal Rome was but a revival of that of Pagan Rome, under different names; and it became an easy matter to those who dwelt upon the earth to transfer their worship from the one to the other. They who had worshipped demons could do so by whatever name they were called, whether the classic one of Venus, or the Christian one of Mary.

“And there was given unto him a mouth, speaking great things and blasphemies.” When the beast found himself on the throne of the dragon, and the world prostrate before him, his heart was lifted up within him, like that of the king of Babylon of old. He imagined himself to be some great one—to be God, and the pride of his heart found vent in the dreadfully blasphemous words of his mouth.“ He opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme His name, and His tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.” No names have been so fearfully blasphemous as those which the Pope has assumed. He has claimed dominion over the whole world; and, as if this were not enough, he has extended it into the other. Whom he will he can consign to hell, and whom he will he can save from it. The gates of paradise he can lock and unlock. He has issued his order to angels, straitly charging them to do his bidding. “We command the angels of paradise to introduce that soul into heaven,” said Clement the Sixth, of such as might die on their pilgrimage to Rome in the year of Jubilee. He has exercised authority over devils, compelling them to release such as he wished to deliver from flames. Gregory the Great rescued thus the soul of the Pagan emperor Trajan.

To speak of his setting his throne above that of kings is nothing remarkable: he has exalted it above that of angels and archangels—he has exalted it above God Himself; he has annulled Divine ordinances, and claimed a power to abrogate the moral law, thus challenging an authority superior to that from which the law emanated; he has sat in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. “To the Romish Church,” writes Clement the Second, “every knee must bow of things on earth, and that at his pleasure even the door of heaven is opened and shut.” We find Cardinal Domiani, writing to Victor the Second, introducing Christ as speaking—“ I have appointed thee to be as the father of emperors; I have delivered into thy hands the keys of the whole Church universal, and placed thee my vicar over her: yea, by the removal of a king” (the Emperor Henry the Third had just died), “have granted thee the rights of the whole Roman empire now vacant.” We find Innocent the Third calling himself the “Lieutenant of Him who hath written upon His vesture and on His thigh, the King of kings and Lord of lords,” and telling King Richard that “he held the place of God upon the earth; and, without distinction of persons, he would punish the men and the nations that presumed to oppose his commands.”

We find Clement the Seventh affirming, in a letter to King Charles the Sixth, that “as there is but one God in the heavens, so there cannot nor ought to be of right but one God on earth.” Politianus thus addresses Alexander the Sixth: “We rejoice to see you raised above all human things, and exalted even to Divinity itself, seeing there is nothing, except God, which is not put under you.” Under the pontifical arms, at the coronation of the Pope we have just named, was inscribed this distich—

But, not to multiply proofs, we close with the very extraordinary titles assumed by Martin the Fifth, in the instructions given to a nuncio sent to Constantinople:—“The most holy and most blessed, who is invested with heavenly power, who is lord on earth, the successor of Peter, the Christ or anointed of the Lord, the lord of the universe, the father of kings, the light of the world, the sovereign pontiff, Pope Martin.” Nor are we to suppose that this was a mere empty boast, or unallowed claim, like the high-sounding titles which eastern despots have sometimes assumed. It was ratified by councils, submitted to by kings, and exercised, in the very spirit in which it was arrogated, over the persons, consciences, and lives of all men.

There is not a fact in history better established than the literal fulfillment of what is here foretold:—“These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.” “And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

And thus, too, was Paul’s prophecy in his epistle to the Thessalonians fulfilled:——“ Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped, so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.”

“And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them.” We have already spoken of this war under the head of the witnesses, and our space does not permit us to re-open the subject. There is not one of the ten horns which has not at one period or another of its history persecuted the saints; nor is there a spot in Europe, within the limits we have formerly traced, which has not been sprinkled with their blood. We need only name the murderous crusades carried on for ages against the Waldenses and Albigenses;—the slaughter of the Piedmontese, whose bones whitened the Alps; the martyrs of Provence, whose blood tinged so oft the blue waters of the Rhone; the massacre of St. Bartholomew, in August 1572, which continued three days, and in which, in Paris alone, thirty thousand Protestants, and throughout the departments of France forty thousand more, perished.

The news of this terrible slaughter was received at Rome with the ringing of bells and the firing of cannon, while the medal of Gregory commemorates it to this day as a deed of illustrious virtue;——the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1685, under Louis the Fourteenth, when, as has been computed, many thousand Protestant churches were razed, a million of citizens were driven into banishment, an hundred thousand were murdered, while those whom the sword spared were consigned to the galleys, and many of the youth of both sexes were transported as slaves to the West Indies;—the bloody wars of Alva in the Low Countries, who boasted that in the course of a few years thirty-six thousand had died by the common executioner;——the suppression of the Reformation in Spain and Italy by the terrors of the axe, the fagot, and the horrors of the Inquisition;—besides the countless thousands who perished at other times, and in other parts of Europe, of whom no record has been kept, and whose names shall never be known till the books are opened.

Engraven on the page of history stands the record of her crimes. Rome shall perish, but this record is eternal. To the end of time not a line of its crimson writing shall be effaced; and so long as it continues to be read, it will excite the mingled horror and indignation of mankind.

But the most marvelous thing in the prophecy is, that the beast should overcome in the war, i.e., in the first instance, for in the final issue the Lamb shall overcome. Let us here mark the adorable sovereignty of God. This power to make war, and to overcome in the war, was given unto the beast. “Thou couldest have no power at all against me,” said Christ, when standing before Pilate to be judged, “had it not been given thee from above.” The beast, in the plenitude of his pride and power, thought that he might do according to his will, without having respect to any God or man, saying, no doubt, with the king of old, Who is he that can deliver out of mine hand? The beast was mistaken herein: he could not have spilt a drop of the Church’s blood, nor have touched a hair of her head, had he not received power from above.

But why did God permit His fold so long to be a field of slaughter? Why did the Church’s blood continue to flow, and her groans to ascend to heaven, while He stood by as one who either would not or could not deliver? We know not. But this we know, that it was God who did it, and that He had wise purposes for doing it, and that He will yet bring good out of it all, and glorify both Himself and the Church by the course of suffering through which He has led her.

Continued in Chapter XVI. The Two-Horned Beast Of The Earth

All chapters of The Seventh Vial – By J.A. Wylie

Continued from XIII. Death Of The Witnesses

THE witnesses were slain; and how were their bodies disposed of? Doubtless by being committed to the grave— the quiet grave. When one dies, both friends and foes unite in consigning him to the tomb—his friends to show respect to his memory, and his enemies not to incur the reproach of a revolting inhumanity. When John was beheaded, his disciples came and took up the body and buried it. The tyrant who put him to death did not think of carrying his resentment so far as to forbid the rites of sepulture (burial) to his remains. But it was not to be with the witnesses as with other dead. They had no friends who might perform this office to their remains; and their enemy, whose rage and Vengeance extended beyond death, would not suffer their dead bodies to be put into graves. Therefore, where they had fallen, there they lay. “And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city.”

Our first inquiry regards the place where the dead bodies of the witnesses were to be exposed—“the street of the great city.” As regards the “ great city,” there is no difficulty.The symbol is explained in chapter 17, where it is said to be that “great city that reigneth over the kings of the earth.” (Rev. 17:18) There is only one city to which this can apply, even Rome; not the literal city, but that system of polity, ecclesiastical and civil, of which Rome was the center, and which extended over, and was supreme in, all the ten kingdoms of Europe. Governed by the Papal code, Europe formed but one corporation or symbolic city.

To make the city indicated still more clear, its designation is given, “which, spiritually, is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.” It will not be supposed that the literal Sodom is here meant, because she had been turned to ashes many ages before the visions of Patmos. That it is neither the literal Sodom nor the literal Egypt that is here intended, is plain from the words, which, spiritually, is called Sodom and Egypt.” The city, on the street of which the dead bodies of the witnesses were to lie, was to exhibit the same moral and spiritual character as Sodom and Egypt. The resemblance would be as close as if these long-perished kingdoms had risen from their graves. She is called Sodom, to denote her impurity and lewdness. This was the characteristic vice of that city on which God rained fire and brimstone.

But we question whether the most revolting abominations of Sodom equaled those gigantic and dreadful pollutions of which sober history affirms the palaces of the popes and cardinals, and the religious houses throughout Europe, were the scene. This “great city” is called Egypt, to denote her idolatry and cruelty. Egypt was the land of false gods; and she was, moreover, the first and cruelest persecutor. The resemblance holds good, too, in that Rome was a land of superstition, a worshiper of demons; and, like Egypt, held the Church in captivity; and, in seeking to destroy it, shed more righteous blood than ever was shed on the earth by any other power. Others have been sated—she was drunk with blood; and that drunkenness brought with it a raging thirst for more. Both cities have inherited an immortality of shame—Sodom from her lewdness, and Egypt from her superstition and cruelty. Rome has become the heir of both: she unites in her own person the impurity of the one, the cruelty of the other.

It is added, as farther descriptive of this city, “where also our Lord was crucified”—that is, Jerusalem; Jerusalem being used, not literally, but symbolically. “Where our Lord was crucified,” not in His own person. Since the day that He ascended from the Mount of Olives, and entered within the gates of heaven, no suffering has come near His blessed person. But there are other ways in which Christ may be crucified. The apostle tells us that they who apostatize from the faith crucify the Son of God afresh. Rome is the grand apostasy. Christ, in His truth, she has crucified; and Christ in His members she has crucified. His own blessed body was beyond her rage. She could neither imprison, nor torture, nor crucify it. His members were fully in her power; and there are no torments which racks, and fires, and steel can inflict, to which she did not subject them. “Inasmuch,” said He from Heaven, as another and another of His witnesses was slain —“inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these, ye did it unto Me.”

Here, then, are the three types of the city—Sodom, Egypt, Jerusalem. Here are portrayed, by a single stroke, her three leading characteristics—impurity, idolatry combined with persecuting cruelty, and infidelity. And as we are to view these three as types of the manner of her life, so, as we have already said, we are to view them as types of the manner of her end—utter rejection, like Jerusalem—— the sword, like Egypt, and burning, like Sodom. All three are needed to constitute the type of her unequaled and inconceivable doom.

The “great city,” we have said, is wide Europe in its Papal character. But what locality is symbolized by the “street” of the great city? The street, (Greek word), literally the broad place, has reference plainly to the forum of ancient cities. This was the place where public assemblies were held, where laws were proclaimed, justice administered, and merchandise set forth. To guide ourselves to the street on which the sad spectacle of the dead bodies of the witnesses should be seen, we have only to inquire in what city of Europe was it where the Papal gatherings took place, where the Papal laws were proclaimed, where Papal causes were adjudged and sentence pronounced, and where the Papal merchandise was set forth? The answer is, Rome. This was the broad place, or forum, of the great city. And here it was that the death of the witnesses was proclaimed with all formality and pomp. From here Rome sent forth the tidings to all Europe, that the object for which she had so long labored she had at last attained, in the total suppression of all public testimony against her errors. Thus she made a public spectacle of the witnesses, lying slain and dead upon her street, and inviting the nations, as it were, to come and gaze upon their remains.

“And they of the people, and kindreds, and tongues, and nations, shall see their dead bodies three days and a half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves.” – Revelation 11:9

To deny burial to one is one of the greatest indignities that can be done him. It was in ancient times employed to express the extreme of contempt. Nothing more may be here meant than the scorn which Rome ever expressed for heretics, and the ways innumerable which she took to inflict the last humiliation upon their persons, and to heap the lowest disgrace on their cause. But perhaps this may not be thought precise enough. Then we must first inquire what we are to understand by their corpses or dead bodies.

Life and organization are connected. The moment life departs, the organization is lost, and the body is reduced to its component elements. The witnesses were organized societies, and the slaying or silencing of them lay in their suppression as Churches. After that, though a few of the individual members which had composed these Churches existed, they had lost their organization—the principle of social life; they were the mere elements of what had been the living witnesses—they were their corpses. The same day in which it was proclaimed that there were no longer any opposers to the Papal rule and religion, the Council issued an edict cutting of all heretics, of whatever kind, and of whatever nation, from the Church, and decreeing against them the usual punishments. Seeing that, on the avowal of Rome herself, there was no longer any organized Church anywhere opposing her authority, the edict could have respect only to individual dissidents which might and did exist, though concealed, in some places —the corpses of the witnesses. These by her edict she cast out of the Church, and adjudged to contempt and punishment.

By her famous proclamation, “Jam nemo reclamat, nullus obsistit,” she affirmed that the witnesses were slain; by the edict that followed, she proclaimed that their remains were still upon the earth. That edict, in truth, served the same end to these remains of the witnesses, which the refusal of burial does to a dead body—it kept them in the sight of men. Now indeed there was rejoicing. The two witnesses were slain, and every square and street of the great city rang with shouts of triumph over their death.

“And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts to one another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.” – Revelation 11:10

What! So powerful and proud, and yet so afflicted by the sight of these two witnesses! How little was Rome to be envied, even when at the height of her glory! What tormentings burned beneath her purple, and scarlet, and fine linen! Had she not unbounded riches and dominion? Did not the whole world worship before her? And yet all this availed her nothing, so long as these two witnesses in sackcloth refused, like Mordecai at the palace—gate of old, to do obeisance. “These two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.” They condemned Rome as the Antichrist; and though one would have thought that that “still small voice ” would have been unheard amid the loud roar of a world’s homage, it reached her ear; and there was in it that which roused her indignation and at the same time shook her courage. Conscience—not utterly extinct—told her that the testimony of the witnesses was just, and that the words spoken by them on earth were ratified in heaven. But now the witnesses were silent; and the prediction before us—“rejoicing, and making merry, and sending gifts one to another”—whose terms are borrowed from the customs of ancient festive occasions, is finely and vividly descriptive of the unbounded exultation and congratulation which reigned throughout the Roman world, now that all heresy was suppressed, and the voice which, like a barbed arrow, pierced the folds of her armour and rankled in her heart, was silenced for ever. But since man was placed upon the earth, the triumphing of the wicked is short.

Accordingly, the next event in the Apocalyptic scene is the RESURRECTION of the slain witnesses.

“And after three days and a half, the spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them.” – Revelation 11:11

Three days did Christ lie in the grave, and then He returned from it, to the terror of His enemies. In this He was the prototype of His witnesses. Their enemies imagined, doubtless, that, being dead, they had now done with them; but at the very height of the triumphing of their foes the witnesses suddenly arose— spectacle appalling to those who had slain them!

The resurrection must be of the same kind with the death. The death was symbolic; so also must be the resurrection. It was the truth that was suppressed; it was the truth that again burst forth. The witnesses did not arise in their persons, but in their cause. The confessors that had been put to death in former ages, and whose martyred blood and ashes had been sown over the various countries of Europe, still continued in their graves; their spirits returned not from their glory, to animate their former bodies, and contend over again on the stage on which they had suffered and died; but a new generation of men, animated by the spirit of the ancient martyrs, and testifying in behalf of the same cause, arose; Churches were organised; and a public testimony was again borne against the abominations of Popery—fuller and bolder than ever. This was the resurrection.

The spirit that quickened them is termed the spirit of life from God—the knowledge of the truth conveyed by the Holy Spirit. It is said the Spirit entered into them. The original term denotes not only entrance, or taking possession, but entrance so as to dwell in them. The witnesses were not again to be slain; the truth was not again to be totally suppressed, as before. They stood upon their feet; terms which indicate the courage with which they were filled. They stood boldly up, as men who knew that God had raised them from the dead, and that their enemies had no power to kill them a second time.

But in what event in the history of the Church are we to seek for the fulfillment of this symbolic resurrection? If we were right in applying the death of the witnesses to the suppression of all public testimony in behalf of truth at the beginning of the sixteenth century, their resurrection can refer only to that remarkable Revival which immediately followed this event, namely—the Reformation. Indeed, in the past history of the Church, there is not another event to which we can apply it.

The exposition which Mr. Elliot has given of this prediction is so precise, striking, and satisfactory, that it is enough on this subject to quote it.

“But does the chronology suit?” asks Mr. Elliot. “It was predicted that for three-and-a-half days the witnesses were to be looked on as dead; in other words, that there was to be the interval of three-and-a-half years between the first recognition of their extinction by the assembled deputies from the states of Christendom, and their resuscitation. Was this the interval between that memorable day of the ninth session of the Lateran Council, on which the orator pronounced his paean (fervent expression of joy or praise) of triumph over the extinction of heretics and schismatics, and the first and yet more memorable act of protestation by Luther?

Let us calculate. The day of the ninth session was, as we have seen, May 5, 1514; the day of Luther’s posting up his theses at Wittenberg (the well-known epoch of the Reformation), October 31, 1517. Now, from May 5, 1514, to May 5, 1517, are three years; and from May 5, 1517, to October 31 of the same year 1517, the reckoning in days is as follows:—

May 5-31 …….27
June………….30
July ………….31
August ………31
September ….30
October ……..31

In all, one hundred and eighty, or half three hundred and sixty days; that is, just half-a—year. So that the whole interval is precisely, to a day, three-and-a-half years—precisely, to a day, the period predicted in the Apocalyptic prophecy! Oh, wonderful prophecy! is the exclamation that again forces itself on my mind. Oh the depth of the riches of the wisdom and the foreknowledge of God!”

That the symbol of the rising from the dead was fulfilled in the fact that, although the martyrs continued in their graves, the cause for which they had suffered arose, we may appeal to the testimony of both friends and foes. “And I,” said John Huss, speaking of the gospel-preachers that should appear after he had suffered at the stake—“ and I, awakening as it were from the dead, and rising from the grave, shall rejoice with exceeding great joy.” Again, in 1523, after the Reformation had broken out, we find Pope Hadrian saying, in a missive addressed to the Diet at Nuremberg—“The heretics Huss and Jerome are now alive again in the person of Martin Luther.” The consternation and dismay which fell upon all the adherents of the Papacy when Luther arose, and the Reformation under him began to gain ground, is a fact too well known to every reader of the history of the period, to need any particular illustration here.

This symbolization is the picture of a transformed Church. A marvelous change has she undergone—we cannot say in the tomb—for her enemies would not permit her the quiet of the grave, but in the state of the dead. She was sown in weakness, she is raised in power. “The Spirit of Life,” it is said—not life only, but “the spirit of life from God entered into her.” She is now quickened with an intenser vitality. Aforetime she had the “sentence of death in herself,” and, as if against the day of her burial, she wore a robe of sackcloth; but now, risen from the dead, she wears the sackcloth no longer. She feels in her veins the throbbings of immortality, she knows herself invulnerable, she stands upon her feet, and bids defiance to her unnumbered foes. So stood Luther before the Diet of Worms. He felt that all the power of the empire could not crush him. So, too, stood the Reformers before the Diet of Spiers. What a moral grandeur belongs to these scenes! What a fulfillment of the prophecy! And with what rage and terror did these appearances fill their enemies! Prophecy has foretold that they would be witnesses for (testes pro) the truth,- and it is sufficiently striking that this is the very name by which they have become known in history— Protestants.

“And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud.” What was done in Christ the Head is here represented as done over again in the Body mystical.

This symbolizes some notable advance in the position of the Reformation Church. She was no longer to dwell upon the earth, hidden from the sight of men, unfelt by the world, and subject to the power of her enemies. She would be taken up into a higher region, so to speak, whence she would look down upon her foes, and where she would enjoy a security unknown to her till then, and wield an influence on the world she had never aforetime been able to put forth.

Look at the Church before and after the Reformation, and what a contrast do we see! From the sixth to the sixteenth century her members are truly a “little flock.” They are entirely without social position, and without political privileges. But, at the opening of the sixteenth century, what an accession of members, influence, and moral power! Suddenly she grows into an army. How numerous her champions! Men of prodigious intellect, of profound erudition, and of the most dazzling eloquence, stand up to plead her cause. But the most wonderful characteristic of the Reformation Church is her deep, and clear, and spiritual insight into truth. The Bible opens, and Revelation now discloses its full glory. A new day has broke upon the Church, and the primitive era is remembered in comparison but as the morning twilight. She dwells no longer amid the clouds of earth; she has mounted into the light of heaven, and, by her joint confession of truth—the harmony of the “Reformed Confessions” ——she sheds upon the world a glorious noonday.

Moreover, we now find her wielding a host of subsidiary agencies for the defense and diffusion of the truth, not one of which had she possessed in previous ages. The revival of learning enables her to translate the Bible; and the invention of the art of printing enables her to circulate it. The world is opening around her—new continents and islands are being discovered—and the facilities of intercourse are daily multiplying. Liberty is advancing; states and princes profer (put forth) their protection; and although she still has enemies—nay, against her is still arrayed the great military powers of Europe—yet no force is able to put her down. The Popish nations fight against her, but they cannot destroy her. The Reformation Church is the true phoenix. She rises from her ashes, instinct with immortal youth, clad in the panoply of divine strength, and radiant with celestial beauty.

The resurrection of the witnesses, like that of their Lord, was accompanied by an earthquake. The earthquake was connected with and sprung out of the resurrection, and may therefore be viewed as symbolizing a revolution mainly of a moral or religious character. In the earthquake, “the tenth part of the city fell.” To explain this, we have only to bear in mind that the “city” was constituted of the ten Roman kingdoms of Europe, confederated under the Papacy. Which of these ten kingdoms was it that fell at the Reformation, as a Popish country? The answer is, Britain. The fall of this tenth part (the tithe) of this city was the first-fruits, as it were, of that great harvest of destruction awaiting the Papacy.

This wonderful chapter is closed with an intimation of the final doom of the Papacy. That event was to follow at the distance of some centuries from the Reformation: nevertheless it is given here by anticipation, accompanied with a brief account of the attendant circumstances. It is the manner of the Apocalypse, as it is that of ordinary history, to glance at the grand close, and to give a succinct view of what is afterwards to be described in detail. The great progression that here takes place in point of time is sufficiently marked by the announcement, “The second woe is past.” This tells us that we have passed from the beginning of the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century; for not till then, as we shall afterwards show, was the second woe past, and Christendom delivered from the terror of the Turkish arms.

“And, behold, the third woe cometh quickly.” A short interval indeed was to separate the second and the third woes. There were not fewer than five hundred years between the first and the second woes; but the second was to be followed by the third at a much shorter distance. Moreover, it would come swiftly and stealthily; it would take the world—which would be looking for no such event—by surprise; and it would do its work quickly after it had come. A series of fearful and exterminating judgments, following each other with astounding rapidity, should fall on Rome, and accomplish her overthrow.

“And the seventh angel sounded.” The end comes at last. The domination of the Gentiles and the sackcloth of the witnesses are both alike terminated. Thrice welcome sound!——welcome, though but the herald, in the first instance, of the lightnings, voices, thunders, and earthquake, of civil convulsion. To mystic Babylon this was a terrific peal. It was her death-knell—her trump of doom; but to the Church it was a trumpet of jubilee. It proclaimed the fall of her prison-house, the expiry of her bondage; and the coming of her King to set up His throne, and, with the Church seated by His side, to reign over a ransomed earth. No sooner does this trumpet sound, than great voices are heard in heaven, announcing the reduction of the world under the reign of God.

“The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ; and He shall reign for ever and ever. And the four-and-twenty elders which sat before God on their seats fell upon their faces, and worshipped God, saying, We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come, because Thou hast taken to thee Thy great power and hast reigned.” – Revelation 11:15-17

Continued in Chapter XV. The Ten-Horned And Seven-Headed Beast Of The Sea

All chapters of The Seventh Vial – By J.A. Wylie

Continued from Chapter XII. War With The Witnesses

“THY way is in the sea, and Thy path in the great waters, and Thy footsteps are not known.” – Psalms 77:19 Such was the exclamation of the Psalmist, as he recalled the past events which had befallen the Church, and thought how much of mystery her history had wrapped up in it. A retrospect of Divine Providence at this day would furnish abundant cause to repeat the exclamation.

One would have thought that after Christ had come, and, by His death, put an end to the comparatively dark dispensation of Moses, and introduced the more glorious and spiritual economy of the gospel—that after Christianity had been published to many of the nations, and established in many of the countries of the Gentile world, it would incur no risk of ever being suppressed. We would have expected that now a final end would be put to all the trials and calamities of the Church —that her path henceforward would be one of unbroken prosperity and ever-enlarging triumph-that her light would wax brighter and yet brighter, till it shone in the full splendor of the Millennium, ushering in that day, long foretold and long ardently expected, when earth, transformed into a majestic temple, shall resound with the songs of ransomed nations.

This is what the Old Testament saints doubtless expected. They looked forward to the coming of the Messiah as the end of the Church’s troubles, and the introduction of an era in which the truth should have no opposition to encounter, and its friends no suffering to endure. This was what the primitive Christians also expected. When the Word of God grew mightily and prevailed—when the Church, which had been confined hitherto to the land of Judea, went forth among the Gentiles, and the desolate parts of the earth were inhabited —little did they anticipate that her period of greatest darkness was yet to come, and that her severest trials were yet awaiting her—that all she had suffered in Egypt, all she had suffered in Babylon, was as nothing, compared with those more dreadful sufferings which she had yet to endure at the hands of an enemy to arise within herself.

Even we, when we look back, and think of the little progress the gospel has made, and that of the countries once enlightened, some are plunged again into darkness, while others are Christian only in name—wonder why God has allowed so great obstacles to impede the progress of the gospel, and not to impede it merely, but actually to roll it back, and to leave those countries once covered with its fertilising waters to be scorched and burned up by the fiery rays of idolatry. We feel persuaded that God has some special and great end in view in this arrangement—that the early triumph of the gospel would, in some way that we know not of, have marred its ultimate and final destiny—and that the long delay of its success was, some way or other, connected with the happiness of future ages. We feel assured that God has some end of this kind in view in this arrangement, which shall be clearly understood by the men of future ages, and which we ourselves, in other stages of our being, shall know and admire; but, meanwhile, it is a mystery unfathomable to us.

It yields, however, no small satisfaction to know that all has happened according to the Divine arrangement. If we compare the events of the past eighteen centuries with the prophecy before us, we find that there is an exact accordance between the two. In the Apocalypse, John was warned, and we through him, that even after the truth had been widely spread, and the Church planted in all the more important countries of the world, she would be brought into a more depressed condition than she had ever formerly been in, that truth would be all but totally suppressed, that for twelve hundred and sixty years the whole world would apostatize, that two witnesses only would appear in behalf of Christ, and that these should have to maintain a terrible warfare, waged against them by the beast, the issue of which would be truly disastrous, that the Church, like her Head, must die, and, to reach her glory, pass through the grave.

We have already sketched the outline of the war with the witnesses, we have traced its beginning to the edicts of councils, and have shown that the form in which it first displayed itself was that of the anathemas of Popes—those thunders from the seven hills which have ever betokened woe to the world—that scarcely had these anathemas been launched, till hosts began to muster, and immense armies to roll towards the Alps, amid the deep valleys and inaccessible cliffs of which the witnesses dwelt. When it was seen that the sword was inefficient to exterminate them, the Inquisition was called into existence. To the fire and sword of war, the racks and wheels of the Holy Office were now added. Undismayed by the hosts that gathered round their hills, and bidding defiance to the terrors with which they were menaced, the witnesses still maintained their testimony. The world was in arms against them, but greater was He who was in them than he who was in the world.

Their numbers were thinned, their dwellings were laid in ashes, their valleys were stained with the blood of their dear brethren and their beloved relatives, they were compelled to abandon the low plains, and betake themselves to the high valleys, and there, amid rocks and eternal ice—“the place prepared of God ”—they maintained, with noble constancy, from age to age, their testimony against the corruptions and idolatries of Rome. Throughout the whole of the fourteenth, and fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, was the war carried on. At last it became apparent that the end approached; not because the fury and rage of the Church’s enemies had abated, but because her members had been well nigh all cut off. This happened towards the end of the fifteenth century. There is something so truly pathetic and mournful—something so much in the spirit of the Apocalyptic prediction itself—in Fleming’s account of this transaction, that we shall here give it at length, though doubtless already familiar to many of our readers:—

“Now, the slaying of these witnesses began in the year 1416, when John Huss, and afterwards Jerome of Prague, were burnt, but came not to its height until the Bohemian Calixtines complied with the Council of Basil, 1434; after which the faithful Taborites were totally ruined, as well as their brethren in Piedmont, France, &c., which happened about the year 1492. For they, being destroyed, the Calixtines were no better than the dead carcasses (as they are called, verse 8), or corpses of the former living witnesses, over which the Popish party did triumph; for they looked upon them as standing trophies of their victory, and therefore did not think fit to kill them further, or bury them out of their sight.

For it is said, verses 7, 8, that after they had finished their testimony, the beast did make war upon them, (Greek words),&c, he killed them, and their corpses also (for the additional words in our version, shall lie, are not in the original, and do but mar the sense), or their bodies in the street of the great city, i.e., in Bohemia, one street of the Papal dominions, or the great city Rome, in a large sense. For I find that towards the end of the fifteenth century, the witnesses were, in a manner, wholly extinct. For Comenius tells us, that about the year 1467, the Waldenses in Austria and Moravia had complied so far as to dissemble their religion, and turn to Popery in profession and outward compliance. The Taborites, in the meantime, upon their refusing to do so, were so destroyed, that it was much that seventy of them could get together, to consult about continuing their Church, and about finding out some qualified person to be their minister, for they had none left, 1467. And so low was the Church of Christ then, that when the hidden remains of the Taborites (who were called Speculani, from their lurking in dens and caves) sent out four men (as the same author relates in another book) to travel, one through Greece and the East, another to Russia and the North, a third to Thrace, Bulgaria, and the neighbouring places, and a fourth to Asia, Palestine, and Egypt, they did all, indeed, safely return to their brethren, but with this sorrowful news, that they found no Church of Christ that was pure, or free from the grossest errors, superstition, and idolatry. This was in the year 1497. And when they sent two of their number, two years afterwards—via, Luke Prague, and Thomas German—to go into Italy, France, and other places, to see if there were any of the old Waldenses left alive, they returned with the same melancholy news as the former had done, that they could neither find nor hear of any remaining; only they were informed of the martyrdom of Savanarolla (who suffered in the year 1498); and they were told of some few remains of the Piemontois, that were scattered and hid among the Alps, but nobody knew where.

Now, a few years after this, even the few remains of the Taborites were found out and persecuted, hardly any escaping; so that, A.D. 1510, six suffered together publicly; and the year following, that famous martyr, Andreas Paliwka, who, I think, was the last of that period, from whose death, in the end of the year 1511, or beginning of 1512, to the dawning of the Reformation by the first preaching of Carolastadius and Zuinglius (who appeared at least a year before Luther, as Hottinger and others tell us), there was only about three years and a half, which answers, as near as can be, to the three days and a half of the unburied state of the witnesses; so that the Spirit’s entering into the witnesses, verse II, began with the year 1516, if not the year before, though this appeared most remarkably when Luther opposed the Pope publicly in 1517.”

The two witnesses were not individuals, but organized societies—Churches. Their death, therefore, must needs be symbolic: not their death as individuals, but their extermination as organized societies—the suppression of that public testimony which these Churches had borne before Christendom.

Now, if we look back, we discover but one period in the history of Christendom to which the prediction can apply—the period we have indicated—the beginning of the sixteenth century, just before the Reformation. During that period, all public testimony of the witnesses against the Papacy was silenced in every part of Europe, and Rome appeared to be universally and completely triumphant. Fleming has told us in his own affecting language, with what wonder and dismay the few individuals who were left after the slaughters and massacres of three centuries, beheld the universal triumph of the Beast—with what terror they witnessed that total obscuration of the light which shrouded the earth when the gospel had ceased to be held forth by any constituted Church. He has told us that, as if only half-believing the tremendous fact, the survivors sent out four messengers to search throughout the earth, if haply they might discover somewhere a pure Church of Christ. The messengers returned, like the dove to Noah, but with no olive leaf plucked off—they returned to tell those who had sent them forth that the faith of the apostles existed nowhere—that error and superstition everywhere prevailed—that a second deluge had rolled over the world, and that its dark waters stood above the tops of the highest hills.

But the most satisfactory and convincing exposition of the fulfillment of this Apocalyptic prediction is that which Mr. Elliot has given. By a variety of historical references and documents he has shown, that from the 5th of May, 1514, to the 31st of October, 1517—three years and a half precisely—all public testimony against the Papacy was suppressed; and that at the latter date that testimony was suddenly and gloriously revived. The importance and interest of the subject will justify us in giving a series of extracts from that part of the “Horae Apocalyticae,” to show the eminent clearness of Mr. Elliot’s demonstration. “And thus,” says Mr. Elliot, “what was the aspect of things when the new (sixteenth) century opened? Let Milner’s be my first historic testimony. ‘The sixteenth century opened,’ he says, ‘with a prospect of all others the most gloomy in the eyes of every true Christian. Corruption both in doctrine and in practice had exceeded all bounds; and the general face of Europe, though Christ’s name was everywhere professed, presented nothing that was properly evangelical. The Roman Pontiffs were the uncontrolled patrons of impiety. The Waldenses were too feeble to molest the Popedom; and the Hussites, divided among themselves, and worn out by a long series of contentions, were at length reduced to silence.’

To the same purport is the testimony of Mosheim. ‘At the commencement of this century no danger seemed to threaten the Roman Pontiffs. The agitations previously excited by the Waldenses, Albigenses, Beghards, and more recently by the Bohemians, had been suppressed by counsel and the sword; and the wretched surviving remnant of Bohemian heretics were an object rather of contempt than fear.’

So, again, Mr. Cunninghame (whose historic sketch of the epoch I may the rather quote because his prophetic explanation is independent of it):—‘At the commencement of the sixteenth century Europe reposed in the deep sleep of spiritual death, under the iron yoke of the Papacy. That haughty power, like the Assyrian of the prophet, said, in the plenitude of his insolence, ‘My hand hath found as a nest the riches of the people; and as one gathereth eggs, I have gathered all the earth,- and there was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped.’

Once more, in language strikingly to the point, the writer of the article on the Reformation in the “Encyclopedia Britannica” thus describes the era:—‘Everything was quiet —every heretic exterminated—and the whole Christian world supinely acquiesced in the enormous absurdities inculcated by the Romish Church—when’—I only break off the quotation at his notice of just such a speedy, sudden, and extraordinary revival of the witnessing as we saw from the prophetic sequel ought to follow the event intended by the death of the witnesses.”

Having adverted to the proofs arising from the Apocalyptic description of the scene of the slaughter—“ The street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified ”—and of the public rejoicings on account of their death held by them, of the peoples, and kindreds, and tongues, and nations, to which we ourselves shall afterwards have occasion to refer, Mr. Elliot proceeds as follows:—

“In turning from prophecy to history—from the symbolic picture to the thing symbolized—it seems almost impossible to mistake the precise scene and occasion alluded to. It can surely be none other than that of the very Lateran Council held from 1512 to 1517, under the pontificates of Julius the Second and Leo the Tenth, just before the Reformation.”

Having stated that the object for which this Council was assembled was the suppression of all that might yet remain in Western Christendom of witnesses for Christ, and particularly the Bohemian Hussites—for both the Lollards of England and the Waldenses of Piedmont had been reduced to silence— Mr. Elliot resumes—

“In a Papal Bull, issued with approbation of the Council, in the very next or eighth session, held December 1513, a charge was issued, summoning the dissidents in question (the Bohemian witnesses), without fail to appear and plead before the Council at its next session, unless, indeed, they should have previously done so before a neighboring Papal legate—the object declared being their conviction and reduction within the bosom of the Catholic Church; and the time finally fixed for the said important session, May the 5th, in the spring ensuing.”

“Thus was the crisis come which was to try the faith of this bleeding remnant of witnesses, and exhibit its vitality or death. And would they then face their Lord’s enemies? Would they brave the terrors of death, and plead His cause before the lordly Legate, or the antichristian Council; like the Waldenses at Albi and at Pamiers, like Wickliffe and Cobham in England, like Huss and Jerome at the Constance Council, or Luther afterwards at Augsburg and at Worms? Alas! no. The day of the ninth session arrived. The Council met. But no report from the Cardinal Legate gave intimation either of the pleading, or even of any continued stirring, of the Bohemian heretics. No officer of the Council announced the arrival of deputies from them to plead before it. Nor, again, was there a whisper wafted to the Synod from any other State, or city, or town in Christendom, of a movement made, or a mouth opened, to promulgate or support the ancient heresies. Throughout the length and breadth of Christendom Christ’s witnessing servants were silenced; they appeared as dead.

The orator of the session ascended the pulpit, and, amid the applause of the assembled Council, uttered that memorable exclamation of triumph—an exclamation which, notwithstanding the long multiplied anti-heretical decrees of Popes and Councils—notwithstanding the yet more multiplied anti-heretical crusades and inquisitorial fires—was never, I believe, pronounced before, and certainly never since—

So did ‘they, from the people, and kindred, and tongues, and nations,’ assembled in the (Greek word), or Broad Place of the Great City, look on Christ’s witnesses as (from thenceforth) dead. Let the reader well mark the description, for it is a description from the life; and let him well mark the day, for it seems scarce possible that we can be mistaken in regarding it as the precise commencing date of the predicted three and a half years, during which Christ’s witnesses were to appear as dead corpses in the face of Christendom. It was May 5, 1514.”

So ended the long and furious war waged by the Beast against the witnesses. After existing for fifteen centuries, Christianity, as regarded the public profession of it, had become extinct. There were still a few individual saints upon the earth; but there was nowhere a Church. There were now none who dared open their mouth and proclaim Rome to be Antichrist. The event was astounding; and yet it was only what the prophecy had foretold:——“The beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and KILL THEM.”

We may lay it down as an axiom, that whatever has obtained a conspicuous place in the Apocalypse, holds a place of equal prominence in history. The prophecy of John was intended to disclose only the great facts of the Church; and in great events only are we to look for its fulfillment. Facts which are found lying concealed in the nooks of history, and which can be discovered only after great search, are obviously not those which the Holy Spirit had in His eye in this Revelation. The catholicity of the Apocalypse requires that its grand symbols be interpreted by events which affected not a part only, but the whole of the Church. The death and resurrection of the witnesses is a grand epoch of the Apocalypse; and we must look for its fulfillment in some grand epoch of the world. We are at once arrested by the dark ages, and the awful state of matters in which they terminated.

And though to determine the very day, as Elliot has done, may be to commit the fault of over-exactness, nevertheless we feel assured that the years that immediately preceded the Reformation is the era in question; and that in the fact, which rests on undoubted testimony, that till the voices of Zwingle and Luther broke the silence, there was no public testimony against Rome, and no public profession of the gospel, we behold beyond all peradventure the “death of the witnesses.”

This dark night was but the prelude to a glorious morning.

Continued in Chapter XIV. Resurrection Of The Witnesses

All chapters of The Seventh Vial – By J.A. Wylie

Continued from chapter XI. Avenging Power of the Witnesses

Note from the webmaster: In this article, the author J.A. Wylie seems to be saying that the power of Rome and the papacy has weakened to the point that there will be no more major future persecutions of the saints. I’m not too sure about that! In my opinion, what’s happening today is the sneakiest trick of Satan ever! The papacy only appears to be weak though it covertly has a stranglehold on the greatest superpower in the world, the USA. I wonder if J.A. Wylie would edit some of his statements if he knew that the papacy in the next century would be behind the slaughter of millions in two world wars, the slaughter of one million Orthodox Serbs by Catholic Croatia, the Vietnam War, the Rwandan genocide, and other conflicts in the 20th century? I wonder if he knew the covert power and influence of the Jesuits. Even in the 19th century, they were powerful enough to assassinate three US presidents who got in their way. Some of my friends still blame the Jews / Zionists / international bankers for all the problems in the world. They don’t see the hidden hand of the Vatican behind them.

“AND when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.” – Revelation 11:7 This introduces us to the solemn subject of the death of the witnesses.

Whether are we to place the slaying of the witnesses among the fulfilled or among the unfulfilled predictions of the Apocalypse? There are able expositors who regard this as by no means a past event, but one still to come. Of late, not a few in our country, whose attention has been turned to the Apocalyptic predictions, have not hesitated to avow it as their belief that the days of slaughter and extermination prefigured in the symbol before us are yet awaiting the Church. If such are correct in their interpretations, all organized societies professing the truth, all visible Churches throughout the earth, are fated yet to meet extinction. It remains that Europe shall yet be covered with the bodies of slain Protestants. Not yet has Rome reached the summit of her power, or committed the greatest of her crimes. She must lift her head higher still towards heaven, and smite the prostrate earth with more dreadful bolts than She ever yet hurled against it. She must efface (make indistinct) the memory of all her past wickedness, by deeds of more awful cruelty—by slaughters and massacres more inhuman and exterminating than any with which her past annals are stained. All this must come to pass, if the event we are considering falls to be classed among the unfulfilled prophecies of this book.

If such, indeed, be the times we are approaching, it behooves the Church to have warning, on good authority, that she may prepare herself; but if already the witnesses have been slain, the fear such a prospect is fitted to inspire, being unfounded, cannot be salutary, and ought to be dismissed.

The witnesses were to be slain by the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit. This is the first appearance in the Apocalypse of this great enemy of God, and murderer of His saints. We here simply assume, what we shall afterwards prove, that this beast is the ten confederate kingdoms of Europe— the same that grew out of the old Roman empire—the Papacy prompting their policy, and guiding their arms. This beast was afterwards seen by John, with seven heads and ten horns, rising out of the abyss or sea. It was on this ten-horned beast that the harlot rode; and we find the interpretation of the symbol in the historical fact that the wealth and power of the ten kingdoms were lent to aggrandize the Papacy, and that their swords were ever at her service when she needed them to slay the saints.

The time when the witnesses should be slain is marked by these words—“When they shall have finished their testimony,” (five Greek words) The verb “to finish,” is used in numerous passages in the New Testament in two distinct and different senses: First, to finish in point of time, so that the person ceases to act. Second, to finish in the way of perfecting the work on which he is employed: he has perfected, matured it; and, though he still repeats it, he ceases to perform it more completely or perfectly.

We may make our meaning clear by a few instances. We have an example of the first sense in Paul’s words to Timothy—“I have finished (Greek word) my course,” 2 Tim. iv. 7. Here the word clearly refers to time. We have an example of the second sense in James i. 15— “When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished (different Greek word), bringeth forth death.” The meaning here, “sin, when it is finished,” is plainly not that so soon as the sinner has ended his course of sinning, but so soon as his sin is perfected, completed, ripened, it bringeth forth death. These are examples of two different sets of passages in which this word occurs. In the one set the verb “to finish” has reference to the expiration of a certain period; in the other, it denotes the perfecting or completing of a certain act.

Mr. Elliot has selected an instance of the use of the word in the latter sense, from what is said of the Jewish priests, in Hebrews ix. 6, and which is much in point:—“‘They enter the Tabernacle continually (three Greek words), fulfilling their services, or priestly functions.’ The which, day by day, including several acts—the receiving incense, carrying it with altar-fire into the holy place and burning it, kindling or snuffing the lamps, &c.; after the whole of which was accomplished, on any one defined occasion, then it might be said that the priest had fulfilled his service, (four Greek words) yet not so as then to have finally ceased, (Greek word) or to have resigned thereon his priestly office. Just in the same way,” continues Mr. Elliot, “supposing a repetition, more or less frequent, of their (Greek word) testimony, required of the two witnesses of the Apocalypse—so soon as they might once have gone through the several component parts or acts of that testimony, so soon it might be said of them that they had fulfilled or completed their testimony, yet not so as to imply that their whole period of testifying was at an end, or that they thereupon ceased to be any longer Christ’s witnesses.”

Seeing the word is used in these two senses—that of finishing a course of acting, and that of completing an act by performing all its parts—the question remains, in which of these senses is it here used? Whether does it relate to the time of prophesying—the twelve hundred and sixty days—or to the witness-bearing (Greek word) abstractly viewed? The more natural reference, we admit, is to the time of prophesying; and were there no elements of judgment but such as are found in the verse before us, we would at once grant that this is the true reference. But other considerations, springing from other parts of the Apocalypse, render this supposition impossible, and constrain us to apply the words to the (word in Greek) testimony—that is, to regard the slaying of the witnesses, as foretold to happen, not at the end of the twelve hundred and sixty days, but as soon as they should have fulfilled their testimony, not in the sense of ceasing to bear it, but in the sense of making it complete and full as against the Papacy. This might be expected to happen whenever Popery should be fully developed, and the testimony of the Church pointed against all the leading errors in the Papal system, which would then be seen and proclaimed to be the Antichrist. Let us mention these considerations.

First, there is the place the prophecy of the slaying of the witnesses occupies in the Apocalypse. It comes in between the sounding of the sixth and the sounding of the seventh trumpet. This leads naturally to the conclusion that the slaughter of the witnesses would occur during this interval. The sixth trumpet was sounded at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the seventh a very considerable while after the Reformation; and it is an historical fact, that almost all the slaughters that have been committed on the adherents of the truth occurred during this interval.

What is the very next announcement after the resurrection of the witnesses? It is this: “The second woe is past, and, behold, the third woe cometh quickly.” This is a sufficiently plain declaration, one should think, that even after the witnesses were risen, the seventh trumpet was still to be sounded. Accordingly, on its being sounded, loud voices were heard proclaiming the advent, not of the triumphs of Antichrist, and the death of the witnesses, but of events of an exactly opposite character— even the time of God’s wrath, and of the dead—that is, of those who had been slain in former times, that they should be judged in order that God might give reward to His servants, the prophets, and to the saints, and destroy them who had destroyed the earth.

Second, immediately after the prophecy of the slaying of the witnesses, the approach of the third woe is announced. Now, on whom does the third woe fall? On Antichrist. It consists of the seven plagues by which he is to be brought to his grave. It is natural to conclude that the slaughter of the witnesses should take place when Antichrist was at his height, and not when he was reeling and staggering under the weight of his last plagues. It is natural to suppose that affairs would be at their lowest in the Church when they were at their highest in the kingdom of Antichrist; that the midnight of the one would correspond with the noonday of the other; and that the greatest effort of the beast would be made when his affairs were flourishing, and not when his power was broken, and his kingdom had begun to pass from him.

Third, while it is stated, at this part of the Apocalypse, that the issue of the war between the beast and the followers of the Lamb should be, that the beast would overcome them and kill them, it is stated at a subsequent part of the Apocalypse, that the issue of this same war would be, that the Lamb should overcome the armies of the beast. The only way of reconciling these apparently conflicting statements is by the natural supposition that the war was to have these different issues at different times; that the beast should for a time prevail, and seem to be carrying all before him; but the advantage would turn out to be only temporary, and, the war going on, final victory would remain with the Lamb. These two issues could not be contemporaneous; and there can be no doubt as to which of the two will be the final one. It is plain, therefore, that the slaughter of the witnesses cannot be deferred till the conclusion of the war, but must take place at a previous stage, sufficiently early to allow of a second battle being gained after the first has been lost. We presume it will not be maintained that the termination of the prophesying of the witnesses in sackcloth is earlier than the termination of the war; for what is meant by their warring with the beast, but just their testifying, in adverse circumstances, against the abominations of Popery?

Fourth, in the same hour in which the witnesses revived, there was a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell—Britain, one of the ten kingdoms. This renders the conclusion inevitable, that the resurrection of the witnesses is considerably prior to the fall of the Papacy; for observe what happens when the seventh vial is poured out. The great city is divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fall, which is a much more striking result than the overthrow of merely the tenth part of the city.

Fifth, it is not the manner of God to visit with punishment—at least with final judgment—before the sin has been completed.

In the Apocalypse the slaying of the witnesses is distinctly marked as the greatest of the crimes of Rome— the crowning point of her guilt. But they who hold that the judgments which have befallen the Papacy since the first French Revolution are the pouring out of the vials, and, at the same time, hold that the slaughter of the witnesses is yet to come, must believe that Rome has been overtaken by her last plagues before she has committed the greatest of her sins—that the cup of God’s wrath has been put into her hand before her own cup has been filled up. This is not very likely to be the case. We do not deny that isolated acts of persecution, perhaps of an aggravated character, Rome may yet be guilty of, and that some startling crime may immediately precede her fall, to establish before the world her connection with former enormities of the same kind. Some of these we have seen in recent events. In the persecutions in Madeira, in the massacre in Cochin-China, in the slaughters in Tahiti, and in the carnage of Barletta, Rome has been serving herself heir to the blood of former ages. In Tahiti, especially, she has been enacting, on a small scale, the same tragedies she was wont to enact on a greater—dethroning sovereigns, ravaging kingdoms with fire and sword, and compelling submission to her authority at the point of the bayonet. But that Rome should be able again to persecute on so large a scale as to suppress all public profession of the truth in every part of the earth—for nothing short of this can fulfil the symbol of the slaying of the witnesses—appears to be scarcely credible. And what increases the incredibility of such a supposition is, the absence of all allusion to such an event in the narrative of the vials, when, according to the theory we are contending against, this occurrence ought to take place. Instead of enjoying a respite, or of regaining its former supremacy, and something more, the Papacy is exhibited under the vials as sinking lower and lower, at each successive stroke, till it is finally and irretrievably ruined. Rome is seen in the grasp of an omnipotent power, which drags her along, and, without the respite of a moment’s pause, casts her headlong into the abyss.

In fine (in conclusion), the course of events during the past three hundred years, and the state and prospects of the world at this hour, strongly countenance the belief that the slaying of the witnesses is past.

From about the year 600 onward till the Reformation, the course of events ran steadily in favour of the Papacy; all the great social revolutions and political changes of the world helped it onward; even the most insignificant and trifling occurrences turned to its advantage—brought it new accessions of wealth and power. In every contest in which Rome engaged, whether with bishops or kings, she was victor; and by a course of almost unbroken prosperity of more than eight hundred years’ duration did Antichrist reach the summit of his grandeur. But at the Reformation how plainly did the tide in his affairs turn! Almost every event that has happened since has gone against him. We can trace the same uniformity in the operation of events now, as before, so far as they regard Antichrist; only then they wrought his advancement —now they are working his downfall. Partial revivals and successes Popery may yet have; but we are strongly persuaded that affairs will continue to run steadily in the same course, till they end in its total downfall.

Let us think, moreover, of the state and prospects of the world. Its state is now such as to render the supposition incredible, that Popery, especially after it has been so greatly weakened by the judgments of God, should raise itself to such universal power as to be able to suppress the truth in the same degree as before the Reformation. Though the gospel should be suppressed in Europe, there are wide realms around where it has been planted, and would continue to flourish—America, India, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific. If a period of darkness yet awaits the Church, such as that foretold in the symbol of the witnesses, the gospel must be suppressed in all these places, and all the labours of the past three hundred years, and all the efforts of missionaries, must come to nought.

But happily the world seems to be secured against a catastrophe so universal, not only by its own inherent improbability, but also by the terms of the Apocalyptic prophecy. Both the scene of slaughter and the agent of slaughter appear to be limited to Europe. It is the ten horned beast by whom the witnesses are slain, which every commentator admits to be the symbol of the ten Roman kingdoms of Europe. And it is on the streets of the great city that their dead bodies are exposed, which plainly identifies the scene of the tragedy with the European dominions of the Papacy, and restricts the time of its occurrence to the age when the true Church was confined within these limits.On all these grounds we unhesitatingly conclude that the slaughter of the witnesses is past.

But how stand the facts of history with our interpretation? They are in perfect accordance therewith. The Waldenses, the Vaudois, and other bodies of Christians, had borne an open testimony from the beginning against the various corruptions of Rome—her errors in doctrine, her idolatries in worship, and her immoralities of life,— but at last, in the end of the twelfth century—the same century in which, according to Gibbon, the meridian of Papal greatness was attained—they proclaimed her to be the Antichrist of Scripture—the harlot of the Apocalypse.

Thus and then did the witnesses fulfill their testimony. It was foretold that this should be the signal for the beast to make war with them; and so it was. Rome as a body now moved against them, which she had not done before. The war was commenced in the edicts of councils, which stigmatized the pure doctrines drawn from the Bible as heresy, and branded those who held them as heretics. The next step was to pronounce the most dreadful anathemas on those whom Rome termed heretics, which were executed in the same remorseless and exterminating spirit in which they were conceived. The confessors of the truth were denied both their civil and their natural rights. They were forbidden all participation in dignities and offices; they could not buy or sell; their goods were confiscated; their houses were razed, never more to be rebuilt; and their lands were made over to such as had the inclination or the power to seize on them. They were shut out from the solace of human converse; no one might give them shelter while living, or Christian burial when dead.

At last a crusade was commenced against them. Preachers were sent abroad through Europe, to sound the trumpet of vengeance, and assemble the nations. To stimulate their ardour in these holy wars, a full remission of all sins, from the cradle to the grave, was promised to such as might fall in battle. Nay, a service of forty days was so meritorious as to entitle the person to no less a reward than paradise. The Pope wrote to all Christian princes, exhorting them to earn their pardon and win heaven, rather by bearing the cross against these heretics than by marching against the Saracens. Army after army was assembled under such men as Simon of Montfort and Saint Louis. We do not intend to darken our page with a recital of the horrors of this war. We search in vain for anything equal to these horrors in the worst atrocities of savage tribes, when engaged in their most sanguinary conflicts. Were a faithful account of them to be given, the recital would fill many volumes, and would shock and outrage every man in whose heart there remains the least touch of humanity. Though legions of fiends had become incarnate, and been let loose to ravage the earth, they could not have devised more exquisite torments—they could not have inflicted more ruthless slaughters and massacres—nor could they have stood by and witnessed the agonies of their victims with a more hellish delight. The peaceful and fertile valleys of the Vaudois were invaded, and speedily devastated with fire and sword; their towns and villages were burnt; while not one individual, in many cases, escaped to carry tidings to the next valley. The young and the gray-haired, the most helpless and the most unoffending, were involved in the same indiscriminate slaughter; mothers, with their infants, were thrown from the rocks; bonfires were kindled, and human beings by hundreds piled upon them; pits were dug, and vast numbers buried alive. In short, every cruelty, barbarity, and indecency, which rage, lust, and bigotry could invent and perpetrate, were inflicted on these confessors of Christ.

To accomplish what these crusades, though carried on with indescribable fury, failed to effect, it was at last resolved that the Holy Office of the Inquisition should be erected. The horrors of this terrible court far exceeded those even of the crusades. The crusades did their work quickly: they swept across the scene of their visitation like a tempest, converting in a few days, sometimes in a few hours, busy and populous seats into profound solitudes. Such a proceeding was merciful compared with the lingering and excruciating torments to which the victim was doomed in the dungeons of the Holy Office. The ravages of the crusades were acted in the face of day: the smoke of burning cities and human hecatombs (a large-scale slaughter) rose into the air, polluting the firmament with a dismal cloud; the shrieks of the mother, as in her agony she clasped her babe, when both were about to be precipitated headlong from the top of some precipice, were repeated again and again from the rocks adown (downward) which they were thrown.

Accordingly, history has recorded part at least of these horrible tragedies, that we may admire the grace of God, as shown in the constancy and courage of the noble confessors that endured them, and that we may know at what an expense of suffering and blood the truth has been handed down to us.

But it is not so easy to chronicle the deeds of the Inquisition. History has been forbidden to descend with her torch into the dungeons of the Holy Office. The crimes that have been there enacted, and the sufferings that have been there endured, remain untold. The familiars and the racks of the Inquisition plied their dreadful work in darkness. No eye saw the writhings of their victim; no ear heard his groans; and the much that these dungeons conceal shall remain concealed for ever, till the dread judgment-day. This terrible court ramified into every country where there were professors of the truth—into Piedmont, France, Spain, Bohemia, Germany, Poland, Flanders, England; and endeavored, by the most horrible means, to exterminate what it termed heresy and heretics—to wear out the saints of the Most High. Thus were the words fulfilled, “When they shall have completed their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war with them.”

The history of the world is little else than a series of wars: many of these are sufficiently melancholy and revolting; but in no age of time, and in no country of the globe, has there been seen a war of so cruel, ferocious, and blood-thirsty a character as that which the beast carried on against the witnesses. Having partaken of her cup, and being frenzied and maddened with her wine, princes wasted, at the instigation of Rome, the blood and the treasure of their subjects, and literally beggared themselves and their heirs to carry on this war.

Philip the Second of Spain, when on his death-bed, acknowledged to the prince, his son, that he had spent on the civil wars of France, on those of the Low Countries, and other enterprises of the same nature, more than five hundred and ninety-four millions of ducats—a sum altogether inconceivable. How many millions of lives, as well as of treasure, have the efforts to extirpate the Huguenots cost the kingdom of France! France crowned this good work under Louis XIV., in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But when she cast out the Huguenots, she cast out with them patriotism and piety, the seeds of virtue and, the elements of order. All followed in the train of the exiles; and Revolution with its furies rushed in to fill the gap their departure had made.

As an instance of how careful Rome was to bind all secular princes to prosecute this war in the most unrelenting spirit, we may mention the decree of the council of Toledo, which was to the following effect:—

Numerous bulls of the Popes, conceived in the same terms, and enjoining the same duty, might be adduced. Who can tell what vast numbers of Christians have fallen a sacrifice in this way? When, at the last trumpet, the mounds of this great battle-field—which is wide Europe —shall be opened, what numbers of slain shall rise up to condemn their common murderer!

Calculations have been formed of the numbers whom Popery has slain. From the year 1540 to the year 1570, comprehending only the space of thirty years, no fewer than nine hundred thousand Protestants were put to death by Papists in the different countries of Europe. During the short pontificate of Paul the Fourth, which lasted only four years, the Inquisition alone, on the testimony of Vergerius, destroyed an hundred and fifty thousand. Those that perished in Germany during the wars of Charles the Fifth, and in Flanders, under the infamous Alva, are counted by hundreds of thousands. During many years, especially after the Reformation, these countries swarmed with executioners, and were covered with scaffolds and fires. In France, several millions were destroyed in the innumerable massacres that took place in that kingdom. It has been calculated that, since the rise of the Papacy, not fewer than fifty millions of persons have been put to death on account of religion. Of this inconceivable number the greater part have been cut off during the last six hundred years—for the Papacy persecuted very little during the first half of its existence. It was not till the witnesses completed their testimony that it made war against them.

Fifty millions in the space of six hundred years gives a rate of upwards of eighty thousand every year. Had Rome but once, during her career, consigned eighty thousand human beings to destruction, a deed so cruel would have been enough to stain her annals with indelible infamy, and to confer on her a terrible pre—eminence in blood. But when we think that she has repeated this fearful deed year by year during the long period of six centuries—when we think that eighty thousand human beings has she sacrificed six hundred times told—we have no words to express our astonishment and horror at her guilt. What an HOLOCAUST! FIFTY MILLIONS OF LIVES! How fearful a meaning does this fact impart to the words of John,

Continued in Chapter XIII. Death Of The Witnesses

All chapters of The Seventh Vial – By J.A. Wylie

Continued from Chapter X. The Western Witnesses, or The Waldenses

THE office of the two witnesses is still further symbolically described. It is not uninstructive to attend briefly to the more noticeable points in this description. Chapter xi. 4— “These are the two olive-trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth.”

The station of the witnesses was a very dignified one: they stood before the God of the earth. Not less dignified and excellent was their office. They were “the two olive-trees”—the only repositories of the true oil; they were “the two candlesticks ”-——the only dispensers of the true light.

Let us consider them first as the two olive-trees. Of all the valuable trees with which Palestine abounded, the most precious was the olive. Not to speak of its numerous commercial and domestic uses, its oil alone was permitted to be burned in the temple lamps. Seeing this tree was devoted to a sacred use, it may well be used as a symbol of persons in sacred office. The pastors of the Church are here intended.

There is an evident allusion to the vision exhibited to Zechariah, at a period of great depression in the history of the Old Testament Church. The prophet was shown a candlestick, all of gold, with seven lamps burning on its branches. By the side of the candlestick stood two olive-trees, whose oil flowed into the seven lamps, and kept them alive. The prophet had the vision interpreted to him, and was given to understand that the candlestick was the symbol of the Old Testament Church —the lamp of Divine truth preserved by God in the midst of heathenism; and that the two olive-trees which supplied that candlestick with oil were “the two anointed ones (sons of oil) that stand by the Lord of the whole earth ”—meaning the prophets and priests who communicated the truth to the Church of old.

The same symbols are employed in the vision of the Apocalyptic witnesses, and, of course, are to receive the same interpretation. The two candlesticks are plainly the Churches—the Eastern and Western, we have supposed—preserved by God’s power and mercy during the period of Antichrist. Zechariah saw seven lamps; John, at a former stage of the Apocalypse, had seen seven candlesticks—the seven Churches of Asia; but now he beheld only two candlesticks. This showed how dark would be the time; no light in the world but the two candlesticks, struggling to dispel the thick gloom that shrouded the earth. Yet there they burned throughout the long night, maugre (in spite) all the efforts of the Man of Sin to extinguish them, till the light of a glorious day returned once more to bless the earth.

By the two olive-trees are meant plainly the pastors of these Churches. They conveyed the oil which maintained the brightness of the mystic candlesticks. They performed the same office to these Churches which the prophets and priests performed to the Old Testament Church; they preached the Word, and they were employed, moreover, in multiplying manuscript copies of the Holy Scriptures. The art of printing had not yet been invented, and the Church was indebted for the written word to the pens of her ministers, as she was indebted for the word preached to their personal ministry; these two means of supply answering, according to the ingenious and natural supposition of Vitringa, to the two golden pipes by which the two olive-trees in Zechariah’s vision emptied the golden oil out of themselves.

Besides its great fruitfulness, the olive possesses this property, that it remains green all winter. So did these mystic trees. They were green during the long winter of the Christian Church. When the storm of temptation arose, and others were overturned, they remained firmly rooted and grounded; when the poisonous wind of error blew, and its deadly influence became visible in the seared leaves and moldering (decaying) trunks of the spiritual vineyard, they remained unscathed by the blight—like the fleece of Gideon, wet when all around was dry.

And why did their lamps burn amid the darkness that had extinguished those of others? Why was their leaf green during the winter that brought so deadly a blight on all around them? They were full of oil—oil drawn from no earthly fountain, but flowing down upon them from the heavens.

Placed in the midst of powerful enemies, called to discharge a duty peculiarly irritating and tormenting to these enemies, provided with no outward means of defense, how would they be able to repel the assaults to which they should be exposed? How, in short, should they continue to exist? The Apocalyptic symbols represent them as armed with the most ample avenging powers. “And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth and devoureth their enemies; and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy, and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues as often as they will.”

The avenging powers here ascribed to the witnesses are threefold. First, they should have power to smite the earth with famine; second, to desolate it with the sword third, to consume it with fire and burning. “These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy.” The allusion here is to an incident in the life of Elijah; and we are taught by association the horrors of the famine that was to prevail during the prophesying of the witnesses. Elijah’s first appearance before us is with the words, “As the Lord God liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these three years, but according to my word.” And the word of the prophet was fulfilled. That moment the heavens became brass over the land of Israel. The spring came, and summer and autumn followed, and these were succeeded by winter; but there was neither cloud in the heavens, nor rain or dew on the earth. What a doleful picture did the land of Israel then exhibit! Every mountain and pleasant field was burnt up, the channels of the brooks were dry, the figs dropped from the fig-tree, the cluster hung rotting on the vine, the herd perished from the stall, and the faces of men began to gather the blackness of famine.

As it was with the land of Israel during these three years and a half, so was it to be with Roman Christendom during the three and a half prophetic years of the prophesying of the witnesses. It was not a literal famine with which the world was to be scourged—a blight upon the earth, which should consume its fountains and its fruits, and cut off from man the bread on which the body lives. The drought here foretold was to afflict the spiritual heavens and earth, and dry up the fountains of salvation. It was a famine of the Word of God. It is a historical fact, that during the ages of their ministry, there was neither dew nor rain of a spiritual kind on the earth, but at the word of the witnesses. There was no knowledge of salvation but by their preaching, no descent of the Spirit but in answer to their prayers; and as the witnesses were shut out from Christendom generally, a universal famine ensued. The Word of God was locked up in a dead language, or forbidden to be read. The priests of Rome, instead of preaching the gospel, descanted (sang) on the merits of indulgences, the efficacy of relics, or entertained their hearers with monkish traditions, or ridiculous and mendacious (false) legends—things that could not feed the soul.

The heavens were shut, and there was no rain. Pining away under their sore thirst, men sought to the fountains of life, but only to find that they were dry. Had the spiritual world been disclosed to one’s eye, what a terrible spectacle would it have presented! Everywhere sterility and death; souls, pale, sickly, emaciated, peopling the earth, and hell gaping for its prey.

“And have power over waters, to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues as often as they will.” There is, we apprehend, an allusion here to the plagues by which Egypt was destroyed, which began by the turning of her river into blood. The former symbol indicated a spiritual infliction. This imports a temporal judgment. We are told, at a subsequent part of the Apocalypse, that waters are the symbol of peoples; and when we are told that these symbolical waters should be turned into blood, we learn that the nations in question were to be wasted by direful carnage and bloody wars. The Egyptians had attempted to destroy the Hebrews, by drowning their children in the Nile; and righteously was the Nile turned into blood. The antichristian nations would employ the sword to exterminate the witnesses, and by the sword should God exterminate them.

Hence the song of the angel of the waters, when the third vial was poured out “upon the rivers and fountains of waters”— “Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus; for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets; and thou hast given them blood to drink, for they are worthy.” This angel was answered by another from the altar—“ Even so, Lord God Almighty; true and righteous are thy judgments” intimating that the Church would take special notice of the Divine equity, in that God had done unto her persecutors as they had done unto her.

Rome had lived in blood, and in blood she expires. When power is ascribed to them to smite the earth with all plagues as often as they will, the allusion to Egypt is plainly continued. Moses had power to smite that kingdom with all the plagues necessary to accomplish its overthrow, and set free the Israelites. A similar power were these men in sackcloth to possess over the Papacy—a power to bring destruction upon destruction, till the kingdom of the Man of Sin should be annihilated, and its captives liberated. Not that these plagues should come at their wish, as if they cherished a vindictive spirit, or had pleasure in the destruction of their enemies; but, foreseeing the doom with which prophecy menaced the antichristian nations, they should predict its approach.

For the quarrel of the witnesses, moreover, all these plagues would be inflicted. Christ, their Head, would take care that, under His administration, not one wrong ever done them should pass unavenged. For every drop of martyr-blood split by her, Rome must one day reckon.

“And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies.” We have placed this last, because it is a final judgment. The symbol becomes of easy interpretation when we refer to that part of Old Testament history from which it is taken. “Behold,” said God to Jeremiah,“ I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and this people wood, and it shall devour them.” This plainly refers to the consuming judgments Jeremiah was commissioned to denounce. Of the same sort is the fire that proceedeth out of the mouth of the witnesses.

When Rome was wasting the witnesses with fire and sword, they foretold a time when she should be visited in like manner—have blood to drink for all the blood she had shed, and be consumed in the fires she had kindled for them. And not one of their words ever fell to the ground. The warning is repeated, to intimate its terrible certainty:—“If any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed;” a caution not unnecessary, seeing they were apparently so defenseless; for never did men appear more completely in the power of their enemies. But—as if the caution had run—let no man plot their harm, tempted thereto by the hope of impunity, seeing them, as he may believe, so completely without the power to retaliate. In seeking to hurt them, he will most infallibly destroy himself. Invisible guards protect them, invisible powers are at their command, they need only to utter the word, and the bolt of heaven is not more speedy nor more deadly.

And have not their words been as fire to the nations? What mean the bloody wars, and the calamities of divers kinds, which have ravaged the Popish countries of Europe these three hundred years? What, especially, mean the terrible wars of the present century, which have covered the Papal earth with conflagration and slaughter? These are the words of the men who dwelt amid the Alps— words uttered long ago, remembered in heaven, though forgotten on earth, and now awfully verified. This is the answer to their prayers.

This is the fire from the mouth of the witnesses, kindled, burning, and to burn yet more fiercely. This power the witnesses were to exercise, not when the time to possess the kingdom should come, but during their prophesying, and while they wore sackcloth. It was especially during the latter half of the period of their prophesying that these judgments were to be inflicted, and particularly after the seventh angel had sounded, and her last plagues had begun to fall on Rome. All these plagues will come in answer to the prayers, in fulfilment of the predictions, and in recompense of the wrongs of the witnesses.

The words we have been considering look back on three theaters of judgment—Jerusalem, Egypt, Sodom—and they exhibit the three leading plagues by which Rome’s destruction shall be accomplished—Famine, Blood, Fire. By famine was Jerusalem scourged, by blood was Egypt destroyed, and by fire was Sodom consumed. These are the three awful types of Rome’s end. Neither Jerusalem alone, nor Egypt alone, nor Sodom alone, could suffice as the symbol of her unprecedented doom. The terrors of her punishment could be adequately represented only by combining all three. When her end approaches, a combination of calamities, any one of which singly would have sufficed for the punishment of any ordinary criminal, will burst upon this great and notable enemy of Christ in a tornado of wrath, which will be remembered with horror, and spoken of with awe, while men dwell upon the earth.

God has raised up mighty prophets to warn her: He has spoken to her by Luther, by Calvin, and by all the reformers; but Rome refused to hear. He has visited her with fearful judgments, but Rome refused to be humbled. She put from her the robe of sackcloth, saying, “I shall see no sorrow.” Woe unto her! for if the mighty works which have been done in her had been done in Jerusalem, or in Egypt, or in Sodom, these cities would have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes: therefore it shall be more tolerable for Jerusalem, and for Egypt, and for Sodom, in the day of judgment, than for Rome.

Continued in Chapter XII. War With The Witnesses

All chapters of The Seventh Vial – By J.A. Wylie

Continued from The Seventh Vial Chapter IX. The Two Witnesses

THE growing light of historical research makes it everyday more probable, if not, indeed, certain, that the “Church of the Valleys” dates from Apostolic times. The refugees from pagan persecution were its first founders. Then it was that this lamp was kindled, and ever and anon, as the ages pass by, we catch sight of its ray streaming down from the mountain-tops, where Providence found for it an asylum. This Church is seen in the third century by the light of its martyr-fires. It comes before us in the fourth, in connection with the zeal and diligence of some of its pastors, and again, in the fifth, by the refuge which it offered to the confessors, whom persecution compelled to flee from Africa. In the ninth century, its existence is attested by Claude of Turin, whose oversight it enjoyed. Nay, onward to the tenth century, we can trace its existence, for it is a well-established fact that even in this century there were Churches of comparatively pure creed, not in the valleys of the Alps only, but also on the great plains of Piedmont and Lombardy at their feet.

And when at length Rome had established her dominion over the north of Italy, and the whole peninsula was subject to the Pope, not utterly extinct was this Church. In the center of the thick darkness, which lay wide upon the face of Europe there was a little speck of light. God did not leave Himself without a witness. Entering into her “chambers,” and shutting the “doors” of the eternal hills about her, this Church kept alive her lamp. True, its light was enjoyed only by those favoured few “redeemed from the earth,” who dwelt here, in the very midst of their enemies, yet defended from them by bulwarks of impregnable rock and eternal ice; but that light was as a “bow” set in “the cloud,” which gave assurance that God had not forgotten His covenant with His Church.

Would the reader like to see those famous valleys, where abode this venerable and Apostolic Church, and where she endured her great fight of afflictions, let him, in fancy, accompany us thither. Advancing from the south, he is traversing, we shall suppose, the plain of Piedmont. Right in front of him is the great chain of the Alps. The sight is one of the most glorious on earth. From where day opens to where it sets, the mountains run on in a line of continuous towering grandeur. Of the summits which form this goodly rampart, some shoot up spiky as needles, others rise strong and massy as castles, crowned with the snows of a thousand winters, and when the rising or setting sun strikes full upon them, they show like torches, and burn like a wall of fire along the sky.

This region, of more than historic renown, we enter by a long, low gorge—its portal. The valleys open before us, carpeted with meadows, and walled in by rocks and great mountains, whose sides are clothed with vineyards, and great forests of the chestnut tree. Thickly sprinkled over their surface are the villages and chalets of some twenty thousand vine dressers and herdsmen. Simple in their manners, and industrious in their habits, of pure morals and evangelical faith, they are here dwelling amid the hills which their fathers glorified by their deeds, hallowed by their prayers, and watered with the blood of martyrdom.

The valleys are seven in number, and are placed, as regards one another, so as to make the region unique; in fact, a network of fortresses, lying enclosed within a common wall of mountains, and accessible only by a common door, which a handful of men could shut against thousands. It is impossible to survey the region, and fail to perceive the traces of design and plan so manifestly stamped upon it.

The great Architect reared it for a moral end. He sank deep its foundations in the earth, He reared high its bulwarks, He stored it with corn, and wine, and oil; and, placing there the ark of His Truth, He gave it to the Waldenses, and bade them be brave, and keep their mountain citadel inviolate, and their lamp unquenched against a. world in arms.

And nobly did they discharge their trust. The darkness gathered; one furious tempest after another burst upon them, but they watched around their Lamp, and there it burned, while the rest of the world lay buried in night.

Wide Christendom around was desecrated by idolatrous temples and pagan rites; in the valleys of the Waldenses mass was never sung, and in the churches of the Waldenses no image was ever set up. Knowing that God is a Spirit, they worshipped Him in spirit and in truth. Their territory was reserved, like the inner temple, for the worship of the Lamb, when the outer court was cast out to be trodden under foot of the Gentiles. The period of their active war against Rome was not less than five centuries. They endured not fewer than thirty persecutions. These were inflicted by the swords of the kings of France and Savoy, but always at the instigation of the Pope. Never did tempest burst over their mountains, but it had its rise in the Vatican.

With regard to their claim to rank as one of the two Apocalyptic witnesses, we may quote the following passages from the “Horae Apocalypticae” (pp. 350—355, Third Ed., 1847):—

In the Treatise of Antichrist, we advance to an admirable and direct identification of the antichristian system of the Papacy, which, though written after the period we are passing under review—perhaps in the last quarter of the fourteenth century—may yet be fairly presumed to exhibit the opinions of the Vaudois of the thirteenth century on the subject; they having embraced, as we know, at the least as early as that period, the view of the Papacy and Roman Church being the very Babylon and harlot of the Apocalypse.”

The following is an outline of the views held on this subject by the Waldensian Church:—

Such was the noble testimony of the Waldenses; and how nobly they maintained it, history testifies. How marvelous the ways of God! How astonishing His power and faithfulness in preserving His truth in the worst of times! When all the dwellers on the plains and in the cities of the Roman world were bowing the knee, and saying, “Who is like unto the Beast,” in the midst of the earth—in the very center of Europe—rose a temple not made with hands, in which the true God.was worshipped. In the midst of their myriad foes an asylum was opened, where the witnesses prophesied a thousand two hundred and threescore days. At the heart of the great Apostasy a Tabernacle was pitched, within which, kindled by no human hand, and fed by no earthly oil, there burned a Lamp of blessed light, from one dark century to another, till its rays melted at last into the morning of the Reformation.

Continued in Chapter XI. Avenging Power of the Witnesses

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Continued from Chapter VIII. The Measuring Of The Temple

PLANTED by apostles, and watered by the labours of evangelists and pastors, Christianity grew and spread widely in the Gentile world. The legions from the banks of the Tiber gained victories less illustrious than the conquests achieved by the fishermen from the shores of Gennesareth, and the empire of Caesar was less extensive than the dominion of Christ. The nations inhabiting from India on the east, to Britain on the west, owned the truth, and submitted to the sway of the gospel. There were few places throughout this extensive tract where Christian congregations were not formed. The name of Jesus was known even on the frontier of China. Scattered throughout the continent of India, as well as in the islands of its Archipelago, were numerous companies of disciples.

The gospel had been planted, too, in those lands which were the birthplace of the human family; and it flourished upon the ruins of the Babylonian and Medo-Persian monarchies. The deserts of the sons of Ishmael, from the boundary of which the arms of Greece and Rome had recoiled, were subjugated by the cross. Amid the moldering (crumbling) temples of Egyptian mythology arose Christian sanctuaries. The gospel spread throughout Asia Minor, and the superstition and licentiousness of the region were restrained; it entered Greece, and its philosophy grew into disrepute; it was carried to Rome, and its idols were dethroned.

From Rome it spread northward, taming the fierceness and enlightening the darkness of barbarous nations; so goodly were the limits of the Church, so vast the territory she occupied. During these ages innumerable souls were converted, and passed to glory. The righteousness of Zion had gone forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth. And the Gentiles had seen her righteousness, and all kings her glory, and she was called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord had named.

But the faith which had been spread over so many lands, and received the homage of so numerous nations, was now to recede from its ancient limits, leaving the space it had filled covered once more with heathenism, under the name of Christianity. What a fearful fulfillment of the Apocalyptic prophecy given in the measuring of the temple, and the altar-worshippers, and the casting out of the outer court, that it might be trodden under foot of the Gentiles! The inquiry which must have immediately suggested itself to the mind of John, when the fate of the outer court was disclosed to him, could be only this: Will the apostasy be universal? Shall none be spared to offer true worship and bear faithful witness for God in these evil times? Already John’s anxiety on this point had been set at rest; for in virtue of the same commission by which he had cast out the outer court, he had included the temple, with the select company that ministered at the altar. This implied their preservation during the coming eventful epoch.

But the angel now proceeds to communicate fuller particulars. Under the history of the witnesses—for, while taken in connection with the temple they are priests, taken in connection with an apostate world they are witnesses—a. succinct and clear account is given of the struggle which the followers of the Lamb should be called to maintain, during the forty-two months, with an ungodly and antichristian world; the persecutions that should befall them in the maintenance of their testimony; their almost total suppression, together with the truth to which they had testified; their sudden and miraculous revival at the very moment that their enemies were rejoicing on account of their death, and their public assumption to a state of dignity and power.

Thus we have the leading events of the twelve hundred and sixty days epitomized in the history of the witnesses, and presented in figures comparatively plain, that the more highly-wrought symbolical prefigurations that were to come after might be the more easy of interpretation.

God left not the old pagan apostasy without a witness, neither would he leave the antichristian apostasy without a witness. “I will give unto my two witnesses,” for so runs the original. The question is, what shall be given? The implied answer of our translation is, we think, the right one—“Power.” The power is spiritual; power to perceive the truth, and reject the errors by which so many would be misled; power to cleave to the truth, and resist the temptations before which the majority would fall; power to proclaim the truth, and, by doing so, to convert others who might stand in their room and maintain their testimony when they were called away, so that the line of witnesses should not be cut off, but might run continuously on till better times should come. Individually they would be removed by death or persecution, but, as a body, the witnesses would be inviolable.

Their work is next defined—“They shall prophesy.” Prophesying means here, as in many other passages of the New Testament, every kind of preaching by Divine aid. The prophesying of the witnesses was to consist, not in the revelation of new truths, but in the exposition of old ones. They were to receive and profess the whole body of doctrine revealed by Christ and His apostles; and, in doing so, they would testify against and condemn the Romish apostasy. Hence the name given to them—“Witnesses.” The name is borrowed from the Old Testament—“Ye are my witnesses,” said God to the ancient Israel. The honorable office of Israel—as a nation to whom had been committed the sacred oracles—was to stand before the other nations of the earth, and testify to the fact that Jehovah was the one true God, and that they were no gods that were made by men’s hands. The same honorable office was to be assigned to the little company before us. They were to stand before the antichristian nations, and testify to the fact that Christ was the one only Intercessor. As God termed the ancient Israelites “my witnesses,” because they witnessed for the supremacy of God the Father, in opposition to the heathen deities, so here the angel, that is, Christ, calls these men “my witnesses,” because they were to witness in behalf of the supremacy of God the Son, in opposition to the antichristian deities; and especially were they to witness for Him as the one Intercessor, in opposition to the numerous intercessors of the Romish Church.

The guise in which they were to discharge their office is specially marked. “They shall prophesy clothed in sackcloth.” This is no mere stroke of coloring, introduced for the purpose of deepening the dark picture. It is a most significant symbol. It denotes the deep distress and mourning of the true Church during the whole of that period.

It was a thankless office which they were to discharge; and rough and cruel treatment was all the recompense that they would receive at the hands of man. The thought of the Church of God lying waste, and their brethren slain, would oppress their hearts with a continual sorrow. Denied all participation in honors and offices—deprived sometimes of their natural rights—hated of all men for His name’s sake whose witnesses they were—and banished from society—they would exhibit the same picture of mourning as the ancient prophets, of whom it had been recorded, “They wandered about in sheep-skins and goat-skins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented (of whom the world was not worthy); they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.” The attire of the witnesses presents a striking contrast to that of the harlot. During the period in question she was arrayed in scarlet and fine linen—they in sackcloth.

They were to prophesy clothed in sackcloth, many days. The exact number is determined—twelve hundred and sixty. These are not literal, but symbolical days, and denote years. The question touching the commencement of these days, which determines, of course, their expiration, is one of the most famous in the whole field of Apocalyptic inquiry. Of that we shall speak afterwards. At present we shall merely indicate the principle on which our interpretation of prophetic time proceeds. Scarce any principle is more clearly taught in the Word of God.

A day for a year is a mode of symbolic speech which appears to have been in use in very early times. The institution of the Sabbatical year was given in these terms. In Leviticus xxv., that year is spoken of as if it were one day, and termed the Sabbath of the land. When a mystic character was given to the prophet Ezekiel, and he was called, as the substitute of the house of Israel, to bear their iniquity, the length of the infliction was determined on this principle—a day for a year.

God Himself announces the principle on which that arrangement proceeded. “I have appointed thee each day for a year.” Like the prophet Ezekiel, these mystic witnesses were substituted for the Church, and called to prophesy, clothed in sackcloth, during as many days as she was afterwards to do years.

We have had experience, moreover, of the truth of this principle. Daniel’s prophecy of seventy weeks completely establishes it. Between the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, and the death of the Messiah, seventy weeks were to intervene. In seventy weeks there are four hundred and ninety days. And between the edict of Artaxerxes Longimanus and the death of Christ there were four hundred and ninety years (Editor: 490 – 3.5 years because Jesus was crucified in the midst of the 70th Week). In the prophecy before us, then, we are to substitute years for days. Our authority for doing so is clear.

During the long period of twelve hundred and sixty years was the Church to prophesy, that is, she was to testify against the apostasy of Rome doctrinally by professing the opposite truths, and practically by separating from her communion (fellowship); and she was to prophesy in sackcloth, that is, in the endurance of all the sacrifices and sufferings to which her faithfulness might expose her. Chased beyond the pale of civilized life, the confessors of the truth would pass their lives in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and reproach; and would often close them, as a testimony for the gospel, in prison or on the rack, at the burning stake, or amid the horrors of the scaffold.

The next question of importance is, Who are the witnesses? This part of the Apocalypse has been the subject of boundless conjecture. These interpretations, incongruous and irrelevant in many instances, we do not stay to enumerate; for it is unnecessary to state what it would be useless to refute. The character of the witnesses may be determined with certainty from the nature of their work. The matter of their witness-bearing was the TRUTH. The party for whom this testimony was borne was Christ—“my witnesses.” The party against whom it was borne was Antichrist. Whom, in that case, can the witnesses be, but those, in whatever land, who, during the period of Antichrist, professed the truth of Jesus, and testified against the idolatries of Rome?

But why only two? “I will give power unto my two witnesses.” We prefer the more common, because the more natural explanation. Two witnesses were enough in law to substantiate any fact. “At the mouth of two witnesses shall every word be established.” But they were the smallest number that could do so. And, therefore, when we are told that TWO witnesses should prophesy, we are given to understand that such a number would be preserved from apostasy as should be competent to condemn the Romish idolators, and leave them without excuse. And when we are told that only two witnesses should prophesy, we are to infer that the number would not be greater than was absolutely requisite to give credibility to their testimony, and to take away all reasonable ground of excuse from the apostate nations. Few will maintain that individuals are intended: two literal men would have been far too few to bear testimony with effect against the apostasy of a world. Organized societies must be meant. It is not persons, but Churches, that constitute the two witnesses. And if we look to the history of the period, we find a small but competent number, both in the East and in the West, who continued all along to testify against the prevailing corruptions.

We are disposed to concur in the opinion of Mr. Elliot, Mr. Faber, and others, that the reference here is to the Eastern and Western Churches. The former has, with great historical research, and with complete success, traced a succession of witnesses in both Churches, from the close of the sixth century till the Reformation. Speaking of the eastern Christians, and showing their claim to be regarded as one of the two Apocalyptic witnesses, Mr. Elliot (“Horae Apocalypticae,” pp. 277—287) remarks—

In these particulars we discern in this body of Christians the essential character of witnesses. They are divinely illumined. They see what has been hid from the wise and prudent of the world—the Truth to wit. They are divinely upheld: for they fulfill their testimony despite the numbers and power arrayed against them. And in the reproach, and buffetings, and death to which their testimony exposes them, we recognize what it had been foretold would be their distinguishing attire, their canonical vestments, if we may so speak—the robe of sackcloth.

Continued in Chapter X. The Western Witnesses, or The Waldenses

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Continued from Chapter VII. The Oath Of The Angel

WHEN we open the eleventh chapter of the-Apocalypse we find ourselves in presence of a new and striking symbolization. Before us rises the temple on Mount Moriah. We are shown the court of burnt-offering within the sacred edifice, and the spacious outer court which runs round it on the outside. At the altar is a little company who offer sacrifice to Jehovah. But while this peaceful scene is proceeding within, a frightful tumult rages in the outer court. A promiscuous crowd have burst into it; and although they profess to have a relation to the temple, for they are here in its courts, they neither show reverence for it, nor do they offer worship to God. On the contrary, they proclaim their essential paganism, by profaning with their noise, and defiling with their impieties the sacred precincts within which they are assembled.

And now comes the Apocalyptic seer, with a measuring-rod in his hand, and he proceeds to measure the temple, and them that worship therein. In other words, he draws a line of separation and protection between the worshippers, and the profane and disorderly crowd in the outer court. “Henceforth,” as if John had said, passing on with his measuring-rod all round the edifice, “henceforth these shall be the limits of what is holy.” The scene is manifestly symbolic. It is a picture of times that were approaching. Let us investigate its import.

We here behold John entering on the execution of the task assigned to him. “Thou shalt prophesy again,” said the angel to him. Having digested the contents of the little book he begins to prophesy; but like Ezekiel, who, having eaten the roll, and been commanded to prophesy to the house of Israel, began to do so by signs, so John opens his new prophetic mission by the exhibition of signs.

The first and most prominent sign before us is the temple. It cannot be the literal temple which John is commanded to measure: for the “holy and beautiful house ” in which his fathers had praised God was now razed to the ground, and the Roman plowshare had been drawn across its site.

In the Old Testament, to which we must go for the key of the symbol, the temple and Mount Zion are used as types of the gospel and the gospel dispensation. The coming of the gospel dispensation, and the privileges and blessings to be enjoyed under it, are all shadowed forth in the prophets by imagery borrowed from the temple. The symbolization then carries us into gospel times, and puts us down in presence of the gospel Church. Whatever we see John do in the case of the type we are to regard as prophetic of an analogous event to happen in the case of the antitype—the gospel Church.

The instrument which John wields is a “reed like unto a rod.” “There was given me a reed” (Greek word) – Revelation 11:1. The (Greek word) or reed was put to three uses among the Jews—a walking-staff, a measuring-rod, and a pen. Its size varied according to its use. To show in which of these senses the (Greek word) or reed is here to be taken, it is added, that it was “like unto a rod.” It was a measuring-reed, then, that was now given to John.

As there is so obvious a reference here to the plan and arrangements of the ancient Jewish temple, it becomes necessary, in order to the clear apprehension of what John now did, and the precise significancy of the act, to describe briefly the arrangements of the ancient temple. The sacred buildings occupied the summit of the hill. In the center was a noble and spacious edifice, divided into two chambers—the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies—with a court in front, in which stood the altar of burnt-offering. This formed strictly the temple. Running round it, in an oblong form, was the court of the Israelites; and, running round it again, was the spacious court of the proselytes to the Jewish religion. John was commanded to measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. It is not said whether the court of the Israelites was included or left out in the measurements of John. We are disposed to think that it was left out, and that nothing was included by the measuring-reed of John but the sacred buildings, with their three-fold division of holy of holies, holy place, and altar-court where the priests and such of the people as had sacrifices and offerings to present were assembled.

But it is of more importance to inquire what the action symbolized. Sometimes the measuring-rod is employed to denote construction, as in the case of Ezekiel (chap. 40:3, et seq. ), where the angel uses his measuring-reed to mete out the proportions of a new temple to be erected. Sometimes it is the symbol of destruction. In 2 Kings 21:13, and elsewhere, it is so used: a part was to be preserved, and a part was to be destroyed. It is plain that here the measuring-reed is used in a sense somewhat analogous to its last mentioned meaning. That it was not used for the purpose of construction, is very evident; for the temple measured was represented as already built. It was used for the purpose of dividing between what of that temple was to be kept holy, and what was to be accounted profane. That this was the design of the measuring is certain, from the reason assigned: “For it” (the outer court) “is given unto the Gentiles; and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.” The action gave warning that a great apostasy was to take place, and that the limits of the true Church were, from this time forward, to be greatly curtailed.

John now predicts in symbol what Paul had already foretold in plain language. “Let no man deceive you by any means,” says he, in 2 Thessalonians 2:3, et seq.; “for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that Man of Sin be revealed, the Son of Perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped: so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.”

This passage, is the key to the right interpretation of the measuring of the temple. The vision is evidently placed at the commencement of the forty-two months; for why was the temple measured, but that its inviolability might be secured during the time—the forty-two months—that the outer court would be trodden under foot of the Gentiles? If from the page of the Apocalypse we lift our eyes to the page of history, and survey Christendom at the beginning of the fifth century, what a sad verification of the symbolic foreshadowings of John! We behold the great predicted apostasy, or “falling away” begun. It sets in with the steadiness and irresistible strength of an overflowing tide. The professors of the gospel are divided into two classes, and the distinction between them is marked and deep, and destined every century to become more so. The vast majority retain nothing of Christianity but the name; in heart, in life, and in creed they are manifestly pagan. The disproportion between the two in point of numbers, as in point of character, is steadily progressive. The one company, the evangelical, grow smaller every age, and at last drop well-nigh altogether out of view: the other prodigiously augment (larger); and by and by appear to cover the whole face of Christendom. The area once occupied by the gospel, “the Holy City,” they tread under foot by their persecutions, and defile, by their idolatrous fanes (church buildings) and ceremonies. Paganism, in the guise of Christianity, has a second time triumphed.

During the fifth century the Church underwent a great change for the worse in her doctrine and worship, and, of course, also in her practice. The great body of her members were grossly ignorant, and her clergy wallowed in wealth and luxury. Magnificent churches were erected, in which ministers officiated attired in richly decorated vestments. True piety lay buried under a load of pompous rituals, and burdensome and superstitious ceremonies. Pilgrimages began to be made to the tombs of martyrs, where tapers (candles) were kept burning at mid-day. Miracles were wrought by the efficacy of relics; the saints and the Virgin were invocated; and, amongst other pernicious inventions, fatal to morality as well as to religion, the confessional was introduced; and the pagan doctrine of the purification of departed souls by fire was more amply explained and confirmed in this century than it had previously been. The grand doctrines of Christianity were lost, especially those pertaining to the great atonement and the one Mediator.

The true temple, which God had pitched, and not man, was abandoned: the true altar was forsaken—not, indeed, entirely—a few there were whom the growing corruptions and superstitions had not carried away. These now formed the true Church—they were the altar worshippers; but they formed no greater a proportion to the multitudes which filled the courts without—Christians in name, heathens in reality—than did the priests at the altar of old to the assembled congregation of Israel that thronged the courts without. Thus the great apostasy rose, whose swelling tide lifted the “Son of Perdition” to his lofty seat in the temple of God, where through successive ages he showed himself as God, by arrogating the powers and assuming the names and attributes of God.

In Vitringa’s exposition of the passage we, on the whole, thoroughly concur. “ The interior temple,” says he, “ means true Christians; the exterior, false Christians, heretics, &c.; the altar means Christ; measuring the temple and worshippers is scrutinizing the character of Christians, real or professed; the casting out of the outer court is excommunicating false professors; the heathen who are to tread down the temple and city are Christians in name only (and therefore called heathen), who are to form an external Church, and have dominion over it, suppressing at the same time the true worshippers of God, until at last God shall exclude them from even the external pale (area they are allowed in) of His Church.”

The Gentiles were not merely to possess the court which was without the temple;—they were to tread under foot the holy city. Jerusalem is here used as the symbol of the Christian Church. The term “treading under foot” denotes the subjection in which the Church would be held, and the indignities with which she would be treated. Like Jerusalem when taken by the Chaldeans, or when sacked by the Romans, its wall broken down, its stately palaces demolished, and the foe walking in triumph over its ruins, the Church of God was to exhibit during this long and calamitous period a spectacle of desolation.- Her rights and privileges were to be taken from her; her ordinances were to be profaned; her members were to be persecuted and slain; and her adorable Head was to be affronted by having His office arrogated by His pretended Vicar. These oppressions she should suffer forty-two months, which is the precise length of time that the Witnesses were to prophesy in sackcloth; the only difference being, that the period of the witnesses is given in days, and that of the treading under foot of the outer court by the Gentiles, in months. This to our mind is completely satisfactory that the profanation of the outer court and the prophesying of the witnesses were to be contemporaneous; and that it is the same event that is prefigured by both symbols—the apostasy of the heathenish and persecuting Church of Rome, and the indignities and oppressions to be endured by the true Church during the continuance of that apostasy.

We cannot but admire the appropriateness of the symbols, and the exact and lively picture which they exhibit of the leading events of the grand apostasy. John receives a measuring-reed; the angel commands him to rise and measure the temple. He does so. On the authority of his Divine commission, and in the application of a Divine rule, he draws a line of separation between the pure and holy worshippers at the altar, and the unclean and idolatrous multitude in the outer court. We behold Christendom divided into two ecclesiastical confederacies, vastly dissimilar in point of numbers, as well as in point of character. During one period of the forty-two prophetic months we behold the one company grown so small, that the inaccessible cliffs and caves of the Piedmontese Alps sufficed for their dwelling; and though driven by the rage of men to dwell there, yet they were beloved of God, and enjoyed access to Him through the one Intercessor— kings and priests unto God; while the other company were so numerous, that the wide plains and populous cities of the rest of Europe could scarce contain them. John, in measuring the temple, acted, we have said, on a Divine commission, and by the application of a Divine rule; plainly though symbolically teaching us, that everything about the Church—her government, her worship, the admission of her members— is to be regulated by the Word of God.

Civil rulers have sometimes arrogated the power of making laws for her, and of saying who were to be admitted and who excluded from her offices and privileges. The self-righteous pride and the superstition of men have led them to invent pompous rites and burdensome ceremonies; but when brought to the test of Scripture— the rule which Christ has put into the hands of His servants, for the purpose of regulating the affairs of His house on earth—they are discovered to be unwarranted and superstitious; they must be discarded; and such as persist in the observance of them must be cast out of the Church as profane.

The measuring of the temple forms a grand epoch in the Apocalypse, as it did in the history of the world; for now the Man of Sin was to be revealed. A dark night was at hand—darker than any that had overtaken the world hitherto, and bringing with it to the Church sorer trials and more protracted sufferings than any she had ever passed through. At this crisis of the drama the great Administrator of it appears before John. He is seen encompassed with all the glorious symbols of universal dominion, almighty power, absolute unchangeableness, and covenant faithfulness. How opportune this revelation of Himself. He comes to comfort His Church, by giving her assurance of His presence during the trials of her protracted night. He comes to bid her be of good cheer; that, this last trial over, all would be over; and, to show that the mystery of Providence was now drawing to a close, and that it should assuredly be finished in the destruction of that enemy who was now on the eve of being revealed, he renews the oath which had been sworn in the hearing of Daniel, at the beginning of that course of mystery, so long before, and which bore upon the certain overthrow of that great foe. He comes to deliver his last prophecy to the Church, and to commission his last prophet to the nations.

What a seasonable appearance! How like to His last interview with His disciples before His first departure! The language of this manifestation was in effect the same as that which fell from His blessed lips on that memorable occasion: “A little while, and ye shall not see me. Verily, verily, I say unto you, that ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice; and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. (John 16:20) I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.” (John 16:22) The cloud was again to receive Him out of their sight. It was expedient that He should go away. He had not yet brought to a close that wonderful series of glorious dispensations which was to introduce the final triumph and universal establishment of His Church. But the end was nigh.

One other dispensation, more full of terror to His enemies, of mercy to His friends, and of mystery to both, than any that had preceded it; and then, oh what a blessed realization of what Daniel had seen in the night-visions!—

Continued in Chapter IX. The Two Witnesses

All chapters of The Seventh Vial – By J.A. Wylie

Continued from Chapter VI. The Little Book

THE grandeur of the vision is heightened by the awfully solemn act which the august being, who stood with one foot planted on the sea, and the other on the earth, now proceeded with great impressiveness to perform.

Our translation does not give the precise import of the angel’s oath -(three Greek words)- literally, “The time shall not be yet.” The angel refers plainly to the time when some event important in itself, and anxiously desired and expected by John, as representative of the Church, would happen, and of which the angel had just spoken, and been answered by the thunders which had disclosed the particulars of that great event. When, then, shall it be? “Not yet,” answers the angel; “but,” he continues, “in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as He hath declared to His servants the prophets.” That it was some joyful event, to the Church at least, whatever its aspect to the world, is undoubted, from the terms which the angel employs when speaking about it—(the Greek word translated as gospel)—the same word which is employed to denote the preaching of the gospel. It had been declared as good news.

We learn further from the angel’s oath, that the event had ere now been foretold. It had been declared—preached as good news—to the prophets. To which of the prophets? Is there any of them to whom we find a revelation made—a revelation on oath —of the consummation or the finishing of some grand epoch in God’s government of the world? We find such a revelation made to Daniel, conveyed in terms and accompanied with imagery so very nearly identical with those of the vision before us, that we can have no doubt the allusion is to that prophet.

In the last chapter of Daniel’s prophecy we find a time of trouble spoken of, “such as never was since there was a nation, even to that same time.” (Dan. 12) But Michael should stand up, and Daniel’s people should be delivered—“every one that should be found written in the book.”

In the hearing of Daniel, one made inquiry at

The epoch, which was to bear a complex character, inasmuch as it was to be a period of unexampled trouble, and of deliverance equally unexampled, was then far distant: accordingly Daniel is told, “The words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.” – Dan. 12:9

The vision of Daniel helps us to interpret that of John. In the words we have quoted, there is a reference made to a noted period in the Apocalypse—“ a time, times, and an half,” (Dan. 12:7) i.e. a year, two years, and half a year; i.e. twelve hundred and sixty prophetic days, or years. The period, we say, is a strongly marked one in the Apocalypse, seeing it embraces the reign of Antichrist. The angel affirms in his oath, that at the end of that period all these wonders of judgment and deliverance shall be accomplished. This enables us to determine what is here meant by the mystery of God, which shall be finished in the days of the voice of the seventh angel.

It also goes a great way to determine with certainty what the things were which the seven thunders uttered, but which John was forbidden to write. Seeing we are informed in Daniel that they were to take place at the close of the twelve hundred and sixty days, we infer that they were the seven last plagues, by which Antichrist was to be slowly consumed, and at length suddenly and fearfully destroyed.

The history of the “little book ” begins after the sounding of the fourth trumpet; from which period, speaking generally, we date the rise of Antichrist. The oath of the angel, touching the finishing of the mystery of God in His destruction, bore that it should not be yet. A full millennium had to intervene—from the fifth to the sixteenth century: not sooner should Antichrist reach his meridian. But having attained the height of his power, the seventh angel would sound,- and then, as sure as God possessed almighty power and eternal being, Antichrist should be destroyed.

There was a high propriety in the angel’s appeal to these two attributes of the Divine character. No power less than that which made the heavens and the earth could suffice to destroy so consolidated a system as the Papacy; and He only that liveth for ever could carry on through successive ages that series of events by which Antichrist should eventually be brought down. Nor was the propriety less of terming this great event the finishing of the mystery of God.

We know not how long God’s providence over the world, in its present state, shall last; but we know this—that the mystery of providence—that part of providence which, from the intricacies and perplexities with which it has abounded, has been a mystery to the wisest—shall come to a close when Antichrist falls. It is long since it was revealed to Daniel that there should be four grand epochs in the history of the world, marked off by the rise and fall of four great monarchies; that these should be preparatory to the kingdom of Christ; and that as soon as the fourth and last of these monarchies had fallen, that kingdom should be set up. The fall of the last monarchy was to form the completion of the scheme—the winding-up of the drama; and when finished, the admirable wisdom with which its plan had been arranged would be seen, and all the mystery in which, to human penetration, it had been shrouded during its progress, would be removed.

This long-predicted and much-desired event would happen, John was assured by the angel on oath, during the days of the voice of the seventh angel. Not longer was the patience of the Church to be tried, and not longer should Satan be permitted, by the instrumentality of his agents, to deceive and destroy the nations.

The seventh trumpet should sound the world’s jubilee—the day of vengeance and the year of the redeemed. The idea that it is the day of judgment that is here announced is inadmissible; but in respect that the scenes by which the close of this part of God’s providence shall be signalised will be second in importance and terror only to those scenes amid which time itself shall close, they are depicted by imagery taken from the last judgment. This period will be a harbinger of the day of judgment—in reality a judgment-day to the world. Accordingly, it is predicted, both in Daniel and elsewhere in the Apocalypse, that then the dead shall be raised; that is those whom Antichrist has slain shall stand up—not in their persons, but in their cause—that their innocence may be published, and his iniquity proclaimed, before he is cast into the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.

The vision ends with an intimation to John to receive the book from the angel, and eat it. He did so; “And it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.” (Revelation 10:10b) To eat the book denoted the exercise of his mind respecting it. To understand a matter at once important and profound is pleasant—sweet as honey; but, alas! the book contained heavy tidings to the Church: it announced a period of twelve hundred and sixty years of sorrow to her, and of triumph to her foes: “And as soon as I had eaten (understood) it, my belly was bitter.”

Once more was the voice of prophecy to be heard in the world before it should become silent for ever. “Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.” (Revelation 10:11) John was the last of the prophets, and this was the last prophecy. It respected the Church’s last enemy; and as soon as this prediction should be published, the volume of prophecy would be closed. John was not in person to publish these sayings to the world. He was a prisoner in Patmos, kept there by the tyrant who now governed the world. But though he had been permitted that very day to leave the shores of the lonely isle, he was too full of years and sufferings to journey through the countries, and proclaim what was now made known to him. He was soon by death to rejoin in glory that Lord whose chosen and best beloved companion he had been during his humiliation on earth. But, inspired as he was, to write the visions of Patmos, he is to this hour prophesying before peoples and nations. By the Church John has ever been held to be one of the greatest of those prophets which, though dead, yet speak unto her.

How infallibly certain is it that Popery shall be brought down! God has not only promised, not only prophesied, He has sworn to overthrow it. At the commencement of that grand scheme of Providence which embraces the four monarchies, the angel who stands upon the sea and the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by Him that liveth for ever and ever, that after a time, times, and an half, the mighty fabric of commingled tyranny and idolatry, symbolised by the Image, should be broken in pieces. And again, during the existence of the last monarchy, when the eighth and last head of the Beast was on the point of making his appearance, the same oath was repeated in the same solemn manner. The oath of the angel must be fulfilled, oppose it whoso list. (archaic word for wish, choose) Nor is God slack concerning His oath. Our impatience often provokes us to think that the vision tarries—that events pass slowly over the stage of time. We measure the duration they occupy by our own little span. We are like one who views the motions of the great bodies of the firmament at the distance of the earth, and to whom they seem to creep slowly across the sky, whilst, were he nearer, he would be dazzled by the rapidity and irresistible force with which they move onward. So would we judge of the events of Providence, were we to measure their progress by the standard here set up by the angel—God’s eternity.

Twelve hundred and sixty prophetic days have been allotted to Antichrist. Climbing higher than mortal ever climbed before, he will remain, for that period, the wonder and the terror of earth. But to that term not a day, not an hour, shall be added. When it expires his knell will be rung, and a universe shall shout over his fall.

Continued in Chapter VIII. The Measuring Of The Temple

All chapters of The Seventh Vial – By J.A. Wylie

Continued from Chapter V. Vision Of The Mighty Angel. Rev. Wylie gives in this chapter a very interesting interpretation of the Little Book of Revelation chapter 10, one that I never heard before but I think makes a lot of sense.

Revelation 10:2  And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth,
Revelation 10:8-10  And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth. And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.