Chapter 8

The storm of thunders and lightnings being expended, the earth into which the fire from the angel’s frankincense bowl was cast, began to shake. The seasonable death of Constantius A.D. 361, delivered the Roman Empire from the calamities of civil war, which had hitherto progressed without serious effusion of blood. Julian was now acknow­ledged as emperor by the whole empire. His throne was the seat of philosophy and science, falsely so-called, heathen piety, and vanity.

Thunders are international wars, whose echoes reverberate through the heavens of the respective states; while lightnings denote civil discord and revolutions in the government.

The twenty-four years of the reign of Constantius were a period of “voices, and thunders, and lightnings,” ending in “earthquake." The whole period was characterized by these, which, affecting the so-called “Christian church,” evinced the displeasure of Heaven, and the indig­nant contempt of the Deity for its unholy and blasphemous specula­tions on the consubstantiality or likeness of

The Angel of the Golden Altar, as we have seen, represents a community — a community consisting of all the saints, with their Chief within the Veil, contemporary with the generation existing in the days of the silence, the voices, the thunders, the lightnings, and the earthquake. These saints were the sufferers by the persecutions of Constantine and his clergy; their prayers would therefore be for deliverance, and divine retribution upon the oppressor who was ruling them unrighteously with a rod of iron (ch. 12:5).

Though cast out of the third of the heaven, as indicated by his Tail drawing the third of the stars of the heaven, and casting them into the earth (Apoc. 12:4), the Dragon still retained power in “the earth and sea” of the Greco-Latin polity (Apoc. 12:12,13,15,16; 7:3). His power there was a “woe” to their indwellers, not excepting those who pro­fessed the faith of Jesus.

The sealing of the 144,000 being inaugurated at the opening of the Seventh Seal, by which sealing process the Spirit “spued out of his mouth” the Laodicean Catholicism of the Nikolaitans of the day— the Ariuses, Athanasiuses, Eusebiuses, Lactantiuses, and their coreli­gionists of the fourth century — the Temple, or Tabernacle of the Deity, in which he would condescend to sojourn upon the earth, must be sought for in connexion with a community to which these eccle­siastics, whether Arian or Athanasian, were opposed.

In the case? It is that the decisive battle that ejected the “Great Red Dragon” out of the heaven, in which he had been carrying on war against the Michael-Power, was fought at Scutari, or Chrysopolis, A.D. 324. “By this victory of Constantine,” says Gibbon, “the Roman world was again united under the authority of one emperor, thirty-seven years after Diocletian had divided his power and provinces with his associate Maximin.” Constantine reigned after this battle till A.D. 337, in which he died on May 22. This gives a little over thirteen years to his death.

Tranquility reigned in the newly constituted government of the Roman Dragon hos hemiorion, about half an hour. This is symbolic time, or time in miniature.

EXPOSITION

This seal covers the whole period from A.D. 324 to A.D. 1908, an interval of 1584 years. It therefore exhibits the judgments specially allotted to the seven trumpets, seven vials, and seven thunders.