We are plainly informed in this text, that its terms are not to be understood “literally”: that the great mountain in a state of intense combustion was not a real mountain, but something analogous thereto.
The following historical summary from Elliot’s Horae Apocalyp- ticae being strictly correct, I cannot do better than to lay it before my readers. “The first angel sounds his trumpet: and lo the same tremendous tempest as before, black with other clouds from the cold hailgenerating countries beyond the Danube, and charged with lightning and hail, appears driving westward.
A prophecy couched in such terms as these indicates nothing but judgment of the severest kind. It is a tempest of the most scathing description imaginable — a beating down with hail, scorching with lightning, and causing blood to flow.
Though the wind blow towards divers points, and is styled the east wind, the north wind, and so-forth, it is still but one and the same wind, air, or spirit in motion. So with “the four winds” of ch. 7:1, they were the one wind, which, when blown against Italy, Spain, Gaul, and the Roman Africa, “the four corners of the earth” to be tempest-tossed, sounded forth destroying blasts, and swept with withering desolation all green and living things.
After the apostle saw the things represented in the sixth chapter; that is, after he saw in vision the progressive accomplishment of the taking out of the way of that power, even of the pagan Greco-Latin or Roman power, which hindered the revelation of the New Power in the estate of Daniel’s fourth beast — a power both spiritual and temporal, or ecclesiastical and civil, unknown to the Augustan Caesars who ruled anterior to Constantine; and germinated from that “Mystery of Iniquity” which, as tares, was sown and springing forth in growing vigor in the d
According to Varro, the foundation of the city, was laid by Romulus on the 20th April, in the year 3961 of the Julian period (3251 years after the creation of the world, 753 years before the birth of Christ). The Romans conquered nearly the whole of the then known world. In the time of Julius Caesar, the empire was bounded by the Euphrates, Taurus, and Armenia on the east; by Africa and Ethiopia on the south; by the Danube on the north; and by the Atlantic on the west.
A.D.
324. Opening of the Seventh Seal, marked by the victory of Constantine over Licinius at Chrysopolis.
Silence in the heaven a half hour begins.
337. Silence, or peace, ends.
All things being prepared — the iniquity of the catholic apostasy being matured, the executioners of judgment upon it being ready, and the 144,000 to be taken from it duly sealed — there was no longer any reason for holding back the tempests that were appointed to blast “the earth,” “the sea,” and “the trees,” of the section of the catholic dominion doomed to judicial overthrow.
Could it have been possible for “seducing spirits,” or demons, who had departed from the faith, and speaking lies in hypocrisy, to have invented and set up such a system of abomination in the fourth century, and in the name of Christianity, and the Deity not have poured out of His wrath upon the deceivers and the deceived?
The death of Julian left the Ancient Idolatry in possession of the empire, but without a champion. He had endeavored to thoroughly