Vol. 1., pp. 428,443
Spiritual death overshadowing the ecclesias from long peace and the philosophical “divinity” which had, to a great degree, superseded the gospel. The things that remain not yet dead, “ready to die.” The Thyatiran, or Jezebel-and-Satan, ethics, the seed which ripens into the Sardian — Apoc. 3:1.
ACT IV. — SEAL-PERIOD FOURTH
Apoc. 6:7,8
War, famine, pestilence, and barbarian invasion combined, sickly over the Roman Horse with the pale cast of death and corruption.
A.D. 235
“And when he opened the Fourth Seal / heard the voice of the Fourth Living One, saying, ‘Come and see!' 8. And 1 saw, and behold, a pale horse, and he who sits upon him, the name for him is Death; and Hades follows with him: and there was given to them authority to kill upon the fourth of the earth with sword, and with famine, and with pestilence, and under the beasts of the earth.”
The fourth living one full of eyes is likened in countenance to a flying eagle. The people represented by this were still “a habitation of the Deity through the Spirit,” and witnesses of the judgments to be revealed in this fourth seal. The Spirit of this divinely inhabited community did not invite John to “come and see” till the Lamb had opened the seal; and this series of events did not occur till A.D. 235, when the auspicious calm that had pervaded the Roman world for thirteen years came to an abrupt and sanguinary termination by the assassination of Alexander Severus, and the massacre of his most faithful friends, by the fury of the soldiers.
When the opening was complete, John saw hippos chloros, a pale horse. The word rendered pale indicates green as the basis of the pallor. Pallida mors was proverbial among the Latins. Hippocrates enumerates the color of the facial skin fading into green and black among the symptoms of approaching death. Nothing could be more appropriate than the color which accompanies putrefaction as representative of the Italian body politic at this crisis of its “dreadful and terrible” history. It had suffered severely under the second and third seals; but what were these in comparison of the deathstrokes by sword, famine, pestilence, and beasts, speedily and of long continuance, to fall upon the Pagan Horse! A deadly paleness and livor would come over it — a hue emblematic of approaching dissolution, as most expressively represented by the chloros of the fourth seal.