“And they shall see among the peoples, and tribes, and tongues, and nations, their corpses three days and a half, and they shall not suffer their corpses to be put into tombs. ”
The ptomata, in this text rendered corpses, are so called because they had fallen down from their former position of “standing before the God of the earth.” They were to be in this prostrate condition until something providential should occur to cause them to “stand upon their feet;” when, of course, they would no longer be corpses. The text before us, then, informs us, that the witnessing prophets having finished their tormenting testimony, were silenced. When witnesses are put to silence, they are symbolically dead; and so long as they are compelled by authority to keep silence, they are in the death-state: and though they may continue associated into bodies, yet being forbidden to assemble, and to propagate their principles upon pain of death, as by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, they are to all witnessing intents and purposes, dead bodies, or corpses.
They were reduced to this condition of death in all the breadth of the Great City over which the Deity of the earth exercised ecclesiastical sovereignty: not in France alone, but in Italy, and other papal countries also. This appears from the formula blepsousin ek ton laon, &c,. they shall see among the peoples, &c., their corpses. They must have been put to silence among these peoples, tribes, tongues, and nations, or they could not have been seen by them as unburied corpses. These nationalities had often experienced the potent effects of their witnessing when “in their days of the prophecy” they had turned the waters into blood: but this they were now no longer able to do, for they had fallen down from their standing in their midst; and the time was come for these “waters upon which the Great Harlot sits,” to rejoice over them in this the day of their prostration.
Now, when people a e dead, it is usual for the living to put them out of sight, or to bury them, as soon as possible; but, in the case of these corpses “they would not suffer them to be entombed.” Who would not suffer it? Their enemies? Or some others friendly towards them? Certainly not their enemies; for these did their best to destroy them, and to blot out the remembrance of them for ever. It was the protection afforded them in the Protestant States that prevented their burial and decomposition. The refugee witnesses that fled by hundreds of thousands from the presence of the Deity of the earth and his regal adherents, settled in Holland, Britain, Protestant Germany, and America; where,
under the protection of the laws, they existed as corporate societies, but bearing no testimony as of old. Some of these governments remonstrated in their behalf which was not without influence in staying the destroyer’s hand. Hence, an unburied remnant of them was permitted to remain in the breadth of the Great City—a prostrate remnant, no longer able to testify, but waiting in silence for their resurrection to life and power.