Volume 3

The following is Mr. Elliott’s summary of the phenomena of the vision. “Which,” he inquires, “is the new scene of judgment? ‘The third of the rivers,’ it is said, ‘and the fountains of waters.’ It begins where yon mighty river to the North forms the ancient limit between barbarian Germany, and the Illyrian, or Middle Praefecture of the Roman Empire. Mark the portentous meteor that glares over it; like a blazing torch trailing its red line of light behind it in the Northern sky!

On account of the luminaries in the natural heaven governing the day and the night (Gen. 1:14-18), all luminaries in the symbolical lan­guage signify ruling powers; and the light itself is well employed to sig­nify the edicts, laws, rules, or directions that proceed from them for the good of their subjects. Thus of the Great King, styled the “Day Star,” and “the Sun of Righteousness,” it is said in Psalm 119:105, “Thy word is a light unto my path;” and in Hos. 6:5, “Thy judgments are as the light.”

The following is Mr. Elliott’s sketch of the phenomena of this vis­ion. “A pause ensues. Then presently there is heard another trumpet- blast of judgment.

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.