John says that the name of the representative personage he saw sitting above, over, or upon, epano, the pale horse, was “Death.” The form of words in which he tells us this is according to the form of the previous seals.
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death overshadowing the ecclesias from long peace and the philosophical “divinity” which had, to a great degree, superseded the gospel.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
In the Most Holy Place of the Temple of Solomon there were two
In Isa. 6:2, these cherubic symbols are styled seraphim. “I saw the Adonai,” saith he, “sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Seraphs stood near to it... .
The “little strength” of the Philadelphian state of the Christian community was now exhausted, at the end of the “little season" of ten years, during which the “fellow-servants and brethren” were being killed by Diocletian, Galerius, and Maximin, as foretold in the prediction of the Fifth Seal.
In the apostolical state of the Christian community the faith, hope, and love of the brethren was conspicuous and strong. But after the One Body had passed through the Ephesian, Smyrnean, Pergamian, Thyatiran, and Sardian, states, it was greatly enfeebled in all its primitive forces; so that when it was fairly established in the Philadelphian, its brightest examples, who had kept the word and had not denied the name of the Spirit, constituted but “a little strength” for the whole.
The state of things deplored by Cyprian was that which resulted in the Sardian, characterized by the Spirit as a death-state. By the generation of professors contemporary with it, it was not so considered.
The apostasy from “the truth as it is in Jesus" must have progressed very far when two such chiefs of the Roman Dragon, as the emperors Alexander and Philip, could be recognized as Christians.
This state of the Christian community is illustrated by the writings of Tertullian, Pantaenus, Clemens Alexandrinus, and the Alexandrian School of “Divinity.”