Interpreting the seven trumpets of Revelation

John H. Pratt & Edward B. Elliott

1st trumpet

The first angel sounded, and lo the same tremendous tempest as before, black  with other clouds from the cold hail-generating countries beyond the Danube, was driving westward; and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, marking the destruction of life, and they were cast upon the earth, or land. For Alaric, now proclaimed king by the Gothic chieftains, descended upon Italy. As his march advanced, terrible omens and prognostications preceded him. "The Christian," says the scornful Gibbon, but with too much truth, "derived comfort from the powerful intercession of the Saints and Martyrs"--the very cause, as prefigured in this vision, of these judgments. Thrice, in fulfilment of his destiny, did the conqueror descend from the Alps on the Italian plains; marking his course each step, (as the awe-struck historians of the time relate), in country and in town, with ravage conflagration and blood; till the gates of Rome itself were opened for his entrance, and the Gothic fires blazed around the capital. Rhadagaisus, too, from the far north of Germany, with a host of Vandals, Suevi and Burgundians, burst "like a dark thunder-cloud from the Baltic" on the Rhoetian and Italian valleys. Blood and conflagration marked their steps through Gaul and Spain; the burning of trees and herbage, as well as of cities in this " third part" of the Roman earth is pathetically particularized by the chronicles of the times; so that the third part of the earth, or empire, was burnt up, and the third part of the trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

2nd trumpet

Gensehic, the Vandal-- "a name, which in the destruction of the Roman Empire has an equal rank with the names of Alaric and Attila"--fell with fire and sword upon all the maritime provinces of Africa, belonging to the Western Empire in the Mediterranean: and so great was the slaughter, that it might be said, that the third part of the sea, or the sea of this third, this Western portion of the Empire at large, became blood. And next, casting his eyes to the sea itself, he determined to create a naval force; and the Vandal fleets, issuing from the port of Carthage, claimed the empire of the Mediterranean. Sicily and Sardinia and the other western isles, the whole sea-third, answering to the land-third, of the Western Empire --were mercilessly ravaged by this burning conqueror; so that the third part of the creatures which were in the sea and had life, died. When asked by his pilot what course to steer, "Leave the determination to the winds" was his reply; " they will transport us to the guilty coasts, whose inhabitants have provoked the divine justice." Twice were the Roman navies utterly defeated off the coast of Spain by these Vandal tyrants of the sea, and thus the third part of the ships, which navigated the sea-third of the Empire, were also destroyed.

3rd trumpet

And the third angel sounded: and there fell a great star from heaven, that scourge of God, Attila, king of the Huns, burning like a lamp. Kings were made subject to his sword. The barbaric princes, it is said, "could not presume to gaze with steady eye on what they deemed his Divine Majesty." How much less his enemies in whose eyes he was like that baneful meteor which history tells us now blazed in the heavens, boding ruin and war! He carried his ravages along the upper Danube, reached and crossed the Rhine at Basle, and thence tracing the same great frontier river of the West, down to Belgium, made its valley one scene of desolation and woe; till at length repulsed in the tremendous battle of Chalons, he diverted his course, and fell on another destined scene of ravage--the Alpine heights and Alpine valleys of Italy. "From the Alps to the Apennines all was flight, depopulation, slaughter, slavery, and despair." This blazing star brought destruction wherever it went; and it fell, as already described, upon the third part of the rivers, and not only so, but upon the fountains of waters in the Alpine and Apennine heights.

4th trumpet

And so baneful was its influence, that the name of the star is called Wormwood : and all the river and fountain waters of the Westtern Empire, even the third part of the waters, became, as it were, deadly as wormwood; and many men died, that drank of the waters, because they were made bitter, and the region that they watered became the scene of famine and disease and pestilence. Thus was the final catastrophe preparing by which the Western Emperors and Empire were to become extinct. The glory of Rome had long departed; its provinces rent from it; the territory still attached to it, like a desert; and its maritime possessions and its fleets and commerce annihilated. Little remained to it, but the vain titles and insignia of sovereignty. And now the time was come when these too should be withdrawn. And the fourth angel sounded. And Odoaceh, chief of the Heruli, a barbarian remnant of the host of Attila, interposed with his command, that the name and oflice of Roman Emperor of the West should be abolished. The authorities turned in submission; and thus the third part of the Roman Imperial sun, that third which appertained to the Western Empire, was smitten, and shone no more; (the Illyrian third had been by common consent made over to the Eastern some years before). But the senate of Home still lingered in existence; and consuls were yearly appointed: till in the course of events which rapidly followed one on the other, in the next half century, these were also extinguished; and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars, was smitten; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise. So ended the awful visitations of the Gothic period.

5th trumpet

And the fifth angel sounded, for the first of the Three threatened Woes was now to come: and I saw a star, a prince of noble blood, fallen from the heaven of political power unto the earth, even Mahomet, by birth of the princely house of the Koreish, governors of Mecca, the principality of which was of no small eminence among the Arabs, and was in the possession of his grand-father at the time of Mahomet's birth. But soon after this event his father died, and then his grandfather; and the governorship of Mecca, the headship of the tribe, and the keys of the Caaba, the holy place of the Pagan religion of his ancestors and his countrymen, passed into the hands of another branch of the family; and his prospects of greatness seemed all blasted in a moment. Though by birth a star on the horizon of the political firmament, he was now, at the opening of the seventh century, a star fallen to the ground. But thoughts were even then working in his mind which were to raise him to an eminence, a bad eminence indeed! immeasurably higher than that of prince of Mecca. In the secret cave of Hera, three miles from that city, where he consulted, says the infidel historian, "the spirit of fraud or of enthusiasm," he laid his plans: and to him was given, not as he boasted in his Koran, "the key of God," but the key, as it were, of the bottomless pit.

And by the invention of a false religion, of hellish origin-- from beginning to end a lie; in its pretensions superseding the gospel of the Lord Jesus; in its doctrines inculcating views of the blessed God dark, cruel, and unholy; and in its morals a system of pride, ferocity, superstition, and sensualism--he opened the bottomless pit; and his false religion rose suddenly into eminence, and was seen as if there arose a pestilential smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace : and the imperial sun and the air or moral atmosphere were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

And there sprang from this fanatical imposture, and came out, as it were, of the very smoke itself, as the offspring of its pestilential blackness, myriads of followers of this false Prophet from Arabia; the Saracen cavalry hordes came up,like locusts from Arabia, the land of locusts, upon the earth, in numbers countless, with swiftness terrible, and compact in battle array, and burst forth in fury upon Christendom. In less than three years Syria was subdued. The Patriach of Jerusalem was compelled to attend the victor Caliph through the Province. He muttered as he passed along--"The abomination of desolation is in the Holy Place." The subjugation of Egypt, then of the African Province, then of Spain, followed--all within the limits of Roman Christendom; and besides these, Persia, North-West India, and Trans-Oxiana. In the ten years of Omar's Caliphate the Saracens reduced to obedience 3,600 cities or castles, destroyed 4,000 churches, and built 1,400 mosques for the exercise of the religion of Mahomet. And at the end of the first century of the Hegira the Arabian Empire had been extended to 200 days' journey from East to West, and reached from the confines of Tartary and India to the shores of the Atlantic. Throughout this wide extent the bitter contempt and hatred flowing out from the Moslem faith rankled in the breasts of the subject Christians. The marks of personal degradation and the insults offered to their religion were intolerable: and it might be said of their conquerors, unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

And it was commanded them by their false Prophet in his Book that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; an order oft repeated by the Caliph Aboubeker to the hordes on their first invasion of Syria--"Destroy no palm-trees, nor any fields of corn, cut down no fruit trees, nor do any mischief to cattle"--a dictate of policy, which enabled them to form flourishing kingdoms out of conquered countries. It was against Idoiators that Mahomet understood and declared his commission to be: and he distinctly charged the Christians of the Roman Empire with worshipping the Virgin Mary as God: and therefore he commanded his soldiers to hurt, not the fruits of the earth, but only those against whom he supposed himself sent, or, in language he would not comprehend, those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

And to them it was given, that they should not kill them, or annihilate the Christian body politic; and therefore time after time were these Saracens repulsed, whereby Christendom was preserved, both in the East and in the West. Twice did they, in the pride and plenitude of their power, attack the vital part of the Eastern division of Christendom, by besieging Constantinople; and on each occasion were compelled to retire, defeated and disgraced, as they had never been before. So also in the West; and most remarkably at that crisis, when, as Gibbon deelares, "it appeared impossible for France to avoid subjugation"--in which case, probably, all Europe would have fallen--a bulwark was raised up by the Franks under Charles Martel, and the Saracens recoiled, broken and discomfited from the blows of that "hammer of Western Christendom." Thus it was declared that the Christian body politic, neither in the East nor in any kingdoms of the West, should be destroyed; but that they should be tormented, by their bitter and oft-successful enemies, five symbolic months, that is, 150 prophetic days or 150 years--the exact period through which the intensity of this woe endured, reckoned from the False Prophet's public proclamation of his mission (A. D. 612) and his opening of the pit, to the flight of his locusts eastward, and their settlement at Bagdad (A. D. 762) which they built beyond the Euphrates and called the "City of peace." The Caliphate had been divided; "war was no longer the passion of the Saracens;" and "the luxury of the Caliphs relaxed the nerves and terminated the progress of the Arabian Empire." But during this period their hatred and power against Christianity were fierce and revengeful, and their torment which they inflicted was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.

And such was the anguish and misery they brought wherever they went, that it was foretold, in those days shall men seek death, and shatt not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall fiee from them.

And the likeness of the locusts was such as to indicate the people they represented : they were in one respect like unto horses prepared unto battle, and moved onwards like hordes of Saracen Cavalry; and on their heads were turbans, or as it were crowns or diadems like gold, a distinctive badge of the Arabs, who boasted in a national proverb, that God had given them four peculiar things--Turbans for Diadems, tents for walls, swords for entrenchments, and poems for written laws. And their faces were in courage like the faces of men; and by the beard and moustache, which the Arabs wore, they were easily discerned from the general mass of the men of Christendom.

And yet they had hair as the long hair of women, and were as the Arabs, in this respect even more discernable than in the other from the inhabitants of the Empire they invaded, among whom it was a reproach for men to wear long hair, as it was looked upon as a mark of effeminacy. And their fierceness was seen in their teeth which were as the teeth of the lions which haunt the wildernesses of Arabia.

And, according to the Saracen policy of wearing defensive armour, steel and iron cuirasses and coats of mail, they had in the vision breast plates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men for ihefive symbolic months already mentioned.

And they had a king over them, which is Satan, the angel of the bottomless pit: whose name in the JTebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon, or Destboyeb--for unlike the Gothic invaders who embraced the Christian religion, the religion of the conquered, these enforced their own, and made their Koran, the book of the spirit of the abyss, the code both of religion and law among all whom they subdued: and by its cruel enactments, and the soul-destroying poison of its doctrines, armed the Caliphs, or Vicars of the False Prophets, with the weapons and spirit of destruction.

But when the 150 years had passed, the intensity of this woe was gone, and the power of the Saracens dwindled through successive years : and indeed the Christians became the invaders. Bagdad, after a brief temporary splendour, weakened by luxury and licentiousness, declined in strength: and the fervour of religious fanaticism passed away. At length (A. D. 841) the reigning Caliph, distrusting the martial spirit of his Arabs, hired a band of 50,000 Turkmans from beyond the Oxus, to be the support of the Caliphate at Bagdad: and these, acting precisely the same part as the Roman Pretorian guards before them, revolted and insulted, humiliated and deposed the Caliphs; and so became a further and powerful accelerating cause of their sovereign's downfall: and in A. D. 934 the Caliphate was stript by the Persians of its temporal power. And later still, the Greek arms were borne triumphantly eastward, even across the Euphrates. In the West also the last great attempt of the Moorish Saracens against the rising Christian kingdoms in Spain was totally repulsed, and the Moslems, with continually contracted dominions, were rednced to the defensive, finally and almost for ever, about the close of the tenth century.

Two remarkable historic coincidences, which illustrate the providential goodness of God, occurred in this period of decline of the Saracenic power. The open Apostasy of the Church from Christ has been mentioned as the predicted cause of these terrible visitations; and Mahomet appears to have regarded his commission to be against idolaters. This charge was accordingly made against them by their conquerors, though ineffectually, throughout the seventh century. At length, some twenty years from the commencement of the eighth, the celebrated Isauriaii family was raised to the imperial throne of Constantinople: and its princes, for sixty years almost uninterruptedly--supported too, as even Gibbon admits, by not a few really religious persons, but with opposition bitter and abiding from the great majority within the empire and the Roman Popes without it,--set themselves strenuously to wipe away the reproach of image-worship, at least from Eastern Christendom. And what followed? It was A.D. 717, very soon after the Emperor Leo's accession and first decided attempt at this reform of the Church, that the grand armament of the Saracens drew near and attacked Constantinople; and was completely defeated! Again in A. D. 754, when the successor of Leo convened a grand synod at Constantinople, for the very express purpose of condemning image-worship, behold! the next year it was that the Caliphate became divided, the Mahomedan collossus broken, the scorpion locusts carried away, as by a strong west wind, to the Euphrates, and the intensity of the Saracenic woe brought to an end.

But alas! the efforts of these Emperors and of the more enlightened of their subjects proved abortive. Irene succeeded to the Imperial throne; and, having murdered her iconoclastic husband, who stood in the way of her object, she gathered (A. D. 787)] another synod, the famous 7th General Council, (called also the second of Nice), in which the decrees of the former Council under Leo's successor were reprobated and disavowed, and the worship of images, by a solemn act of the Catholic Church, declared lawful. It was just about this time that the Saracenic woe, though already broken, seemed to revive for a time. The Eastern Church persisted in its evil course; and under the influence of the Empress Theodora the struggle ended finally (A.D. 842) in the undisputed ascendancy and establishment of Image-worship.

And what then the consequence? With characteristic forbearance the Lord continued to his guilty people the interval of mitigation and of respites through the ninth and much of the tenth century. But would He endure the provocation much longer? How long would be the respite before another woe ? Hear the prophetic cry!

6th trumpet

Turkish cavalry, &c.

7th trumpet