Commentators on the Second Woe

Justin Almerin Smith, (1819-1896)

Commentary on the Revelation (1884) pp. 131-139.

12. One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter. If we realize, in any considerable degree, the nature of this which has now come before us under the fifth trumpet, we shall appreciate the warning of the eagle flying in the midst of heaven with his thrice-uttered "woe to the inhabitants of the earth." There was, in that warning, an implication that the evils to come upon men under the three following trumpets were especially to be dreaded. In the case of that just described, we cannot but feel that the warning was appropriate. This woe is now, in the movement of the vision, "past," and two others are yet to "come." This does not imply, we must notice, that the events indicated under the sixth trumpet, especially, are sequent to those under the fifth. We understand by it, simply, that as represented in vision it is "past."

13-21. The Sixth Trumpet Sounds.

13. The sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God. The Sinaitic manuscript reads, "from the golden altar," omitting the words "four horns." The Alexandrine reads "from the horns of the golden altar," omitting simply the word "four." The revised version adopts the latter, and translates, accordingly, "I heard a voice from the horns of the golden altar which is before God." The sense will not be materially affected, whichever of the readings be preferred. It is the general locality of the voice that is significant. The golden altar in the vision is that on which the incense given to the prayers of the saints was burned. It was thence that these prayers, made acceptable by the much incense, "ascended up before God." That which, under this sixth trumpet, is about to occur, seems thus to be put in relation with "the prayers of the saints." In other words, we are again to witness the unfolding of divine dispensations and procedures, which come in answer to prayer. There is nothing to indicate by whom the words of direction that follow are spoken. It is more in keeping with the spirit of the description as we have it, to understand this only – that it is "a voice."

14. Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet. This command is given to him, Alford thinks, "only in so far as he is the representative and herald of all that takes place under his trumpet-blowing." – Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates. The revisers translate ''at the river Euphrates," which makes the sense much clearer, while grammatically more exact. The Greek preposition used here (ἐπὶ), when it governs the dative of place, is not translated "in," but either "upon," or "at." The latter is plainly the word here. The river Euphrates, must be treated as symbolical, in the same way as "Babylon," "the holy city," "the new Jerusalem." To treat these as thus symbolical, and that as literal, would be against all rule, not only, but all propriety in the interpretation of imagery occurring in the same general connection. When we turn to seek the exposition of the symbol, difficulties present themselves. Yet these, if we gain the right point of view in our study, will mainly disappear. For that point of view we go back to the history of God's ancient people. In the times of Israel's apostasy and idolatry, the punishment with which God visited them with a view to reclaim and restore, came chiefly in the form of invasion by heathen nations. And these nations, almost invariably – all the most formidable of them – came from the direction of the Euphrates, Assyria, Babylon, Damascus – these were the instruments, for the most part, of judgment and punishment, through which God chastised his people in the times of their backslidings. If, now, we still bear in mind that in all the series of visions found in this part of the book we are studying (chs. iv.-xi.), the church of the New Dispensation is viewed as the substance of that type which was furnished in the Israel of the Old Dispensation, we shall readily perceive, that the symbolical Euphrates must stand in a relation with the symbolical Israel, like that which the literal Euphrates bore to the literal Israel. That is to say, it denotes in general the direction and source of the judgments with which an apostate church is about to be visited. This apostasy has been very strikingly set forth under the third, fourth, and fifth trumpets; the darkness descending on the earth from a firmament where the ordained lights had failed to shine, and ascending out of the pit in a deeper "blackness of darkness" still; the inroad of evil through the failure of that Christian instrumentality and influence by which it should have been stayed; and in general a condition of the Christian world not unlike that of the land of Israel in the times when "the Assyrian came down, like a wolf on the fold," or when Babylon made of Judea and Jerusalem a threshing-floor. That such is the nature of the allusion seems clearly to be inferred from what appears, by verses 20. 21, of our chapter, to be the purpose of "the plagues" sent forth under this trumpet. "We are there told that "the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood; which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk; neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts." This description applies alone to that period of the Christian Dispensation which we understand to be indicated by the third, fourth, and fifth trumpets, and to the condition of the Christian world as it was when the great apostasy was at its height. The papal religion was an idolatry, a worship of pictures and images, of saints ("demons" – departed spirits) and angels, above all in its form of Mariolatry – a perversion of the religious instinct in man, and of every revelation of himself which God had made, with a view to inspire and guide the love and the worship of his creatures, as flagrant and as ruinous to the souls of men, as any worst form of Paganism. The judgments under this sixth trumpet come as the punishment of that idolatry and of the crimes prevailing in connection with it. As God visited apostate Israel under the Old Dispensation, so now he visits apostate Israel under the New. To indicate the source and the nature of the visitation, a symbolism is employed consistent with this parallelism. "The four angels" bound "in [at] the great river Euphrates," are the instruments of the punishment. Four great powers, lying contiguous to the river Euphrates, are mentioned in Scripture as having important relations with Israel. Three of these we have already mentioned – Assyria, Babylon, Damascus. The fourth is Persia – not conspicuous, indeed, as an oppressor of the people of God; in some instances quite the contrary, as when Cyrus permitted the captive Jews to return, or when Darius Hytaspes authorized the rebuilding of the temple. Still, it was a heathen power, willing, as in the case of Xerxes, the Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther, to oppress the Jews, and even to slaughter them by wholesale; while his son, Artaxerxes Longimanus, exhibited active hostility in forbidding the temple rebuilding which the Jews after their return had commenced. It would, perhaps, be an arbitrary and strained view of the symbolism in our present passage, to treat the "four angels" as alluding to these four heathen powers – Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Damascus – throned by the Euphrates, and so largely used in God's providential dealing with his ancient people. And still, there may be reasons in favor of such a view, not unworthy of consideration. At all events, we can scarcely go amiss in saying that the symbolical Euphrates, in this vision, calls our attention to the source, and in some sense the nature, of the visitation under this sixth trumpet.

15. And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year. We should translate, "the hour, and day, and month, and year." The common version is misleading, here, as implying that the words designate a precise period during which the visitation to be described should last. Such is not the meaning; but that a certain hour, day, month, year, is appointed – that is, a, certain fixed moment of time, when what is to be described should occur. So it had been "prepared" in the divine purpose and plan. – For to slay the third part of men. "That they should kill the third part of men"; that is to say, "they," the four angels, as instruments of the divine purpose. The special mission here assigned indicates a significant point of difference between what occurs under the sixth trumpet, and that which took place under the fifth. The locusts were especially charged that they should not kill, but torment. Here the command is to kill. This, then, is war, of which we are about to read; not war of infernal hosts out of the pit, which "torment," but do not "kill," but war as history records it, only in this case peculiarly destructive. In it "a third part of men" will perish: the words not indicating in this case, more than in those before noticed, any exact proportion, but simply how large a number, though a number having in the divine purpose its exact limitation, will be the victims of this war, or succession of wars.

16. And the number of the army of the horsemen. He had just spoken of the four angels. Now he proceeds at once to describe the hosts which go forth under their leadership, or at their command. It seems to be taken for granted that the mission of the four angels "to slay the third part of men" will be at once understood as the marshaling of great armies in destructive wars. – Were two hundred thousand thousand. "Two myriads of myriads," Ellicott translates. "Twice ten thousand times ten thousand," is the translation by the revisers. Two hundred millions would be the number so represented. Clearly, the number is symbolical, and to be viewed purely as a feature of the vision. – And I heard the number of them. "The number of them" as they appear in vision; and as thus representing the fact that in the wars so pictured the hosts assembled in the contending armies will be vast beyond the power of literal expression.

17. And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them. The writer now describes the figures seen in the vision– both the horses and their riders. – Having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth and brimstone. The meaning is that the breastplates had the appearance of fire, of jacinth, and of brimstone. "The jacinth color," says Ellicott, "seems to be the dark purple or blue so often seen in smoke. – And the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions. Symbolical of the fierce and destructive nature of the wars in which these hosts are marching forth. – And out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone. All these features are intended to make the symbolical forms in the vision more accurately and vividly representative of that which the vision itself symbolizes. These armies are innumerable, signifying how general, as respects the inhabited world, this marshaling of armies will be, and what mighty hosts will come in collision on the various battle-fields. The very horses which the soldiers ride are ferocious in aspect; they have the heads of lions – fiercest of all beasts of prey – and out of their mouths go forth fire and smoke and brimstone, indicative of the infernal nature of the spirit by which these wars shall be instigated. It is as if, of that spirit, the very horses which bear the combatants, partake. The riders are in a like manner terrible in appearance. They wear flaming breastplates – the purple hue of smoke mingling with the fire, and a color of brimstone, as if suggesting that the armor and the weapons of the fierce soldiery are furnished out of the pit itself. It is straining the imagery far too much, to suppose any reference here to the invention of gunpowder, and the changes thus introduced in means of human destruction. The description throughout is simply the costume, if we may so speak, of the vision, and representative, purely, of the general fact, that the wars thus foreshadowed were to be in a surpassing degree, inhuman, fiendish in spirit, and destructive in effect. This is more specifically set forth in what follows.

18. By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone. This must be understood simply as imagery, symbolizing destruction, wasting and terrible.

19. For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails; for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt. There would seem to be in the imagery here, something like an identification of the horse with his rider. The horse partakes of the rider's fierce and destructive spirit, and shares in the murderous fight. And, indeed, in the tumult and fury of the fray, the horse and rider do seem alike terrible, especially in battles as waged in the olden time, when the fight was hand to hand, and was a mere trial of brute strength and ferocity. The description here implies, in the wars as symbolized in the imagery used, more than human ferocity and destructiveness, and more than that of the fiercest brutes. The picture becomes infernal in aspect as we study it. Out of the horses' mouths sulphurous flames pour, while their tails become serpents, armed with ferocious stings. The imagery suggests the idea of wars and battles waged in a spirit more fiendish than is even usually the case; in which this spirit shall be indicated in a manner express and terrible. In the "General Comments" we shall dwell more at length upon what may, as it seems to us, be viewed as the historical realization of this prophetic symbolism. It must suffice, here, to say that during the general period whose various aspects are brought to view under these four trumpets – the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth – especially the later portion of this period, exactly such a prevalence of destructive wars is upon record; wars, in many instances charged with a spirit not less ferocious than the imagery here imports.

20, 21. And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues, yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood, which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk; neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. We have made some mention, above, of what is imported by these words. It is now to be observed that the apostate church of the period under consideration – in general to be designated as "the Dark Ages" – the church itself, not simply the world outside the church, was no less corrupt and criminal than the language in these two verses implies. With every one of the crimes here mentioned, the papal clergy and monks were chargeable, and their example encouraged like enormities in those to whom they did not scruple, for a price, to grant absolution for the worst outrages upon humanity, and upon every law of God and man. What seems to be said to us here, is that the terrible wars by which Christendom, thus apostate and corrupt, was laid waste, were judgments of God, "let loose" in divine indignation, as when the heathen hordes in more ancient times came down upon apostate Israel. The judgment, however, did not work reformation. Myriads were slain; but those who survived, even as history records, "repented not."

GENERAL COMMENTS.

In the exposition of these two trumpets, we aim to abide by the principle of interpretation before explained – to take, that is, a medium course between that method of procedure, on the one hand, which seeks for exact and detailed historical fultillment for each more marked feature of the vision, and that, upon the other, which in avoiding this extreme, verges so far toward the opposite one. It cannot be extravagant, or unsafe, to assume that the general Apocalyptic scheme has a distinct and definite character in itself, and that this is determined by the foresight of, and the purpose to portray, what is distinct and definite in the history as anticipated. Viewing the trumpets as having reference to what is exterior and providential in the career of the church – God's spiritual kingdom among men, the outward aspects of that history, whose more inward and spiritual ones had already been set forth in describing its redemptive processes and results – we find ourselves, in comparing prophecy with history, coming upon periods, following the triumphant, though stormy, opening one, which seem pre-eminently suitable as scenes for the Apocalyptic drama. Indeed, we can scarcely think it possible, that in such a revelation of the future as is understood to be the purpose of this book, events like the great Christian apostasy, or periods of mighty change, and political disruption, like those which accompanied and followed that event, should be referred to only in a vague and obscure way. We look, rather, to find the general aspects of these tempestuous centuries wrought into the drama as marked features of it, and so distinct as to be capable of decipherment and exposition. While, therefore, we regard the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth trumpets as relating to the same extended general period, reaching from the time when the corruptions of Christianity began to tell in an express way upon the whole system of Christian doctrine, discipline, and life, to the time of the Reformation, we interpret these trumpets severally, as exhibiting this period under distinct aspects of it. The third and fourth trumpets present the apostasy in its process and effect. The fifth describes that moral condition which resulted from the combination of two causes – the corruption of Christianity and a general outburst of human wickedness. Apocalyptically represented as brought on through the agency of evil spirits in a new and unprecedented inroad on men; while the sixth is a picture of murderous and desolating wars, which, in point of fact, we know from history to have prevailed in a degree almost unparalleled, and with scarcely an interval of cessation, during all those dark and troubled centuries. Our exposition, therefore, deals with periods in the general aspects that especially characterize them; with large events and courses of events, rather than mere incidents; with principles and forces, rather than with persons.

It would be easy to find in history illustrations of the general view that we have given of the vision under the fifth trumpet. The barbaric element which came in with the hordes that overran the whole territory of the Western Empire, long survived, and yielded but slowly to the influences of the nascent new civilization. The old civilization, so long as it survived, was vicious and depraved, and only in individual instances felt the regenerating effect of even Christianity. Here was a meeting of conditions ominous enough; and when Christianity, the only influence tending to purify and save, became itself corrupt, and so largely, as is well known, a power for evil rather than good, it was an outlook for the nations as gloomy as can well be imagined. And these portents did not mislead. The history of Europe especially, the chief seat of Christendom, from the fifth to the sixteenth century, is, in the particulars now referred to, one of the most melancholy chapters in the annals of the human race. It is scarcely possible to go amiss in seeking illustrations of the fact in writers who treat of this period. There were, it is true, influences at work tending to good; it was a time of growth, as well as of destruction, of seed-sowing, as well as of rude and wild upturning of primitive soils; a time in which foundations were laid of much that is now deemed most auspicious for the future of the race – and of these features, indications appear in Apocalyptic foretokenings which we have yet to study. Yet so far as that aspect of it is concerned which comes to view under the fifth trumpet, the story of this period is one of the most painful and the most dishonoring to human nature ever told. An air of romance has been thrown over it by those representations in which what was best in the "chivalry" of the age is selected, and in which deeds of knightly valor or exhibitions of courage and strength are given, with all that should have supplied for the picture its dark back-ground studiously veiled. The grandeur of the feudal system is too often allowed to gild its outrageous cruelties and oppressions; monastic peace and culture, symbolized in the fruitful fields and vineyards which surrounded and adorned the monasteries – a contrast and an example to the rude peoples who gained from thence inspirations toward agriculture and the arts of peaceful life – have too often shut from view the fact that worse sinks of iniquity were not to be found in all the world than many of these ultimately became. The Romish priesthood did, indeed, often interpose to protect the victims of tyranny, and the privilege of ''sanctuary" was, in those stormy times, a refuge for thousands and thousands of hunted lives. Yet this very practice of making the altars of God a sanctuary against oppression and murder shows how unprotected human life then was, by all ordinary means, and how little of shelter there was in law or in justice; while, if the priesthood were ready to interpose where the tyranny of others was concerned, there was no power on earth that could shield or save the victims of their own. What relation of life was sacred in those terrible centuries? What law of God or man put a curb upon ferocious passion or brutal desire? To be weak, was to be at the mercy of unscrupulous power. To be poor, was to be enslaved. To have anything that could tempt cupidity, was to be "in jeopardy every hour." To be a Christian indeed, was to be made the victim of persecution; to wear the livery of the Man of Sin, was to be bound to him, body and soul, as the instrument of whatever mean or wicked thing it might please him to enjoin.

We may select, almost at random, a passage which will illustrate all this, as existing in one of the countries of Europe, France, about the middle of the fourteenth century.

We copy from Kirk's "Life of Charles the Bold." The condition of things described, had come about through special causes, yet similar causes had been operative, with like results and widely throughout Europe, during many centuries. "The administration of the law," says the writer we quote, "so far as the protection of life and property was concerned, was entirely suspended. Murder and rapine no longer sought their prey by stealth, or waited for the darkness to conceal their work. The country was covered with armed bands, wearing the badges of Burgundy or Armagnac, but subject in fact to no other leader than him who could best scent the plunder and guide them in the pursuit. These brigands infested every highway, and ravaged villages and farms, pursuing the work of destruction without hindrance and without fear. The peasantry, driven to despair, abandoned at length their ruined homes and wasted fields, their wives and children, their lives of industry and care, and fled in troops to the refuge of the thick forests, seeking sustenance with the wild beasts, crouching from the sunlight that shone upon an earth of which the devil, they exclaimed, was about to take possession." The words we italicize might almost be used as a comment upon the passage in the Apocalypse now especially in hand. The picture so drawn is by no means a solitary one, nor was the original of it to be found alone in any one of those gloomy centuries, or any one corner of Europe. The character of the throngs which followed Peter the Hermit in the first Crusade, some three hundred years earlier than the date given above, illustrates only too well the moral condition of the masses of the European population at that time. Says Michaud, the historian of the Crusades: "The civil wars, which had so long disturbed Europe, had greatly increased the number of vagabonds and adventurers. Germany, more troubled than the other countries of the West, was filled with men trained in brigandage, and become the scourge of society. They almost all enrolled themselves under the banners of the cross, and carried with them into a new expedition the spirit of license and revolt with which they were animated. . . . They had been told that the crusade procured the forgiveness of all sins; and in this persuasion they committed the greatest crimes with impunity. Animated by a fanatical pride, they believed themselves entitled to despise and ill-treat all who did not join in the holy expedition. . . . Everything which fell into their hands appeared a conquest over the infidels, and became the just reward of their labors. No captain durst place himself at the head of this ferocious troop; they wandered on in wild disorder, and obeyed none but those who partook of their wild delirium." Their excesses, however, were fully paralleled by those of knights and nobles, bearing the proudest names in European chivalry. The rapine and ravage, the merciless slaughter of helpless women and children, equally as of soldiers in arms, the enormities attending the sack of cities, the utter pitilessness of the Crusaders when victorious, as well as their brutal fury in the fight, amply show a survival of the same spirit which animated Goth, and Hun, and Vandal, in their inroads upon the old empire at the time of its tremendous overthrow. These are the mere glimpses of the age which history affords. What they suggest is even more gloomy than that which they disclose. For these are only the heaving billows of a sea, storm-troubled and boiling to its lowest depths. They reveal to us simply here and there a flight of the infernal locusts with whose poisoning myriads the murky air of those centuries was filled. It is in such a time that "men seek death," and lament when they do not "find it"; the burden and misery of life becoming too intolerable to be borne.

In the interpretation given to the vision under the sixth trumpet, a somewhat specific allusion will naturally be understood to be to the wars of Mohammed and his successors, and to the later contests of Christians and Saracens for the possession of the Holy Land. From about the middle of the seventh century, when Mohammed began the enterprise of spreading his religion throughout the world by the sword, until the middle of the thirteenth century, the date of the eighth and last crusade, there was a direct and more or less continuous struggle between the two great religions – Mohammedanism and Christianity'. The early portion of this period was occupied in the almost incessant wars of invasion and conquest carried on by the Saracens, with the specific and sustained design of completely destroying Christianity. The period first named, besides, from the middle of the seventh to the middle of the thirteenth century, was that within which the apostate Christianity grew into the proportions of usurped power, both spiritual and temporal, and of corruption reaching to all that is most essential in the religion of Christ, in which it at last bestrode and overshadowed the whole Western world. The parallel which seems implied in the Apocalyptic prediction, is almost a perfect one, between the judgment of God visited upon Christendom as thus apostate in these Mohammedan wars, and that which came upon apostate Israel in the invasions of heathen nations from the East and North. In truth, the hosts of Arabian warriors, who, under the banner of Mohammed and his successors, in less than a single century subdued to the faith of Islam five great nations – Persia, Syria, Egypt, Northern Africa, and Spain – and which at one time seemed likely to overrun the whole of Southern Europe, viewed themselves as instruments of divine anger upon the idolaters of Christendom. To the first of those ferocious leaders, Chaled – who united with extraordinary military skill, a fanaticism and a singleness of purpose which never lost sight of the one idea – the title, "The Sword of God" was given, and this designation became so identified with the whole idea of Saracenic conquest, that until this day it continues to be used by writers in their allusion to the wars of that period. There were, in these enterprises of the Saracens, other extraordinary features quite in accordance with that picture of them which we find here in the Apocalypse. The spirit of conquest has, of course, often so taken possession of individual men, conspicuous in history, as to urge them from one enterprise with that end in view to another, while even a world seemed insufficient to sate the passion which only grew more intense with each achievement. It is true, besides, that these men have shown themselves able to infuse their own spirit into the peoples they ruled and led, so as to make them at least submissive to the exactions necessary in the carrying forward of military schemes so vast, and so wasteful of both treasure and life. But there has never been, we may say, in the whole course of human history, another instance of an entire people possessed with this spirit, as the Saracens were; amongst whom, in fact, the host of the followers sometimes even went beyond the leaders in the eager passion for conquest, and in the insatiableness of that fanaticism which made the name of Christian one of deepest reproach, and themselves as pitiless as they were fierce. Again, the "four angels" that were "loosed" were "to slay." The expression implies destructiveness united to unsparingness of a special sort. Wherever the Saracens appeared, in the invasion of countries, or the siege of cities, they had one announcement to make – "the Koran, tribute, or the sword"; and when the first two were refused, the last smote without pity, yet was never glutted with slaughter. Like features appeared in the wars between Christians and Saracens in the time of the crusades. One reads the story of those fell encounters with shuddering amazement. The great numbers engaged – the army of the Christians which encamped near Constantinople in the first crusade, numbering some six hundred thousand fighting men; the waste of life on the part of the Christians in the long marches, with no proper provision for the wants of so vast a host, under Syrian suns and amidst the tremendous passes of the Syrian mountains and in the ambuscades where the nimble foe took them at unawares, and slaughtered them by tens of thousands; as well as, upon the other hand, on the part of the Saracens, where the heavy-armed Western warriors had them at a disadvantage, and crushed them like hornets caught in a gauntleted hand – in these things the foreshadowings of the Apocalyptic vision seem to be literally realized.

There, are, again, some coincidences of apparent correspondence between the prophecy and the history as regards the Saracenic invasion above referred to, which we may note, although we must not too much insist upon them as intentional. The four angels are "at the river Euphrates," and to some extent the seats of Saracenic power were there; yet not so much so as to make the name of the river, as it appears in the passage we are studying, any less symbolical. The real centre of Islam was, as it still is, at Mecca, although the successive caliphates occupied for their capitals, cities like Bosra and Bagdad, on the Euphrates or the Tigris. We believe the name Euphrates, however, to have a far broader meaning than the literal one, and to cover in its significance all the various phases of that struggle, during a period of six centuries at least, in which apostate Christendom suffered under that severest of all divine judgments, destructive wars; the most notable of these, as already shown, originating in a hostility to Christianity like that of Oriental heathenism to Israel, and waged with a like purpose – to destroy Christianity itself from the earth. Then the angels loosed are "four." So, one might say that the first Caliphs, recognized as true successors of Mohammed, were four – Abu Beker, Omar, Othman, and Ali. There were also four great teachers, Imams, corresponding to the Fathers of the primitive Christian age – Abu Hanifeh, Malek, Esh Shafy, and Hanbal. By these, four schools in theology were founded, which last until this day. No doubt, other like coincidences might be found. They should, perhaps, as in so many other cases noted in Apocalyptic interpretation, be treated as coincidences, and yet may be worthy of mention even so. We only add that such an event as the rise of Mohammedanism, by reason of its special relation to Christian history, could hardly fail of a place in an Apocalyptic scheme such as we are here following. And it is quite consistent with the Apocalyptic method that this great power appears on the scene as a mighty hostile force, seeking its own ends, yet used in the divine plan as an instrument of judgment upon an apostate church.

We must emphasize, as supporting the view we take of the vision under the sixth trumpet, what appears, in ver. 20, indicative of the divine purpose in the visitation described. "The rest of the men" – those who were not "killed" – 'repented not." We infer that to bring them to such repentance was the pourpose of the "plague" sent upon them. The sins of which they were to repent, were those into which Christians under the apostasy, and especially those who represented the Christianity of that period – the rulers and teachers of the church – had fallen. The period we have been considering, had then, these two marked features – the corruption of Christianity, on the one hand, to such an extent as to make this apostasy comparable in many features to the idolatrous ones of ancient Israel, and upon the other hand, a wide and almost constant prevalence of devastating wars, with the miseries always attendant upon such. We are taught here, to see in the one, God's just judgment upon the other. Of this underlying divine philosophy history takes little or no account; prophecy makes it pre-eminent as a clue to the right interpretation of the record. The "men" so visited, however, "repented not." A primitive Christianity and a pure church were to be restored by other means. Of these, we now, in the chapter immediately following, are to learn.