the opus operatum of baptism,) and of the priesthood as the necessary and only channel of grace-the proof arising out of a most remarkable parallelism,' in respect of some eight or ten particulars, between what is noted. in the sealing and palm-bearing visions as effected by Christ and his Divine Spirit in the 144,000, the election of grace, or true Israel, distinctively and alone, and that which history reports to have been more and more regarded, in the current estimation of the age referred to, as effected through priestly agency in all baptized Christians by the very baptismal ceremonial, and the subsequent application of other sacraments in case of those Christians' correct observance of church ordinances. It was just such a parallelism of particulars, in the way of allusive contrast, (I beg the reader to mark the sufficiency of the test,) as at once convinces the student, in the absence of direct historic testimony, that the Athanasian Creed must have been drawn up with allusion to, and in condemnation of, the heresies of the Arians, Eutyches, and Nestorius; and would convince him also, if their history were wanting, (which it is not,) that the Articles of the Church of England were drawn up in opposition to those of Popery and Trent.-Secondly, the very manner and means seemed also hinted, by which Christ's remnant would be preserved, both then and thenceforward, from the infection and deadening influence of this ever-growing ritualist apostacy: viz. by a discovery, at that æra to be specially vouchsafed the true Church, of the doctrines of grace-of electing, enlightening, life-giving, justifying, saving grace, according to God the Father's choice, by God the Spirit's influence, and through God the Redeemer's blood and righteousness:

-precisely such a revelation as the sealing and palmbearing visions conjointly signified. For just as, at this point in the Apocalyptic prefigurations, the electing and sealing vision was pictured before St. John, so, at the corresponding historic period of which I speak, a revelation of precisely similar character was made, through

1 Vol. i. p. 253-257.

the great Augustine principally, to the true Church of God: a revelation which is found to have furnished, for centuries after, the doctrine on which it fed, and through which mainly it was preserved alive, in the wildernessstate of a general surrounding apostacy.

Nor must I omit to add that, as the appended vision of the palm-bearers carried St. John's views far onward, when they looked into the probable future fortunes, duration, and extent of Christ's true Church, until its presentation before God, after perhaps a long time of tribulation, and entrance into blessedness,-so at the end of the fourth century, when the storms of invasion were on the point of sweeping over the Roman Empire, the views of Christians, which had before limited the earthly duration of the church, and its time of trial in the world, to that of the then Roman Empire, became enlarged, and looked far onward to the final blessed issue still chiefly through the teaching of Augustine.1

In the conclusions thus formed respecting the Apocalyptic visions shown to St. John, as not merely prefiguring facts, but facts as they would be seen by the true Church of the time figured, it was presumed that he saw these visions, not as a mere individual, but as a symbolic man; i. e. as the representative of Christ's true Church, or of its chief ministers and seers of the true apostolic succession, in each successive age presignified. But this was no unwarranted presumption. It was one shown to be agreeable to the analogy of other prophecies, above all (as afterwards strikingly illustrated 3) to that of the Apocalyptic prophecy itself:-not to add that it accorded also with the belief and interpretation (however imperfectly carried out) of the earliest patristic, as well as of many of the more eminent later expositors.

And so (after a brief introductory notice of a vision of incense-offering in the Apocalyptic temple, which on

1 See the second Section of the Sealing Vision.

2 Vol. i. p. 267-270.

3 Viz. in the prefigurations of the Reformation. See the summary pp. 15, 16. infrà.

the same principle of allusive contrast seemed to hint that, while the saints still approached God in prayer through Christ as their Mediator, the rest, though called Christians, would have forsaken and be neglecting his mediatorship,—an intimation verified in the sad and ever-increasing tendency of the professing church at the close of the fourth century to saint-mediatorship,')---I say, after this the prophecy was seen to proceed to the development in symbolic visions of the judgments of the seventh Seal, now at length opened :-judgments sevenfold in number, as marked in limine by the provision of seven trumpet-angels, to sound forth the appointed times, successively of their infliction; and in character judgments as of tempests, from the agency of the four tempest-angels charged, we before saw, with the fury of the four winds of heaven against apostate Christendom.Those of the first four trumpets being depicted as judgments of desolation on the third of the Apocalyptic (or Roman) earth, the third of the sea, third of the rivers, and third of the sun and stars, corresponding,-in the which the local scene of infliction was the thing most strikingly marked in the prophetic description,-they were explained of the four several successive and not uncorrespondent desolations of the Roman Western Empire, by Goths, Vandals, Huns and Herulians, on its land territory, maritime colonies, frontier river vallies, and high authorities of state, respectively :—a celebrated tripartition of the Roman world, (elsewhere in the prophecy strikingly referred to,) the Western third of which embraced the provinces of what was afterwards the Western Empire,2 furnishing a precise literal explanation of the Apocalyptic third part; and the principle of construing such territorial divisions, and the localities of land, sea, and rivers, literally,3 albeit in symbolic pre

'See Vol. i. p. 306–313.

2 It was shown that even after the bipartition of the Roman Empire, the Western Empire had in the first instance only part of the intermediate or Illyrian third and at the time of the third Trumpet's desolation by Attila, only the European territory originally assigned it in the tripartition. See Vol. i. p. 335— 340.

3 I mean literally, as fixing the locality intended. There may still attach a

2

dictions, being proved accordant with the general analogy of Scripture prophecy :-not to add that the truth of our interpretation was further corroborated by the equally successful application of the same principle of interpretation to prophecies very similarly expressed in the four first Vials.'-Next came the judgment of the fifth Trumpet. And we had the test of its position in Apocalyptic chronology, the Arabian character of its prefigurative symbols, its accompaniment by, and origination out of, some false religion from the pit of the abyss, as well as the general character of the plague, its well-defined period of intensity, and well-defined limits to its destroying power, we had, I say, all these concurrent marks,-marks which I think cannot reasonably be mistaken, whereby to identify it with the irruption and desolations in Roman Christendom of the Mahometan Saracens.-Nor was the evidence dissimilar or inferior on which we explained the sixth Trumpet's plague of the Turks. Its declared local origin from the Euphrates, its apparently implied connexion with the plague of the previous Trumpet, the several particulars of its composite symbol, some very remarkable,-as that which described sulphur, fire, and smoke to proceed from the mouths, and authority and power of injuring to attach to the tails, of the symbolic horses in vision,3-its destined office of destroying the third part of men, (the Eastern or Greek third, nearest Euphrates, it would seem) and the remarkable period of time that was to elapse from the commencement to the final accomplishment of its work, all concurred to assure us that we could not be in error in interpreting this plague of the Seljukian and Ottoman Turks.

symbolic meaning to the term,-the sea or river, for example, as symbolizing the people on or near it. So the frontier rivers of the third Trumpet and Vial, and again the Euphrates of the sixth Trumpet and Vial, were expounded literally as to their geographical position, but figuratively as meaning the people near them. Which last has been done not by myself only, but by those who most carefully avoid the literal local principle of exposition in the three first Trumpets. And does it need to say that in so expounding the Apocalyptic Euphrates, they virtually acknowledge the correctness of the principle contended for?

1 See Vol. iii. pp. 305, 327, 332, 340.

2 See Vol. i. pp. 407-413.

See ib. 482-486.

1

2

On the sufficiency of the evidence of the THIRD PART of our Exposition, and certain reference of the prophecies it embraces to the REFORMATION, the reader, if satisfied thus far, will not, I think, long hesitate. The prophecy turns from speaking of the destruction of "the third part of the men," or Eastern Roman Empire, to what it calls "the rest of the men,' i. e. of the Roman world; which can only mean those of Western or Papal Christendom. And after briefly sketching their religious state as that of an awful apostacy, long before begun, and even yet unrepented of and persisted in,-an apostacy exhibiting itself chiefly in five several points, all and each of which were shown, on the fullest clearest evidence of history, to have characterized Papal Christendom, both during the 400 years (from 1057 to 1453) of the Turkman's destroying progress from Euphrates to Constantinople, and also throughout the remainder of the 15th century, which followed after the fall of that Greek capital, there was next after this, I say, a vision exhibited on the Apocalyptic scene, as sudden as glorious, of Christ descending on the earth, revealed in light as the Angel of covenant-mercy and Sun of righteousness, with a book opened in his hand, as if for men to read it,-apparently the Bible or gospel part of the Bible a picture as fit, I think, as could have been devised, to depict the heaven-sent outbreak of gospel-light at the Reformation, on the opening of the 16th century. Then, whereas the Angel's planting his feet on land and sea, as if to claim them to himself, and his roaring like a lion, as if against some enemy, seemed to imply the fact of some usurper having at the time appropriated his rights and kingdom, so we saw from history that not only did such a usurping Antichrist then exist and triumph but that actually, at the exact epoch corresponding with the vision, he permitted himself to be represented before Europe in gorgeous paintings, on a high festival day at Rome, almost precisely as Christ was represented here; his face radiant as the Sun of Righteousness, the 1 Apoc. ix. 20.

2 Apoc. x. 1.