was born. The overthrow of Jerusalem and its ruling powers having been predicted by Christ under figurative language borrowed from earthquakes and eclipses,1 there occurred literal earthquakes just before the time, and extraordinary phenomena in the literal starry and meteoric heavens.In the Apocalypse, the mighty political convulsion of the Roman Empire that resulted from the revolt of the Goths, A.D. 395, on the death of Theodosius, having been predicted in one place under the figure of an earthquake, there are recorded to have occurred in it just the year before, and also the year after, repeated and severe literal earthquakes. And in another parallel Apocalyptic prophecy, the original passage of those same Goths into the empire having been symbolized as a flood poured out of the Dragon's mouth, it is noted in history, that there was at the time of Valens' great earthquake, a little previous, a most remarkable literal inundation also.-Once more, (turning to the prophecies of the Trumpets) as the irruption of Alaric and Rhadagaisus from Northern Germany was foreshown under the figure of a hail-storm, so the fact stands on record of there having occurred at the time of their irruption, not only, as Gibbon describes in his graphic picture,

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1 Matt. xxiv. 29; "The sun shall be darkened, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken."-I do not forget that this prophecy had a reference also (a very principal reference) to the convulsions immediately preceding Christ's second coming. But I conceive, in common with most commentators, that it was primarily intended of the destruction of Jerusalem: this being a type of the destruction of apostate Christendom at the time of the end.

2 See Bishop Newton's illustrations. I must quote one extract from Josephus' description of the convulsions in Judea; De Bell. Jud. iv. 4, 5. Δια γαρ της νυκτος αμήχανος εκρηγνυται χειμων, ανεμοι τε βιαιοι, συν ομβροις λαβροτάτοις, και συνεχείς ας ραπαι, βρονται δε φρικώδεις, και μυκήματα σειομένης της χης εξαισια. Προδηλον δ' ην επ' ανθρωπων ολεθρῳ το κατασημα των ολων συγκεχυμενον και όχι μικρο τις αν εικασαι συμπτωμάτος τα τέρατα.

* See my Vol. i. p. 349.-Ammianus Marcellinus, xxvi. 10, and after him Gibbon, iv. 338-340, describe a much more tremendous earthquake, which happened A.D. 365 soon after the accession of Valens; under whom occurred the Goths' trans-Danubian passage, revolt, and victory, which was the primary epoch and cause of the Gothic desolations of the empire. Its great extent throughout nearly the whole extent of the Roman world, showed, it has been observed by Geologists, that the cause was very deep-seated.

4 At Alexandria alone 50,000 were lost in it. Gibbon, ibid.—So the flood by which the Prince of Scylla was washed away,-" the Prince with half his people,"'-was an accompaniment of the great Calabrian earthquake of 1783.

5 Apoc. viii. 7.

a winter of unusual severity, by which the largest rivers were frozen,' but also, as Philostorgius relates, a tremendous literal hail-storm, of which "the hail was bigger than a man's fist:" and as the irruption of Attila was depicted under figure of a comet, so we are told that there actually appeared a great comet the first year of Attilla's ravages. Of course, phenomena of this kind occur too often to be by themselves, and on their own account, at all rested on by an expounder of prophecy. But the exemplifications just given show that the chronological coincidence, the picturing from the times, has not been. altogether unattended to by the divine all-prescient Spirit. And while with regard to the generality of men, God's purpose in ordaining remarkable elemental convulsions, such as I have enumerated, at times of severe national judgments impending, may have been simply to awaken a feeling of awe and expectation, (such as, we know, was awakened in many, by the physical phenomena that preceded Jerusalem's overthrow, the earthquake and deluge that preceded the Gothic revolt, and the convulsions of which Cowper speaks before the French Revolution,7) it may have been also his intention that they should serve to the prophetic student as a corroborative sign, conjunctively with others less dubious, of the time of the catastrophe or judgment predicted under such particular symbols being near at hand.

2. And so at length the mighty political convulsion of this modern age broke out. It was in the year 1788, just a month after the hail-storm, that the united financial and social derangements of the French nation were considered by both king and minister to render necesary the extraordinary and long-disused measure of the Con

1 Gibb. v. 177.

2 Daubuz, p. 368.

3 Apoc. viii. 10.

4 In the Chronicon of Count Marcellinus the comet and the Hunnish invader are thus immediately connected together; Stella quæ crinita dicitur per plurimum tempus ardens apparuit. Bleda et Attila fratres Illyricum Thraciamque depopulati sunt." B.P.M. ix. 523. Quoted before, Vol. i. p. 356: where see also p. 354 on the volcano.

5 See the last clause of the extract from Josephus given above. Gibbon says, in the passage above referred to, that they were regarded as presages of great calamities impending. 7 Exemplified in Cowper.

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vocation of the States General; that is of the representatives of the nation in its three estates, the clergy, nobles, and people. The day of their primary meeting at Versailles was May 5, 1789. "This," says Alison, "was the first day of the French Revolution." For the minister, as one demented, had doubled the number of the Tiers Etat, so as that the representatives of its body should alone outnumber those of the two other orders.3 And thus the DEMOCRATIC ELEMENT, which had been long silently growing up to wealth, intelligence, and political ambition, found, all suddenly and strangely, that power was placed within its grasp; nor did they let it slip. Scarce met, the Tiers Etat insisted on all the three forming together one deliberative body; and, on the clergy and nobles refusing, constituted themselves The National Assembly; as authorized even alone to legislate and act as the nation's representatives. And then, having soon, through firmness and support of the popular voice, overawed the others into submission and coalescence, and in the so united Constituent Assembly swamped the aristocracy of Church and State by force of numbers, they proceeded to enact the part of legislators, as with the authority of the state concentered in them; and abolished at one fell swoop the whole system of the long-established laws, rights, and customs of the nation, the privileges of the nobility, tithes of the clergy, and monarch's supremacy.5 "Absolute monarchy," says

1 The last previous convocation had been in 1614. Alison i. 168.

2 i. 178.

3 Alison i. 270. The numbers were of the clergy 293, of the nobles 270, (together 563,) of the Tiers Etat 565.

It was May 6, the day after the three Estates assembling, that the Tiers Etat insisted on one assembly. On the refusal of the two other Estates, they opposed till June 19 only passive resistance, refusing to proceed to business: but then at length, by a majority of 491 to 90, constituted themselves the National Assembly; and, on the Government imprudently shutting the hall against them, met elsewhere, and took an oath never to separate till they had settled the constitution on a solid basis. On the 22nd of June, 148 of the clergy joined them; on the 24th the Duke of Orleans and 46 of the nobles. Then the king yielded; and on June the 27th the whole were formally united in one assembly. Alison, i, 200-221.

5 This was August 4. Then all the feudal rights were surrendered by the nobles, and power given of redemption of the tithes : this last act being introductory to the total abolition of tithes. "That night," says Alison, i. 232, changed the political condition of France."

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Burke, "breathed its last without a struggle." -The world looked on with awe. Within two short months from their constitution as the National Assembly, they had overthrown everything that might have appeared most stable in Church and State. What might not this new democratic power effect, of change in the other European states? And in what spirit? And in what spirit? Of that of the ancient democracies, when conflicting and dominant, Corcyra suggested fearful recollections. And, in their attack on the Bastille, the Parisian populace had already exhibited a specimen as ominous of modern democratic fury and bloodthirstiness. 3 Thus the Apocalyptic figure of an earthquake had not only been realized in France, (indeed so realized that historians and statesmen perpetually adopt the metaphor,) but it was felt that it was that which might extend through Europe." "Already," it was said by Mr. Burke in the year 1790," in many parts of Europe there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a confused movement that threatens a general earthquake of the political world." And he foresaw other evils fast-coming also, with or after the earthquake : even, according to another of the anticipative symbols of prophecy, the lightnings and thunderings of war:and these, wars of atrocity and horrors unparalleled.—It was evident that a drama had opened, in which mightier

1 Burke, iii. 183.

2 See the awful description, with the historian's profound and philosophic remarks appended to it, in Thucydides, iii. 81–84. 3 July 14. 1789. 4 Mr. Alison, with reference to the Decrees of the memorable 4th of August, thus writes: "Nothing could be regarded as stable in society after such a shock. The minds of men were shaken as by the yawning of the ground during the fury of an earthquake. All that the age had rested on as most stable, all that the mind had been accustomed to regard as most lasting, disappeared before the first breath of innovation."-Mr. Fysh, in his work on the French Revolution, has also cited this passage. And he adds another from Blackwood's Magazine for 1839; "The abuses of the old French Government were such that they could scarcely have been shaken to the ground by anything short of the tremendous moral and political earthquake by which that country was visited. A cotemporary, Mr. Hey of Leeds, writing in 1795, naturally draws his figure from the earthquakes of the æra itself. "What a world we live in! The nations are agitated like poor Calabria." Wilberforce's Life, ii. 80. See the notice of this, p. 294 supra.

"A revolution in France," said Napoleon, " is always, lowed by a revolution in Europe." Alison, i. 514. 6 Works, Vol. iii. p. 207.

sooner or later, fol

agencies than those of man were operating.'-Its issues who could foretel ?

CHAPTER III.

THE FIRST VIAL.

"And I saw another sign in heaven, seven angels having the seven last plagues: for in them is filled up the wrath of God. . . . . And behold, the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony in heaven was opened and the seven angels went forth out of the temple, which had the seven plagues, clothed in pure and white linen, and having their breasts girded with golden girdles. And one of the four living creatures gave unto the seven angels seven golden vials full of the wrath of God, who liveth for ever and ever. And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God, and from his power; and no man was able to enter into the temple till the seven plagues of the seven angels were fulfilled."

"And I heard a great voice out of the temple, saying to the seven angels. Go your ways, and pour out the vials of wrath of God upon the earth. And the first went; and poured out his vial on the earth and there broke out a noisome and evil ulcer on the men who had the mark of the beast, and on them who worshipped his image."-Apoc. xv. 1; xvi. 2.

:

Such was the introduction and commencement of the Apocalyptic scene before St. John, of the Vial-outpour

1 So Alison i. 7. "The talent and wickedness displayed were too great to be explained on the usual principles of human nature. It seemed as if some higher powers had been engaged in a strife in which man was the visible instrument; as if the demons of hell had been let loose to scourge mankind. The fancy of antiquity would have peopled the scene with hostile deities, supporting unseen the contests of armies: the severer genius of Christianity beheld in it the visible interposition of Almighty power to punish the sins of a corrupt world."

2 The intervening verses will be considered in my Chapter viii. infra.

3 EYEVETO. The authorized translation "fell on them" is objectionable; as it seems to imply an infliction from without, not an eruption within.