champion of the Arian heresy, and a ruler in ecclesiastical affairs wherever his conquests extended. In this respect his fiery and desolating course is, with strict regard to symbolical language, designated by the words "burning as it were a lamp;" for his name stands in dreadful pre-eminence, not merely as a destroyer of nations, but as a ruthless and savage persecutor of the Lord's people. Gibbon says, "The cruel and absurd enterprize of subduing the minds of a whole people, was undertaken by the Vandals alone. Genseric himself, in his early youth, had renounced the orthodox communion; and the apostate could neither grant nor expect a sincere forgiveness. He was exasperated to find that the African who had fled before him in the field, still presumed to dispute his will in the synods and churches; and his ferocious mind was incapable of fear, or of compassion. His Catholic subjects were oppressed by intolerant laws and arbitrary punishments. The language of Genseric was furious and formidable: the knowledge of his intentions might justify the most unfavourable interpretation of his actions and the Arians were reproached with the frequent executions which stained the palace and dominions of the tyrant." The same historian immediately afterwards speaks of "the religious war," and says that "persecution was made the serious and important business of the Vandal court."

Acting on this principle, throughout all his extensive ravages, he not only spoiled private houses, palaces, and public buildings, but he stripped the

churches of their riches and ornaments; rased them in most instances to the ground; seized their revenues; sent their bishops into exile, or to the slaughter; and maimed, and otherwise tormented or slew, such as were nobly firm and inflexible in acknowledging the Deity of God their Saviour. Thus in every sense were "the waters made bitter, and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter."

FOURTH. The deeply marked lines of desolation inflicted on the Empire by the three trumpets already considered, were of that destructive and permanent character, and they had so completely overthrown the vast colossal power of Rome in the West, that it required no new enemy from beyond the bounds of the Empire, no new fiery mountain or blazing star, to finish the work of desolation in the subversion of the imperial throne. "'The remnant, or the refuse of previous invasions, was enough to destroy the last remaining parts of Roman greatness in Italy, and to abolish the office and the name of the Emperor of Rome."

Accordingly, on the sounding of the FOURTH TRUMPET, Odoacer, king of the Heruli-a bold barbarian, and popular leader of the confederate troops of Italy, of whom no new symbol or similitude is given, as in the three former instances-in the year 476 stripped the emperor Augustulus of his imperial robes, and every shadow of Roman greatness in the West departed! In the In the space of twenty

years, nine emperors had successively disappeared: the present one was a youth only recommended by his beauty; and would be "the least entitled to the notice of posterity, if his reign, which was marked by that extinction of the Roman empire in the West, did not leave a MEMORABLE ERA IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND."* His real name was Romulus Augustus; respecting which the same historian remarks, "the appellations of two great founders of the city, and of the monarchy, were thus strangely united in the last of their successors." Anticipating another similar fact which will shortly come under our notice, in speaking of the extinction of the Eastern empire, it may in like manner be remarked, that the last of the successors of Constantine," the founder of the Eastern capital, likewise bore his name.

Thus was the third part of the sun, the ruling power, smitten; likewise the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; and that to such a degree, as that neither the one nor the other could afford any light. In consequence of this eclipse, or obscuration, the Western empire was darkened for above three centuries, so that "the day," whose light is direct from the sun, "shone not for a third part of it; nor the night," which receives its light from the other luminaries, the moon and the stars "shone likewise." One of the heads was, as it is elsewhere expressed, thus "wounded to death," and

* Gibbon.

did not revive until the commencement of the ninth century. In the mean time the evils and miseries of the Roman world arrived at that extreme pitch which is so eloquently described in the above quotation from Dr. Robertson; and the West settled into a gloom of ignorance and barbarism.