Revelation 6:7-8

THE FOURTH SEAL.

And when he had opened the fourth seal,. heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And. looked, and behold. pale, horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. 6:7, 8.

Again, for the fourth time, the exile Of Patmos beholds. horse. It is still. time of war. The horse is now pale, the bloodless color of the sheeted dead. Upon him sits an undescribed figure, called by the apostle, DEATH. Behind the dread destroyer follows Hades, the unseen world, swallowing up the dying mortals and hiding them from human vision. The means employed to destroy men are described.

Death and Hades employ,

(1) the sword, or war;

(2) hunger, or famine;

(3) death, or pestilence, for so is the word hero used often translated, and such is its meaning in this place; and, finally,

(4) the destruction caused by the wild beasts of forests and field.

The evident meaning of this symbolism is so plain that all can understand its application, and we need only ask if the facts correspond. Do we find the scarcity, want, hunger, and pestilence, indicated by the prophecy, during the latter portion of this period of civil commotion? Do we have an awful reign of Death in the forms signified by the seal?

Let the reader turn to the tenth chapter of the first volume of Gibbon's Rome. It recounts the events of the reign of Gallienus, which ended in A. D. 268, or about seventy-six years after the death of Commodus. It details the attempts of no less than nineteen pretenders to the throne, who aroused rebellions that were quenched in blood, and themselves forfeited their lives by their presumption. It describes the dreadful sufferings of the Roman Empire during the period of disaster and gloom, and then the historian closes the chapter with the words we give below.. ask the reader to carefully read the words of the Scripture and then compare them with the following words of Gibbon:

But. long and general famine was. calamity of. more serious kind. It was the inevitable consequence of rapine and oppression, which extirpated the produce of the present, and the future harvests. Famine is almost always followed by epidemical diseases, the effect of scanty and unwholesome food. Other causes must, however, have contributed to the furious plague, which, from the years two hundred and fifty to the year two hundred and sixty-five, raged without interruption in every province, every city, and almost every family of the Roman Empire. During some time five thousand persons died daily in Rome; and many towns, that had escaped the hands of the Barbarians, were entirely depopulated.

Applying this authentic fact to the most correct tables of mortality, it evidently proves, that above half the people of Alexandria had perished; and could we venture to extend the analogy to the other provinces, we might suspect that war, pestilence, and famine, had consumed, in. few years, the moiety of the human species.

Let all notice the correspondence. The prophet asserts that one-fourth of mankind would be destroyed, but the infidel historian goes beyond the prophet, and doubtless exceeds the facts when he makes the mortality twice as great. The prophet names the sword, famine, pestilence, and beasts of the field as instruments of destruction. The historian affirms that half the human race were destroyed by the first, three of these agencies, but fails to mention the fourth. We might, without historical proof, dare to assert that on the terrible depopulation of large districts, the beasts of prey, wolves, hyenas and lions, would so multiply as to become objects of terror, but we are not left to this necessity. Not. generation later, about A. D. 300, Arnobius "Adv. Gentes," refuting the charges made by heathen that various calamities were due to the enormous increase of Christians, exclaims: "When were wars waged with wild beasts and contests with ions? Was it not before our time? When did. plague come upon men, bitten by serpents? Was it not before our time?"

I have thus far discussed the opening of four seals. The second verse of chap. VI. reveals to us the white horse and the crowned conqueror who was his rider. This. have pronounced the seal of conquest, foreshadowing the wonderful conquests of Trajan, in the second century. The red horse of the fourth verse is the seal of civil war, fulfilled in the awful convulsions that began about A. D. 186, and agitated the whole civilized world. The third seal, the black horse and balance of the fifth verse, is the seal of want, while the next, the pale horse of the eighth verse, is the seal of death.

Such is the symbolism of the first, second, third and fourth seals. About its meaning there can be no mistake. Nor can there be any doubt as to its wonderful fulfillment. Prophecy, on the one hand, points to the pictures upon the panorama of Patmos, and says, "Here is the future." Upon the other hand, history points to its undubitable records, and replies, "Here is the fulfillment." The intelligent reader beholds with astonishment the wonderful agreement.