they prevailed, has been emphatically called the dark ages, and the spiritual bondage under which mankind then groaned, is known by the significant appellation of the papal yoke. During these ages of ignorance and superstition, the Scriptures were hidden from the eyes of the people; the worship of the Virgin Mary, and of saints and their images, and of the bones of dead men, were substituted for the service of God and of Christ. A burthensome yoke of rites and ceremonies, of mortifications, penances, and celibacy, was imposed on men. Yet, in the midst of this darkness, an obscure ray of light sometimes illumined the spiritual horizon: a few faithful and enlightened men in every age, were raised up by Divine Providence, to bear testimony against the universal corruption, to whom were vouchsafed the influences of the Spirit, the wine and oil, in rich abundance. This light burst forth with increased and inextinguishable splendour at the era of the Reformation, and seems, in the present eventful period, to be extending its benign influence to those parts of the world, hitherto unblest with the knowledge of Revelation.t Thus has the * *See Milner's History of the Church of Christ, passim. It has become the practice of some, among the students of Prophecy, to throw a species of reproach upon the Missionary efforts of the present age. I, on the contrary, believe, that though it were vain to expect the conversion of the world by our Missions, yet, with all their defects and imperfections, they are the glory of this age. Already is the whole edifice of Idolatry in British India shaken to its foundation, by our Protestant Missions. The savage tribes of Southern Africa have felt the healing virtue of the doctrine of the cross, and command not to hurt the wine and oil, received its accomplishment in every period of the church. THE FOURTH SEAL. "I beheld, and lo! a pale livid green horse, and "his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell "followed with him and power was given unto "them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill "with the sword, and with hunger, and with death, "and with the beasts of the earth."* The word used to express the colour of the horse under this seal, which is rendered "pale" in our authorized translation, signifies, as Archdeacon Woodhouse remarks, a grassy-green hue, which, though beautiful in the clothing of the trees and fields, is very unseemly, disgusting, and even horrible when it appears upon flesh; it is there the livid colour of corruption. The pale livid green colour of this horse is emblematical of a state of things even more dreadful than that of the preceding seal. The character of his rider corresponds with this idea; his name is called Death, the king of terrors. He is followed by Hell, not the place of punishment for the wicked, but the general receptacle of departed souls, which is the usual meaning of the word άons, and in which sense it is used in that article of the apostles' creed regarding the descent of our Lord into hell.-Hell and Death are here personified. The whole assemblage of figures constitutes an even the cannibals of New Zealand are beginning to bow the knee to Jesus. * Rev. vi. 7, 8. hieroglyphical representation, of the most horrible and terrific nature, and points out to us a period when the rulers of the visible church should seem to lose the character of men, and to assume that of malignant demons and savage beasts, and of Death himself, the king of terrors; and should extirpate, by fire and sword, all who dared to prefer death to the sacrifice of a good conscience. This seal evidently represents the state of the church during those ages, when the flames of persecution were kindled by the papal power, to destroy all who refused obedience to its tyrannical authority, and who pretended to judge for themselves in matters of religion. Early in the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III. addressed himself to Philip Augustus, King of France, and to the leading men of that nation, soliciting them, by the alluring promises of the most ample indulgences, to extirpate all heretics by fire and sword. Shortly afterwards a crusade was proclaimed in the name of the pope, against the heretics throughout the kingdom of France. An army of cross-bearers took the field against the Albigenses, and commenced a war, which was carried on with the utmost cruelty, and ended in the subjection or extirpation of that religious body in the southern provinces of France. About this time also the dreadful tribunal of the Inquisition was instituted, which, in the thirteenth and following centuries, subdued a prodigious number of those who were called heretics, part of whom were converted to the church by terror, and the rest committed to the flames.* Mosheim, Cent. XIII., part ii. chap. 5. The persecutions of the church of Rome against the servants of Christ continued, with unabated fury, down to the period of the revocation of the Edict of Nantz, in every part of Europe where the secular powers consented to be made subservient to this dreadful tyranny. It is computed, that, in the war against the Albigenses and Waldenses, in the fourteenth century, a million of men were destroyed. From the beginning of the order of the Jesuits to the year 1580, it is said that nine hundred thousand men perished. One hundred and fifty thousand were destroyed by the Inquisition in thirty years.* The ferocious Duke of Alva is reported to have boasted, that during his government of the Netherlands, in the short space of five years and a half, upwards of eighteen thousand heretics had suffered by the hand of the public executioner, besides a much greater number whom he had put to the sword in the towns he had taken, and in the field of battle.t At the memorable massacre of St. Bartholomew, several thousands of protestants were destroyed at Paris, in the space of three or four days, by all the varieties of cruel deaths that the most unbounded malice could invent. The same scenes were acted in other cities of France, so that, in the space of two months, thirty thousand protestants were butchered in cold blood. During the dreadful persecution in France, in the reign of Louis XIV., five hundred thousand protestants were driven into banishment, in the space of a few years, * Mede, Comment. Apocalyptic. ad cap. xiii. B and the prisons and galleys were filled with those, who were stopped in their flight. About four hundred thousand still remained in the kingdom. They were compelled to go to mass and communicate. Some who rejected the host after having received it, were condemned to be burnt alive.* Such of the protestant ministers as returned to the kingdom, after having quitted it, were condemned to the gallows or to the rack.† Thus did the rulers of the visible church assume the character of Death, accompanied by Hell, or Hades; and in this manner was the symbolical import of the cadaverous and putrid colour of the horse under the fourth seal fulfilled, in the cruel and bloody persecutions which desolated the Christian world during the space of four centuries. To the foregoing view of the contents of this seal which was given in my former editions, I shall now add some remarks upon the different instruments with which the rider on the pale green horse was to execute his work of destruction. He kills, 1st, with the sword; 2dly, with hunger; 3dly, *Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV. + Voltaire, in giving an account of these dreadful scenes of cruelty, makes the following striking remark: « C'était un étrange contraste, que du sein d'une cour voluptueuse, où regnaient la douceur de mœurs, les graces, les charmes de la société, il partit des ordres si durs et impitoyables." He afterwards quotes the following passage from the letters of the Marquis de Louvois, the minister of Louis: "Sa majesté veut qu'on fasse éprouver les dernières rigueurs à ceux qui ne voudront pas se faire de sa religion; et ceux qui auront la sotte gloire de vouloir demeurer les derniers, doivent être poussés jusqu'à la dernière extrémité." Vide Siècle de Louis XIV., chap. xxxvi. |