LECTURE XVI.

THE VIALS.

And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man and every living soul died in the sea. And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged us. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments. And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory. And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds. And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared. And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty. Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed

is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame. And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great. And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.-REV. xvi.

ANY ordinarily attentive reader will perceive a great resemblance between the events which were said to follow the blowing of the trumpets and those which are here seen to follow the pouring out of the vials. When the first four trumpets sounded, the earth, the sea, the rivers, the sun were smitten, Here we read of the same calamities in the same succession., The river Euphrates is connected with the sixth trumpet and with the sixth vial; the voice, "It is finished," accompanied the seventh trumpet as well as the seventh vial. There are several minute differences, to which I may refer presently. There is one leading and startling difference which seems to determine the purport of the respective visions. When the fifth trumpet sounded, a star fell from heaven upon the earth, the bottomless pit was opened, locusts came forth, which did not hurt. the grass or the trees, but only those men who had not the seal of God on their foreheads, which did not kill them, but tormented them for five months. The fifth vial" was poured out upon the seat of the beast, and his kingdom was full of darkness, and they gnawed

their tongues for pain." That the trumpet imported the downfall and ruin of a great spiritual dynasty, and the moral and spiritual misery which is consequent upon such a fall, I tried to show you when I was occupied with that subject. That this vial imports the perdition of a dynasty not spiritual at all, but essentially brutal, though once, it may be, upheld by spiritual sanctions, the words themselves would teach us, if no light fell upon them from previous or subsequent passages. Everything so far would appear to favour that method of considering these prophecies which I have adopted. The trumpets would be all announcements of the fall of the spiritual centre of the old world; they would point to Jerusalem. The vials would concern what I may call the material centre of the old world; they would point to Rome. But they would not concern Jerusalem and Rome at different epochs of history; they would denote a crisis through which the two cities were passing within the same three or four years.

I. What those three or four years were, and what we know to have been passing in them, I have partly considered already; the seventeenth chapter will bring the question distinctly before us. The subject for today leads us to reflect upon the different aspects in which the same events may be presented to the mind of a prophet. "And the first went and poured forth his vial upon the earth, and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men that had the mark of the beast, and upon them that worshipped his image." There was no allusion in the eighth chapter to any calamity that befel human beings from the hail and fire mingled with blood which were cast upon the earth; only the third part of the trees and of the green grass were said to be

burnt up. There we were hearing a trumpet; here we are seeing a vial poured out. There earth was smitten; those who had been called out to declare who is the Lord of the earth, and had not declared Him to men, or believed in Him themselves, were to read His Mene Mene written on their walls. To the others it could not have that significance. They only feel the effects of the visitation. It comes upon them as a noisome and grievous sore. They smart under the plague. The lesson reaches them through their bodies. Let it not, however, be supposed that the message may not have come in this form to the inhabitants of Judæa. They, too, were worshippers of the beast. They were becoming incapable of rising to a conception of anything but material losses and sufferings. And there may have been many of the heathens who saw a Divine hand in the infliction, who glorified God in the fires. The distinction between the two purposes of the judgment is not affected by the mode in which it was received by this person or that.

II. "And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man, and every living soul died in the sea." This it will be said is the language of poetry or prophecy, not of fact. I have asked you before whether you are sure that the language of poetry or prophecy does not represent facts more faithfully than the language of statistics. Do you think a statement of the number of persons who die in a wreck-let it be of the most petty fishing smackconveys the history of that wreck? Is not the picture of a great artist truer? Many of you, I am sure, will be familiar with that memorable passage of Jeremy Taylor, in which he supposes a man "from one of the battlements of heaven to espy how many men and women at

that time lie fainting and dying for want of bread; how many young men are hewn down by the sword of war; how many orphans are weeping over the graves of their fathers, by whose help they are enabled to eat; to hear how many mariners and passengers are at this moment in a storm, and shriek out because the keel dashes against a rock or bulges under them; how many people there are that weep with want and are mad with oppression, or are desperate by too quick a sense of a constant infelicity." Surely there was no exaggeration in these thoughts. Such a spectacle must at any instant, in Taylor's age or ours, have been presented to one who stood on that point of observation.

It is not so horrible as the vision of a single den of tyranny which is sometimes laid bare to our eyes when it is about to pass away. St. John is beholding the withering of the earth, and the destruction at sea, from one of the battlements of heaven. We might describe it by some dry abstraction such as the overthrow of commercial prosperity, the interruption of the intercourse between nations. To him it is as if the sea became the blood of a dead man.

III. "And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments." There is nothing which often puzzles us more than the sense of Divine retribution. The conscience witnesses for it; ever and anon we are sure that we recognise it. Not