Chapter 11 is still part of the sixth trumpet, for the seventh does not sound until the close of this chapter 11. 

The West

v 1-13 - From A.D. 312 to A.D. 1794, a period of 1482 years.

1 And there was given <to> me a reed like a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise <up>, and measure the <nave of the Deity>, and the altar, and <those worshipping in it>.

"RISE UP!"

In this we find John in a like situation with Zechariah. They are both in the presence of an angel, and both asleep. That John was lying down asleep appears from a voice saying to him, egeirai, awake, or rise up! ....he was prostrate in symbolic death, from which he was commanded, not by the angel, but by the voice of the power that develops the angel, to "Awake," or "Rise up."

The angel is placed there...as the representative of the One Body in the post-resurrectional period; as indicated by the symbolical resurrection of John, who, when awake or risen up, sees him standing -- "the Angel stood."

...The literal resurrection of the dead saints develops the angel he saw standing when he opened his eyes to see. The things revealed in this eleventh chapter ultimate, as any one may see, in the resurrection of the saints, and the establishment of their kingdom.

Eureka 11.1.ii.1

Reed - Measure of faith: rod 1260 affliction

"Rise up," said the voice of the Spirit, "and measure the nave of the Deity, and the altar, and them that worship therein."

When we consider the things to be measured, it is clear that the reed must be a rule of faith, a rule of practice, a rule of time, or all of these; not a material rule, such as a builder would use. It was "a reed like unto a rhabdos."

In writing to the saints in Corinth. Paul says to them: "What will ye? Shall I come unto you with a rhabdos or with love, and a spirit of meekness?" (1 Cor. iv. 21). This shows that a rhabdos is something different from love and meekness in expression. The use of it in this chapter of the apocalypse is evidently representative of the same idea as in Paul's inquiry. The scope of the prophecy shows this; for the two olive trees are to "prophesy 1260 days, having been clothed in sackcloths" (ver. 4,3); and to be overcome and denied a burial (ver. 7,9).

Eureka 11.1.ii.2.

The Altar

The altar in the text is the altar of sacrifice.

Had it been the altar of incense it would have been specified, as in ch. viii. 3, "the golden altar before the throne." The altar John measured was the altar under which the saints lie, who are slain for the word of the Deity, as in ch. vi. 9.

In this place, the symbolic souls are represented as "crying with a loud voice, saying, How long?" But the measurement of this was not revealed. They were told that it was "for a little season;" but the number of days contained in this short period was not measured off for their information.

Not so, however, in John's measuring. He gives in symbolic days the period of altar-worshipping; that is, the period during which the saints would be liable to death at the hand of their enemies because of their testimony. In all "their days of the prophecy they were an afflicted people.

As the Spirit had foretold in Dan. vii. 21, the Little Horn with Eyes and a Mouth of blasphemy was to make war upon the saints, and to prevail against them till the Ancient of Days came. The saints being in Christ Jesus, the altar, they "worship therein," and are "partakers with the altar" in altar-sufferings; in other words, "they are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that when his glory shall be revealed, they may be also partakers of that, and be glad with exceeding joy" (1 Pet. iv. 13; v. 1).

But, was this altar to be deluged with the blood of victims in all the period elapsing from A.D. 70 to the coming of the Ancient of Days? John's measuring answers this question in the negative.

Eureka 11.1.ii.3.

2 <And> the court which is <outside of the nave cast away> out, and measure it not; for it <has been given> to the <nations>: and the Holy City <they shall trample> forty two months.

Outside of the nave:

All not of the "One body" Excommunicate

Trampling period AD 608-1868 approx

John's measuring was restricted to the One Body, the mystical body of Christ, the saints. He was expressly commanded to excommunicate all the Gentiles not of the One Body. "The Court," said the Spirit-Voice, "that is outside of the nave, ekbale exo, cast away out, and measure it not;" and the reason given for this excommunication is, "because it hath been given to the nations."

Hence, the apocalyptic court is the Court of the Gentiles; and the antitype of the Court of the Gentiles under the Mosaic constitution. It may be remarked here, that in Solomon's building there were three courts; first, the outmost court of all, into which the Gentiles might enter; next, the Court of Israel, for native Israelites, if clean according to the law, otherwise admission was denied even to them. See more 1 Kin 6: 14

...As we have seen elsewhere, these temple arrangements have been incorporated into the structure of the Apocalypse.

...... Israelites and Gentiles not of the One Body, are constituents simply of the unmeasured court. Their position in relation to the Nave and the Golden Altar, and the Altar of Sacrifice, is that of excommunicate outsiders. In the aggregate, they are "the court outside of the nave cast away out, and not measured." They are therefore, without remission of sins, and consequent right to the tree of life; they cannot offer acceptable prayer and praise to the Deity; nor have they any intercessor within the veil.

Their court is wholly occupied by Daniel's Fourth Beast. There is not a foot of its area which is not so occupied; so that there is room within its limits for no other beast; for this beast is resolved, apocalyptically, into the dragon, the beast of the sea, the beast of the earth, the image of the beast, and the scarlet colored beast and its rider. In other words, the Unmeasured Court is Christendom, so called, in its civil and ecclesiastical constitution "Babylon the Great."

***

In this Court of the Gentiles, "the spirituals of the wickedness in their high places" are rampant revellers in tradition and blasphemy. Their court is illustrated by one great "Name of Blasphemy" (xiii. 1); which towers in pride and arrogance ("its look more stout than his fellows", Dan. vii. 20) above all the other blasphemous "Names and Denominations," of which it is so "full" as scarcely to afford space for novelty in this department of iniquity, transgression, and sin (xvii. 3).

These Names and Denominations of Blasphemy fill up the Court; a fact expressed in the text quoted, by the words, "a scarlet-colored beast, full of the Names of Blasphemy." Those of them in alliance with the civil powers of the court, are styled "Harlots;" these can be counted upon the fingers; as, the Church of England and Ireland, the Church of Scotland, the Lutheran Church, the Calvinian Church of Switzerland, and the Gallican* Church.

These are the Harlots, who have sold themselves for gain to work the will of them who keep them. They are ecclesiastical incorporations of "all that is in the world, the" sanctimonious "lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life;" and therefore "not of the Father" (1 Jno. ii. 16).

Their diversities are but the diversities of mere human speculation and views of expediency. The same substratum of blasphemy and scripture-nullifying tradition, pervades them all. They teach nothing aright; for their divinities and theologies, are the mere fleshly thinkings of the natural man. Though their spirituals claim to be "ministers of the gospel," and "ambassadors of Jesus Christ," and "successors of the apostles;" their claims are stamped spurious and their high pretensions ignored, by the command given to John [Rev 11: 2] not to measure their court, but to "cast it away out."

They are a denounced apostasy, as far removed from the One Body as the east from the west. Ministers of the gospel indeed! How can men minister that of which they are profoundly ignorant in letter and spirit. If ministers of anything, it is of "the wisdom from beneath; which is earthly, soulish, and demoniac." By their fruits they are known to the One Body which alone has spiritual intelligence to discern their true character.

This measured community knows, that they are a base counterfeit that can only be made to pass current among those who are ignorant; and who mistake brass for the fine gold of the temple. The spiritual institutions of their unmeasured and excluded court, have no vitality in them; and can therefore save no one. Their way is the way of death -- the wide gate and the broad way leading to destruction.

These Harlot-Churches of the Court are the leading novelties of modern times. They had no place in the Court four hundred years ago. Then the court was wholly occupied by Greek and Latin catholic idolatry; the Latin section of which they ignorantly acknowledge as the true church; and the common "Mother of All Churches." This is true. The state churches are all her bastard progeny, begotten of her adulteries with the kings of the earth (xviii. 3). Hence, her apocalyptic name, "MOTHER OF HARLOTS."

But, besides these harlot daughters, whose presence in the court she is too drunk and feeble to prevent -- "drunk," not so much with wine as with folly, and "with the blood of the saints and witnesses of Jesus" (xvii. 6) she has a multitudinous brood of young serpents, styled "All the Abominations of the Earth." These are the Anti-State churches of the Court -- churches, not allied to the state, but holding dogmas, which are a mere dilution of the traditions of the Harlot Mother of Christendom.

They pervade all the British isles and possessions, under the general denomination of "Protestant Dissenters;" and all the original United States, north and south. In the American section of the Court of the Gentiles, as there is no Harlot "by law established" with privileges from which her sister-prostitutes are excluded, "the Abominations" are not styled "Dissenters" and "Nonconformists." In this section of the court they are all equal before the world's law; but not equally respectable and orthodox in the world's esteem.

Wealth, classical (or pagan) scholarship, and numbers are the criteria of their relative respectability and orthodoxy. The rulers and politicians of the "Model Republic," players all upon the world's boards, are the honored members or patrons of "all the Abominations of the Earth;" so that from the stage to the pulpit, and from the pulpit to "the floor of the House," there is no wider step than from the sublime to the ridiculous and profane.

The legislators and executives of the protestant sections of the Court are the incarnations of the profanities and blasphemies inculcated by the spiritual craftsmen who live by "the Abominations," or "Denominations" of the earth. Hence, their legislation and rule are devilish and oppressive; and calculated to bring down upon them catastrophe and judgment, as at this day, but more intensely and generally hereafter.

..."the Angel stands" prepared to "finish the mystery of the Deity as he hath announced the good to his servants the prophets" -- to break up the court, and to level the Great Mountain of human dominion and corruption, with which it is filled.

There will then be no more Court of the Gentiles, and no more apocalyptic altar-worshipping for the One Body. All "the Abominations of the Earth," mere lies, vanities, and "things which are of no profit," will then be swept away with the besom of destruction; and nothing will survive, but the victorious and glorified community, symbolized by Zechariah as the Seven Branched Lightstand, and Olive trees. These will then burn the golden oil in the kingdom of their Father; and enlighten the subject nations with their glory.

Eureka 11.1.ii.4.

The Holy City

"Ye are come to Mount Zion, and unto the City of the Living Deity, the Heavenly Jerusalem," "the Mother of us all" (Heb. xii. 22; Gal. vi. 26).

In the apocalypse, the Holy City occupies a conspicuous and interesting position. The Holy City measured by John, and the Holy City measured by the Angel, are the same Holy City in two different states in the pre-resurrectional; and in the post-resurrectional, states.

...The true believers in the present altar-worshipping state are collectively the Holy City, the Municipality elect, and divinely appointed to rule in the restored Jerusalem, when it shall have been delivered by the Angel of the Bow from the Serpent-Power of the unmeasured court by which it is now "trodden under foot."

Eureka 11.1.ii.4.

The Holy Polity Trampled Forty-two Months

The Holy Body Politic is measured -- the period of its down-treading by Gentile barbarism is measured. The Court of the Gentiles will continue to exist a longer time than their trampling of the Holy City. Not being measured, it does not appear how much longer it will continue; but as the Holy Polity is to destroy the Court and its sin-powers, it follows necessarily, that the altar-worshipping and sackcloth prophesying of the Body, must come to an end before judgment is given to it.

This limit of tribulation had been revealed to Daniel in the words of the oracle:

 "The Horn shall make war upon the saints, and prevail against them until the Ancient of Days come, and judgment be given to the saints" (vii. 21,22); and in verse 25, "they shall be given into his power until a time and times and the dividing of time." 

In other words, at the end of this period the Ancient of Days will come; and then the saints will no longer be prevailed against, or "the Holy City be trodden under foot."

...Now he comes "as a thief" under the sixth vial, while the Franco-Frog power is in active operation (xvi. 12-15)

Birth of the "god of the earth" - The 42 months begins

"Forty and Two months" of symbolic time are as many years as they contain days. Forty and two months are 1260 days; so that, on the principle of a day for a year, as in chap. 9, the Holy City is trampled to the end of 1260 years.

...There are no data in the first and second verses of this eleventh chapter to show at what epoch these "forty and two months," or 1260 years of trampling begin.

... But, the same Spirit told Daniel, that the time was the period of the saints being in the hand of the Little Horn with Eyes and Mouth; if, therefore, it can be ascertained when they were turned over by authority to the ecclesiastical horn-power, the commencement of the "forty and two months" will be determined.

The words of the oracle, are, "they shall be given into his hand. This implies a giver -- one having power, by which he would be able to place the saints under the jurisdiction of him who should "wear them out, and think to change times and laws" (Dan. vii. 25). This powerful giver was unquestionably the Sixth Head of the Dragon; or

 "the king that shall do according to his will, and shall honour a god whom his fathers knew not."

The throne of this dragon-king is Constantinople. It was removed here from Rome by Constantine "the Great;" a removal, that prepared the way for the manifestation in Rome of this new god, who would speak great things against the Most High. The principal bishop of the catholic idolatry in Rome was developed into "the God of all the earth" by the legislative favour of the imperial Constantinopolitan power. This development was legislative and circumstantial, and therefore progressive.

He was no meteoric upstart in the Seven-hilled city; but a bastard deity, who had been begotten in the Roman Mother by the adulterous embrace of the imperial power. Rome was pregnant with this blasphemous deity during a gestative "set time" of two hundred and eighty years -- nine months and ten days being the physiological period of human incubation.

From A.D. 324 to A.D. 604-8, was this "god of guardian saints" in the embryo, or foetal state. He was quickened into political life as a future imperial element of the fourth beast dominion of the Court, by Justinian's Code, A.D. 529, and his Decretal Epistle, A.D. 533; which affirmed the Roman Bishop's universal supremacy in spiritual affairs.

Seventy-five years after this quickening, he was born God of the Roman earth by Phocas, the Dragon emperor, acknowledging the supremacy of his See, A.D. 604; in grateful commemoration of which, and other benefits, the New Deity caused to be erected by the exarch of Italy a Corinthian fluted column of Greek marble, standing on a pyramid of eleven steps, on the top of which was a gilt statue of Phocas.

The date of the pillar was A.D. 608; and the occasion of the honour is stated in the inscription to be, "Pro innumerabilibus Pietatis ejus Beneficiis, et pro Quiete procurata Italiae, ac conservata Libertate." Surely, the birth of "the God the earth" was an event to be celebrated in grateful honour upon the imperial creator!

Perhaps a baser wretch than Phocas never wore the dragon-crown; but the baser the more worthy in the estimation of the new god. By the murder of the imperial family, the usurper had given absolute liberty and supremacy to the Roman bishop; besides bestowing liberal donations upon the Roman churches. He was therefore entitled "His Piety;" and the pillar was erected "For the innumerable benefits of His Piety, and for the quiet procured to Italy, and the preservation of liberty."

Eureka 11.1.ii.5.

The period of‭ ‬1,260‭ ‬years is not the‭ "‬time allotted for her existence‭;" ‬understanding by‭ "‬her,‭" ‬the Roman Catholic Church.‭ ‬The period mentioned is‭ "‬the time allotted‭" ‬for the existence of the little horn of Daniel's fourth beast,‭ ‬and the leopard lion-mouthed beast of Rev.‭ ‬13:2,‭ ‬which are both representative of‭ ‬a political development from within the Roman Catholic Church,‭ ‬and not the Roman Catholic Church itself.

‭ ‬The apostasy is one thing:‭ ‬the political result of the apostasy is another.‭ ‬The distinction is observed in Paul's chapter‭ (‬2‭ ‬Thess.‭ ‬2.‭) ‬on the Man of Sin.‭

‭"‬There shall come‭ ‬a falling away first,‭ ‬and‭ (‬second‭) ‬that Man of Sin shall be revealed.‭"

The apostasy paved the way for the manifestation of what was otherwise an impossibility-viz.,‭ ‬a pretended vicar of Christ,‭ ‬aspiring to,‭ ‬and receiving from,‭ ‬the imperial power enthroned at Constantinople,‭ ‬universal authority over the consciences of men,‭ ‬with power to inflict temporal penaltieson those who should disobey his will.‭

This personage was not finally developed till A.D.‭ ‬606.‭ ‬In‭ ‬1866,‭ ‬exactly‭ ‬1,260‭ ‬years from that period,‭ ‬his existence in this aspect came to an end‭; ‬for since the military events of that year,‭ ‬resulting in the dissolution of the Concordat with Austria,‭ ‬the substitution of the hostile democracy for the friendly Bourbons in Spain,‭ ‬and the assumption of political authority by France within the walls of Rome,‭ ‬the Pope has ceased to be a political personage,‭ ‬except in name.‭

He can no longer enforce his authority by means of the civil power.‭

The civil power is indeed turning hostile to him in all the countries of Europe,‭ ‬as evidenced in the diplomatic coalition against the doctrines of the Œcumenical Council.‭

The Christadelphian June, 1870

3 And I will give <to> my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy 1 260 days, <having been> clothed < with> sackcloths.

My two witnesses prophesy clothed with sackcloth 

Witnessing period AD 312-1572

The DONATIST EPOCH, a period of three years, signalized by the Donatist Trials and their condemnation by Constantine 312-'16

The JUSTINIAN EPOCH, a period of four years, signalized by the promulgation of the Civil Law of the Great City; and by great desolation in the Holy Land 529-'34

The PHOCAN EPOCH, a period of four years, signalized by the Bishop of Rome being recognized as Supreme Pontiff by the emperor Phocas 604-'8

The ST. BARTHOLOMEW EPOCH, signalized by massacre and war upon the Huguenots on the day of that Romish saint 1572-'6

The Donatists

...the epoch which initiated the 1260 years of their sackcloth-witnessing against the

apostasy.

Eureka 11.3.11.

Their characteristics described:

... "uncharitable" exclusiveness, and "bigoted" devotion to the primitive apostolic faith, was the truly christian spirit of the woman and her seed...

...abhorrence of the apostasy

Du pin - "They did not teach anything that was contrary to the (apostles') creed that thus the [apostolic faith] was only found among themselves they [reimmersed] such as had been [immersed] by the Catholics... the [ecclesia] ought to be made up of just and holy men, or at least of those who were such in appearance; ...This was spuing the apostasy out of their mouth... flight into the wilderness necessary to her preservation.

Mosheim - avoiding all communication with other churches from an apprehension of contracting their impurity and corruption. ...This erroneous principle was the source of that most shocking uncharitableness and presumption (poor Dr. Mosheim!)

If such only was "the crime" of the persecuted Donatists, had I lived in their day, I should have been guilty of their "shocking uncharitableness and presumption" too.

Eureka 11.3.

The Spirit styles them "my two witnesses." They are therefore the Witnesses of the Spirit, styled in ch. xvii. 6, hoi martures Iesou, the witnesses of Jesus -- of Yah the Saviour. A witness is one who gives testimony to the truth at the hazard of liberty, estate, and life. The Spirit's witnesses are witnesses of this kind. They testified to "the truth as it is in Jesus," in opposition to "every high thing that exalteth itself against the Deity's knowledge;" consequently, they were conspicuous in testifying against the catholic worshipping of the daemonials and idols; and all the other abominations they encountered in the Court of the Gentiles.

Many of them incurred the loss of all things -- "they loved not their lives unto the death" (xii. 11); therefore they are described in "the time of the dead," as "the souls of them who were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of the Deity, and who had not worshipped the Beast, neither his Image, neither had received the mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands;" and to show that these witnesses are the Saints, it is added, "and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years" (xx. 4).

To these witnesses something was given -- "And I will give to my two witnesses," saith the Spirit. What was this that was given? It could be nothing else than the gift of prophecy; for it is immediately added, as the result of the gift received, "and they shall prophesy."

Now, the nature of the gift is determined by what, as prophets, they were to accomplish. They were to devour their enemies by fire bursting forth out of their mouth; to shut the heaven that it rain not; to turn the waters into blood; and to smite the earth with every plague (verses 5,6).

...For this reason it is, that the saints are said to "prophesy," when they state, illustrate, and prove the truth. "He that prophesieth," saith Paul, "speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort" (1 Cor. xiv. 3); and "he that prophesieth edifieth the ecclesia" (ver. 4); therefore he saith in another place, "despise not prophesyings."

...The ancient prophets and apostles received the subject matter they proclaimed by revelation direct from Deity; while the apocalyptic prophets receive it by hearing expounded, and reading the writings in which the direct revelation is contained.

...For this reason it is, that the saints are said to "prophesy," when they state, illustrate, and prove the truth. "He that prophesieth," saith Paul, "speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort" (1 Cor. xiv. 3); and "he that prophesieth edifieth the ecclesia" (ver. 4); therefore he saith in another place, "despise not prophesyings."

...The ancient prophets and apostles received the subject matter they proclaimed by revelation direct from Deity; while the apocalyptic prophets receive it by hearing expounded, and reading the writings in which the direct revelation is contained.

...Thus were organized in the unmeasured Court of the Gentiles two powerful antagonisms -- civil and religious despotism, on the one hand; and civil and religious liberty, on the other. The adherents of the despotisms, in their civil and ecclesiastical organization, were the Dragon, the Ten Horns, the God of the earth, the Great Harlot, her Daughters, and the Abominations of the earth -- a blind, corrupt, and cruel host; while opposed to these, were the One Body and its unconscious instrument, "the Earth" -- unconscious that it was the divinely appointed and divinely energized agent for the aid, nourishment, and vindication of the Spirit's witnessing prophets against their enemies.

Here, then, were two cooperative organizations against the Catholic Apostasy of the Court. Without any treaty of alliance offensive and defensive, and without any direct mutual understanding, the ages and generations of the past found them standing side by side in witnessing and prophesying with tormenting effect against the blasphemies and abominations of

"them who dwell upon the earth."

Each witness had its own speciality. Christ's brethren testified the gospel, and laid before the Court the way of salvation. They showed men what they must believe and do for the remission of all their past sins; and for the obtaining a right to the tree of life in the Holy City, when it shall be measured by the angel of the golden reed (xxi. 15; xxii. 14).

In doing this, they did their utmost to neutralize the teaching of the Jeromes, Augustines, Ambroses, and Martins, of the apostasy;

...But, when this "Name of Blasphemy, speaking great things," had received political life; and had been set up as a living Image of Imperial Power, styled "the Image of the Beast" in ch. xiii. 14; a change for the worse came over the situation of affairs. "All, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond," were commanded to worship this image upon pain of death; and

"to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their forehead; and that no man might buy and sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

This pressed with great hardship upon the One Body; and upon those who were pledged to the antipapal principles of civil and religious liberty. Multitudes preferred death to submission to this decree; and determined to draw the sword in defence of "conscience and the rights of man," thus violently assailed by the new "god of all the earth."

This Moloch of the Seven Hills was not backward in affording them scope for the development of their prowess in all the nations of the court. He proclaimed crusades against them; and called upon his worshippers to gather their hosts, and to take the field against them, and to slay them with utter and exterminating slaughter. "The Earth," the Spirit's other witness, embraced the conflict, undismayed by the power and ferocity of the foe.

The Woman's Protector

...relatively to the Spirit's witnessing prophets, "the earth" is used in a more restricted sense. "The Earth that helps the Woman" is all those upon whom her testimony or principles, or both, have made a favorable impression.

Though they may not at all be influenced by her moral and doctrinal precepts for salvation, they incorporate her principles of "civil and religious liberty," and what they call "the rights of man," which were abolished by the edicts of the Imperial Dragon, when he subjected the nations of his dominion to the absolute sovereignty of the Episcopal God of the earth, A.D. 529.

No one imbued with the principles of civil and religious liberty could forbear to testify against arbitrary power in Church and State; and when natural men become impregnated with such principles, they become impetuous and impatient of oppression, which is said to drive even a wise man mad; and in their fury organize resistance, and seek the overthrow and destruction of the oppressor.

Such an "earth" as this did not exist in the ages and generations of Rome pagan. The Woman then had no Earth devoted to religious liberty to interpose itself between her and the arbitrary ferocity of "the great red dragon;" the whole brunt of this sanguinary despotism fell directly upon her unprotected self.

It was not till after the establishment of that worse than pagan superstition -- that "dreadful and terrible" blasphemy, surnamed the Holy Catholic Church, that "the Earth" in its witnessing relations appeared upon the arena. When aroused to action in the unmeasured Court, it was a terror of the oppressors of the saints. It tormented them with all the plagues of war; and devoured them with fire and sword, as its own peculiar testimony against "the God of the earth," and the Sin-powers that sustained him.

An arrangement of this sort was absolutely necessary for the preservation and protection of the One Body, witnessing for the truth against "the worshipping of the daemonials and idols," in the midst of the nations, and "before the God of the earth;" the weapons of whose warfare were civil disabilities, and the infernal tortures of anti-heretical crusaders and inquisitions.

The JUSTINIAN EPOCH, a period of four years, signalized by the promulgation of the Civil Law of the Great City; and by great desolation in the Holy Land 529-'34

The beginning of the witnessing clothed with sackcloth

As the Holy City was to be trampled forty and two months by the Gentiles; and as these were to trample it under the inspiration of the Antichristian Mouth of the Beast, the power given him for this purpose by the Dragon-Emperor was to be operative for the same length of time, which, in order to show this relation between the Mouth and the Holy City, is also expressed by the same formula of "forty and two months" (Apoc. xiii. 5).

And, for a somewhat similar reason, that is, to connect the sackcloth witnessing of the Holy City community with the fugitive woman and the earth that protected her by its help (Apoc. xii. 6,16), the things affirmed of the woman in relation to her feeding are expressed in the same kind of time as the duration of the witnessing -- 1260 days; and, furthermore, to show that 1260 symbolic days are equivalent to "a time and times and the dividing of a time" (a formula which occurs nowhere else in the Apocalypse, and pertains exclusively to the measurement of the Holy City) the 1260-feeding of the woman by the earth, in the fourteenth verse of the twelfth chapter, is styled her nourishing

"for a time and times and half a time;"

for to feed and nourish her are the same idea; so that the one statement of the duration of her feeding, is expository of the duration of her nourishing.

This view of the matter which I believe is the only correct one, helps us greatly in determining the commencement of the saints witnessing after the sackclothes had been put upon them by their enemies.

This beginning carries us back to the epoch of the Woman's flight into the wilderness, or two wings of the Great Roman Eagle. Her flight, by which she turned her back with contempt upon the honors and riches of the world; which she left to the leaders of the Catholic Apostasy -- the Eusebiuses, Lactantiuses, Ariuses, Athanasiuses, and Chrysostoms of the day -- her fugitive separation from these, by which she became a witness for the truth against their worldliness and traditions, occurs after the birth of the Man-Child of Sin -- that sanguinary Cain, who, as the Antichrist, in the power of his manhood and impiety, afterwards slew the Abel of the Faith, whose blood cries for vengeance against him from the ground.

......The birth of this imperial child of the woman occurred in the enthronement of Constantine in Rome on his defeat of Maxentius at the battle of Saxs Rubra, A.D. 312.

This introduced a remarkable epoch in the history of the woman, this was the epoch of her deliverance from pagan persecution by the celebrated edict of Constantine published at Milan, A.D. 313; and of her introduction to an acquaintance with the worse than pagan persecution, which sought to exterminate her in the after years of Catholic ascendancy.

Constantine delighted to style himself "THE DELIVERER OF THE CHURCH." He was truly the deliverer of the Catholic Church; but he was also the first to inflict persecution and death itself upon those,

"who kept the commandments of the Deity, and retained the testimony of Jesus Christ."

The edict of Milan, the great charter of toleration, had confirmed to each individual of the Roman world, the privilege of choosing and professing his own religion. But this inestimable privilege was soon violated; with a smattering of truth, the woman's child imbibed the maxims of persecution, and the Dissenters from the Catholic Church were afflicted and oppressed by its political triumph over Paganism.

Constantine easily credited the insinuation that the HERETICS, as they were called, who presumed to dispute his opinions, or to oppose his commands, were guilty of the most absurd and criminal obstinacy; and that a seasonable application of moderate severities might save those unhappy men from the danger of an everlasting condemnation.

Eureka 11.3.

flight of the woman clothed in sackcloth

After a preamble filled with passion and reproach, Constantine absolutely prohibits the assemblies of "Heretics," and confiscates their public property to the use, either of the revenue, or of the Catholic Church. Some of the penal regulations were copied from the edicts of the pagan emperor Diocletian; and this method of conversion was applauded by the same bishops who had felt the hand of oppression, and pleaded for the rights of humanity.

But Constantine was not the only oppressor whose tyranny bore heavily upon the woman. His imperial colleague, Licinius, also within the limits of his jurisdiction, made her to groan with anguish. "Those who had done no evil," says Eusebius, "were led away to punishment without any pretext, just like murderers and assassins.

Some also endured a novel kind of death, having their bodies cut into many small pieces, and after this savage and terrible spectacle, were thrown as food to the fishes into the depths of the sea. Again the worshippers of God began to flee; again the open fields, the deserts, forests, and mountains, received the servants of Christ."

The fleeing of the woman was the reduction of her to a state of humiliation and tribulation, far removed from the exaltation and haughtiness characteristic of the region of imperial grace. The gates of this clerical paradise were closed against her. She has nothing to do with emperors and courts. These are only for the votaries of fashion, and parasitic spirituals, who hold the persons of rulers in admiration for the sake of gain.

Bishops, cardinals, archbishops, and other princes of the church, flourish in regions of imperial sunshine; but for the woman and her seed, the farther off they flee from such a heavenly, the clearer will they see the truth, and the better able will they be to "keep the commandments of the Deity," and to testify with the approval of Jesus Christ.

Thus, then, the woman in flight is related both to state and place. She fled because she was persecuted by "the angels of the Dragon" officials in power, both imperial and magisterial. The interval from the birth of her child, A.D. 312, to the conquest of the East by the overthrow of Licinius, A.D. 324, was occupied in ecclesiastical legislation in favour of the Catholic Church, and against Dissenters; and in carrying off her son unto Deity, and the throne thereof. Here was an epoch of twelve years.

At the end of this, that is, A.D. 325, he sat as a god, a presidential episcopal god, in the Council of Nice, exhibiting before the world the type of that full grown Man of Sin, who should be worshipped by all the nations of the unmeasured Court as "the Deity of the earth."

Now, it was at some point in this epoch of twelve years, that the 1260 years of witnessing began. As the woman's seed in their sackcloth witnessing were to "stand before the deity of the earth" in the sense of testifying against him, it is reasonable to refer the commencement of the witnessing period to the time of the formation of an issue between him and them.

Eureka 11.3.

Two Witnesses 

1. civil and ecclesiastical - 'the earth' and 'the woman'..

2. Holy City - The Lamb's Bride

The prophecy of the two witnesses is concerning two great parties in the ten horned beast's dominion, which antagonize it in its civil and ecclesiastical policy. One party is purely secular, and styled "the earth," or democracy; the other party is "religious," and termed "the woman.''

The mission of these is to make war upon tyranny, and to take vengeance upon it, and finally to be the means, or occasion, of breaking it up in its ten-horned and papal constitution. "The earth," or secular witness, is the helper of "the woman," or religious witness. They have co-operated since the reign of Constantine more or less intimately until the present time; their co-operation consisting in a determined hostility to state-churchism, and to its monarchial allies. They are both more or less republican in their principles. "The earth" especially is animated by a hatred of oppressors. Its spirit in all ages has shown itself in a terrible form. It is ferocious as the tiger, but it is a ferocity which is required by the nature of the work assigned it. The civil and ecclesiastical tyranny it has to combat, which is itself horribly terrific and blasphemous against God and his truth, must be encountered by a spirit as fierce.

In history, we see it exhibited in the Circumcellions of the first century of its operations, in the men of Munster of the sixteenth, the Camisards of the seventeenth, the Terrorists of the eighteenth, and the Red Republicans, socialists, &c., of the nineteenth. Like God's "sanctified ones, the Medes," the heart of "the earth" is steel, and its eye unpitying. It is ready to dash out the brains of sucklings, to spoil the property of the rich, and to reduce the social fabric of the Beast to its elemental chaos. Its political representative in Europe is ''THE MOUNTAIN" in the French legislature; a body of men who are the abomination and terror of the Jesuit priest-party throughout the world.

"The woman" is constituted of heterogeneous sects. "Dissent" and "non-conformity" are terms which define the religious witness in this country. In France she is styled "Calvinist." Her tendencies are republican, as illustrated in the Cromwellian commonwealth, and in the constitution of the United States of America, which was the conjoint work of "the earth" and "the woman." This great religious witness is made up of an infinite variety of factions, whose contempt of popes, emperors, kings, priests, and aristocrats, is profound; yet, with all their hatred, they conscientionsly repudiate the excesses of "the earth," or secular witness. These two witnessing parties, however, are of one theory, which is death to tyranny, if not to tyrants; and in some sense, or other, rally around the standard of "liberty, equality, and fraternity;" three principles which are utterly destructive of the dominion of the Little Horn, and its less audacious fellows of the Roman Beast.

But there is a third party which, although it has the deep rooted enmity of truth against every form of Satanism in church and state, papal and protestant; and wishes success to the Two Witnesses in their war with civil and ecclesiastical tyranny, yet it is distinct from them both. It is that party described by the apostle in the passage above quoted. It is composed of the saints of God in the highest sense of the word. It is the One Body of Christ, having the one faith, the one hope, one Lord, one spirit, one baptism, and one God and Father (Eph. 4:4-6).

It is styled "the holy city"

Elpis Israel 3.1.

Of the witnesses and holy city, without discriminating them, REINERIUS, the inquisitor-general, who shed their blood, writes thus concerning them as a whole. "Among all the sects which are, or have been, there is not any more pernicious to the church (i.e. of Rome) than that of the Leonists. And this for three reasons. The first is, because it is older; for some say that it hath endured from the time of Pope Sylvester (fourth century) others from the time of the apostles. The second, because it is more general, for there is scarce any country wherein the sect is not. The third, because when all other sects beget horror in the hearers by the outrageousness of their blasphemies against God, this of the Leonists have a great shew of piety; because they live justly before men, and believe all things rightly concerning God, and all the articles which are contained in the creed; only they blaspheme the church of Rome and the clergy, whom the multitude of the laity is easy to believe."

"The causes of their estrangement, says Acland from the Roman church are thus stated. 'It is because the men and women, the young and old, the laborer and the learned man, do not cease to instruct themselves; because they have translated the Old and New Testaments into the vulgar tongue, and learn these books by heart, and teach them; because if scandal be committed by any one, it inspires them with horror, so that when they see anyone leading an irregular life, they say to him, the apostles did not live so, nor should we who would imitate the apostles: in short they look upon all that a teacher advances, unsupported by the New Testament, as fabulous."'

Elpis Israel 3.1.

4 These are the two olive trees, and two < lightstands which have stood> before the god of the earth.

In the fourth chapter of Zechariah there is a very remarkable symbolic prophecy concerning Zerubbabel and the "great mountain."

The apostles have also taught us that the Spirit-Lightstand, or one light-bearing body, is constituted of two classes of mankind, which are fitly represented by Two Olive Trees; the one, "a wild olive tree," and the other, "a good olive tree". see Rom 11:24

[...the sackcloth witnessing of the woman's seed "before the god of the earth" for the truth of "the God of heaven" in the Alpine Wing of the Great Eagle (verses 4-13)]

Eureka 12.26.

...the One Body is destined to flourish in two states. The Zechariah-symbolic group represents it in the state inaugurated by the resurrection. John saw it in this state, as "a Son of Man in the midst of Seven Lightstands," invested with all the attributes of omnipotence (Apoc. i. 12-16).

Being in the midst of the seven, he occupies the same relation to the light-irradiating ecclesias that the seven tubes of Zechariah's group do to the golden bowl, and the seven horns do to the Lamb (v. 6). The whole group of John and Zechariah is symbolical of the Omniscient and Omnipotent Spirit in post-resurrectional corporeal manifestation -- the "One Body" perfected and glorified in all its members.

But, before the One Body thus symbolized can stand in the presence of the nations to "enlighten the earth with his glory" (xviii. 1), it must pre-exist in all "the times of the Gentiles;" that is, in the interval between the breaking off of the natural branches of the good olive tree, say from A.D. 70, to "the time of the dead when they should be judged, and a reward given to the prophets and saints" (xi. 18).

This state of being, Paul styles, "the present evil world;" we term it commonly, "this world," and "the present state," in contrast with "the future state," or "the other world," or "the world to come." Seeing, then, that the One Body, a great multitudinous unity, Jesus and his Brethren, is related to these two states, it is interesting to know --

I. What position it occupies in respect to the nations of the earth?

II. What its mission while so placed? and,

III. How long is that position to be held?

Eureka 11.1.2.

...the two olive trees are not united by pipes into one lightstand, as in Zechariah... In the first chapter, there is only one Lightstand with seven burners; but in the text before us, we have "two lightstands" with a tree to each.

...A wild olive branch and a lightstand are symbolical of "the Earth" -- the anticatholic and antipapal champion of civil and religious liberty, and the rights of man, standing defiantly "before the god of the earth," and the other branches of the wild olive tree. Fed by the revolutionary principles of wild olive liberalism, the earthy lightstand shone with light amid the deep and universal gloom of "the dark ages."

...There was another lightstand and a good olive branch. These symbolized the One Body, witnessing the truth. This lightstand shone with the light of the word, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light to my path" (Psa. cxix. 105). This was "the golden oil" of the good olive, by which the lightstand burners were fed. It was "the unction from the Holy One by which they knew all the things" they witnessed; and by which they were taught, "and is the truth" (1 John ii. 20,27).

Eureka 11.2.1.

The God of the Earth

Now, it is expressly said, that these "two witnesses," "two olive trees," "two lightstands," and "two prophets" "have stood before the god of the earth." This was to be their position. This god is not to be mistaken for the Eternal Creator. Though he made the earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein; and claims them all as his, He is not styled in this prophecy "the God of the earth." His title in this chapter is "the God of heaven," to whom glory is ascribed at the concluding act of the second woe (xi. 13).

It is true, these witnesses in a certain sense stand before the Creator; but in the sense of giving testimony against, they do not; and that enopion, before, is to be understood in the sense of against, is evident from the effect of their testimony which "torments," and stirs up the powers to destroy them (verses 7, 10). These two witnessing classes of antipapists confront the representatives of the papal deity in all the nations of the abyss; and in so doing, they stand in a hostile attitude before the God of the earth.

Eureka 11.2.2.

The earth (wild olive branch) helps the woman

...The one faith was intrusted to the apostles that they might go forth, and publish it

... The firm of Luther, Calvin, Knox, Cranmer and Company, knew nothing of this; yet they were highly useful in their day. They were Satan casting out Satan, whereby his kingdom was greatly weakened. They fought their master with his own weapons, and prevailed and became the founders of Harlot-Superstitions, which flourished in power and worldly glory, while the Spirit's Witnesses were lying dead and unburied in the breadth of the Great City, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified" (xi. 6,9).

In this breadth, plateia, they still flourish in all pomps and vanities of sin and folly. They are useful antagonists to the power of the Antichrist, while they are themselves but antichristian fellowships inimical to the truth. But, the Deity of the heaven, in his providence, educes good out of evil to his saints,

"for whose sake are all things."

The antagonisms of Satan so neutralize his power, that his Deity in Chief can no longer torment them unto death.

...The birth of this imperial child of the woman occurred in the enthronement of Constantine in Rome on his defeat of Maxentius at the battle of Saxs Rubra, A.D. 312.

This introduced a remarkable epoch in the history of the woman, this was the epoch of her deliverance from pagan persecution by the celebrated edict of Constantine published at Milan, A.D. 313; and of her introduction to an acquaintance with the worse than pagan persecution, which sought to exterminate her in the after years of Catholic ascendancy.

Constantine delighted to style himself "THE DELIVERER OF THE CHURCH." He was truly the deliverer of the Catholic Church; but he was also the first to inflict persecution and death itself upon those,

"who kept the commandments of the Deity, and retained the testimony of Jesus Christ."

The edict of Milan, the great charter of toleration, had confirmed to each individual of the Roman world, the privilege of choosing and professing his own religion. But this inestimable privilege was soon violated; with a smattering of truth, the woman's child imbibed the maxims of persecution, and the Dissenters from the Catholic Church were afflicted and oppressed by its political triumph over Paganism.

Constantine easily credited the insinuation that the HERETICS, as they were called, who presumed to dispute his opinions, or to oppose his commands, were guilty of the most absurd and criminal obstinacy; and that a seasonable application of moderate severities might save those unhappy men from the danger of an everlasting condemnation.

5 And if any <will to injure> them, fire <bursts forth out> of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any <will to injure> them, <in this way must he be put to death>.

This is prophetic of the wars that would be waged against the forces raised by the antichrist for their extermination. The Deity of the heaven did not require the members of the One Body to stand and be murdered by their enemies without help. If persecuted in one city they were to fly to another; but "the Earth," not believing in non-resistance and passive obedience to ecclesiastical tyranny, stood their ground, and devoured their enemies, after the introduction of gunpowder in war, at the cannon's mouth.

In this way "the Earth" performed their part. This was their mode of prophesying against the Antichrist; which, "in all their days of the prophecy," was very effective in the preservation of civil and religious liberty, and the rights of man; and in perpetuating them to succeeding generations.

...The right exercised by the Antichrist he derived from the Dragon Imperiality of the East, styled by Daniel the Little Horn of the Goat; a right afterwards recognized by that other Little Horn, which came up in the midst of, and after, the Ten Horns of the European Commonwealth.

"The Dragon gave him his power, and his throne, and great authority" (Apoc. xiii. 2);

and it is by virtue of this, which is mere right based upon might, the right of brute force, that "the Devil and his Angels" -- Antichrist and the Sin-Powers of the Court -- have sought to force men, thus given into their hands, to worship what they call God according to their dictates.

Now, it is in opposition to this blasphemous assumption, and in the negative sense already defined, that the witnessing prophets of the Deity of the heaven, champion civil and religious liberty and the rights of man. The enemies of these are their enemies; for if the spiritual and temporal Sin-Powers were to deprive society of these, their testimony or prophesying would inevitably be suppressed also. The conflict, therefore, which raged for ages in the Court of the Gentiles was one of life or death to the witnessing existence of the One Body, and the defensive self-devotion of the Earth.

This conflict of ages was long and bloody for all concerned. The saints of the Holy City fell by thousands under the savage and merciless hand of the Roman God. His Spouse of Babylon became red and drunk with their blood, which, like the righteous Abel's, still cries for vengeance upon the ruthless harlot that sits upon the beast (Apoc. xvii. 3).

The Earth valiantly helped her, but could not destroy the murderess. It gave her papistic myrmidons frequent and signal overthrows. It gave them blood to drink, and smote them with the plagues of war; so that, if they were determined to trample the Holy City of the Faith, they should not be permitted so to do with impunity.

Eureka 11.2.4.

6 These have power to shut <the> heaven, that <rain may not fall in their days of the > prophecy: and <they > have power over waters to turn them <into> blood, and to smite the earth with <every> plague, as often as they <may have willed>.

To shut up any sort of heaven that rain might not descend upon those who lived under it, is figurative of divine wrath upon the sufferers.

This appears from Deut. xi. 17 --

"And Yahweh's wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven that there be no rain."

This shutting up was the effect of divine displeasure. The shutting up of a heaven is never significative of blessing upon any people, but always of calamity of some sort. The genial, refreshing and fertilizing character of the administration of human affairs by the Mystical Christ -- Jesus and his Brethren -- is compared to an opened heaven from which rain descends in gentle showers upon the grass newly mown: as,

"There shall be a ruler over mankind, a Just One, ruling in the righteous precepts of Elohim. And as the brightness of morning, He shall rise the Sun of an unclouded dawn shining forth after rain upon tender grass out of the earth" (2 Sam. xxiii. 4).

...when the heaven is shut, the reverse of this obtains -- the righteous do not flourish, but are "in sackcloth;" and there is no peace.

Eureka 11.2.4.

But in process of time their power of resistance was diminished. This was attributable to the testimony of the One Body being enfeebled by the admixture of traditions which had crept in, and, in so far, rendered it ineffectual. The pastors, whose business it was to keep the lightstand well supplied with golden olive oil of truth, were deteriorating in faithfulness and aptitude for teaching.

Hence, the light grew dim and smoky, and men did not see their way as in former years. In consequence of this enfeebled perception, their christian virtue became too easy and tolerant of the traditions of the apostasy, until at length their individuality converged towards, and was finally lost in, the indefiniteness and confusion of the Lutheran and Calvinistic novelties of the sixteenth century.

This fatal termination of their labours is styled in the prophecy, the finishing of their testimony. Their word having lost its power, the energy of their ancient helper, the Earth, was enfeebled likewise.

When men's hold upon principles is relaxed, they lack that enterprize and force which is necessary for their preservation in this evil world. A worldly and "charitable" spirit generates indifference, by which the pointedness and sharpness of the truth are destroyed. The word handled in a worldly spirit is always "charitable" or tolerant of traditions, which make it of none effect.

The word being ministered thus, the power of energetic resistance, and of a bold and valiant advocacy of their ancient principles, was wanting, and deprived both classes of witnesses of their efficiency.

Hence, the spirit had no longer any use for them; for the protestantized testimony they were now only able to give, was not of that brightness necessary to constitute them the Golden Oil Light of the world.

Men may testify against the Roman Antichrist, and denounce both him and his co-religionists as idolators, which is unquestionably true; but such a testimony leaves the Court as much in the dark as to what must be believed and done for remission of sins, and for obtaining a right to eternal life, as though nothing had been said. This is Protestantism.

It protests truly, that the pope is a blasphemous impersonation of the Christ; but it cannot delineate Christ Jesus according to the prophetic and apostolic testimony. It is, therefore, simply a negation; it denies every thing, but can scripturally affirm nothing. Such a witness as this is of no account in the premises; its doctrine and institutions are devoid of all power for the salvation of the soul.

Eureka 11.2.4.

Their days of the prophecy

...the days of the prophecy are of much longer measure than the days of the witnessing against the Antichrist. These days are the 1260, and therefore they are emphatically and specially "their days" the portion of time appropriated to the One Body and its Helper

And these "their days" neither begin nor end with the days of the prophecy. They began, as I have shown, in the three years' epoch of A.D. 312-316, and would consequently end A.D. 1572-76; because 1260 + 316 = 1576.

Thus, their [1 260 years] sackcloth-witnessing had its beginning and ending, long before the deliverance of the Holy City from its "forty and two months" of subjection to the Gentile governments.

Eureka 11.3.1.

7 And when they < may> have finished their testimony, the beast that <ascending out of the abyss will> make war  [Began with the Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre 1572] <with> them , and overcome them, and <put them to death> [1685 Revocation of Nantes Edict].

There were two witnesses. This indicates a distinction-two classes. They were the true woman and the earth, which helped the woman. The Brethren of Christ, who held the Truth and kept separate from the world, on the one hand, and on the other all in the world, who for various reasons-social, political, or religious-opposed the Papacy and sought liberty. It is the latter class-the outer shell, which appears in history. The Huguenots were of the outer witness. They entered politics and war.

Bro Growcott - A review of the apocalypse

The terminal epoch

Exactly 1260 years from the birth of the Imperial Man-Child of Sin (who, they testified had no more to do with the church, than christians with kings, or their bishops with courts); that is, in the year 1572, the first of a terminal epoch of four years, a dreadful calamity befel them in Paris and other cities of France.

This was the celebrated papal massacre of "St. Bartholomew's Day," as the 24th of August is termed by the worshippers of the saints. The murderers ravaged the whole city, and in three days butchered above ten thousand lords, gentlemen, presidents, and people of all ranks. From Paris the massacre spread throughout the whole of France.

... It burst forth upon them most unexpectedly in that section of the plateia, or breadth, of the Great City, styled in the thirteenth verse, to dekaton, the tenth -- one of the Ten-Horn-Kingdoms of the Beast.

...In this Tenth of the Papal Breadth they still amounted to over 1,500,000; many of them wealthy merchants, skilful manufacturers, able sailors and soldiers. The question with the Antichrist and his "eldest son" Louis XIV, was, should such a sect be permitted to exist; and whether their power was not now able to subdue it, and extirpate the heresy?

The king believed that God had raised him up and prospered him for this very thing. The season seemed to them favorable.

There was none of the European States that could protect them. ... Other states were awed by her power, and however willing to support the Huguenots, dared not to provoke so mighty and unrelenting a foe as the GRAND MONARQUE.

He was therefore free to essay their conversion to Romish idolatry, or to exterminate them from his kingdom. He accordingly began this great work of putting to death the witnesses by revoking the Edict of Nantes granted by Henry IV, April 1, 1598. The revocation was decreed October 23, 1685.

... This was putting them to silence, or killing them as witnesses against Romish idolatry. So long as their mouths were closed they were unable to testify; so that as witnesses they were literally dead, though not therefore buried.

...When the remnant ceased to "contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints," "the earth" began to fail in its efforts to establish civil and religious liberty in the countries where "the remnant of the woman's seed" [Rev. 12:17] had witnessed for the truth so long. The reactionists on the side of arbitrary power began to prevail against both classes of witnesses, and the holy city; and to succeed in re-establishing what they call "order;" that is, such a state of society as existed in France from A.D. 1685 to 1789, or in England under Charles II.; or of which we have more recent illustrations in the case of France under Louis XVIII; and Charles X.; and of Italy under Austria and the pope, &c., in 1815!

It is the "order" established by Satan, when he triumphs over the rights of men, and the truth and righteousness of the untraditionized gospel of the kingdom of God. Satan's adherents sigh for that "order" in church and state, which will enable them to increase their power, augment their earthly treasures for the gratification of their lusts, and perpetuate their grinding and debasing tyranny over the nations.

Elpis Israel 3.1.

The saints are marshalled on the side of the woman; and their persecutors on the side of the serpent. The war has been long, fierce, and bloody; but the saints' victory is certain, and the destruction of the beasts and their image inevitable and sure.

In the previous chapter I have briefly sketched the cruelties practised by the Ten Horns, the-Little Horn, and the ecclesiastical image, upon the witnesses and the holy city (called the saints in the aggregate) in all the countries in which they have appeared. France, and the "bloody house of Austria," have been pre-eminent in the strife. They are dyed in infamy of every kind, which they have enacted on the most virtuous of the human race. In all their deeds of fiendishness, they have been applauded by the archdemon of the papacy, who styles them his beloved sons, and the mercenary instruments of his cruelty, his "dear children."

Does the reader suppose that the just and merciful Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of those who keep His commandments and have His testimony, has looked on the fiendism of the sin-power with indifference; and that He will permit their wrongs to die unavenged? if he does, he has greatly mistaken God's character, and knows nothing at all of the awful judgments He has decreed against those who "bruise the heel" of His beloved.

Did He judge Egypt for oppressing Israel though at the time idolators; did He sink Sodom into the volcanic abyss for its crimes; and did He punish Judah with pestilence, famine, sword, and scattering for eighteen centuries, because of unbelief of "the truth as it is in Jesus," and for killing his servants -- and will He not avenge His elect whom He hath chosen upon the demoniac powers which have continued to crush them?

The scripture saith, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints and "precious shall their blood be in His sight." If the blood of the murdered Abel, crying from the ground, was heard of God and avenged, what shall be said of that exceeding great and piercing cry, which upon the same principle, ascends to his throne from that ocean of blood which has been poured out like water from the hearts of his slaughtered saints? Doth it not cry aloud to heaven against popes, emperors, kings, hypocritical and blaspheming priests, and their hordes of mercenaries; and against all ecclesiastical abettors of arbitrary power in church and state?

Yes, that voice, though unheard and unheeded by those who worship the beasts and their image, continually ascendeth, and hath "entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth," saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?" (Rev.6:10).

The hour has come, and the death-knell of the destroyer has sent forth its clangor throughout the dominion of the Roman beast. As in the case of Sodom, though unseen by the eye of the flesh, God has "come down to see if they have done altogether according to the cry." He has found it even so. "Their sins have reached unto heaven," therefore, He will reward them double for all the evil with which they have afflicted His saints.

Such, then, is the case before us. The great national crime has been committed, and perpetuated, of converting the truth of God into a lie, of blaspheming His name, and of bruising the heel of his saints. All nations are guilty of this, and as national offences can only, and must necessarily, be punished, by national judgments, retribution is pouring out upon them according to the word of the Lord.

Elpis Israel 3.2.

This dreadful massacre was 1260 years from the separation established between State-church christians, and the remnant of the Woman's seed. In 312-3, the man-child was born of the Woman as the military chieftain destined to cast the pagan-dragon out of the Roman heaven. A great revolution was consummated. The world's religion was changed; and the foundation laid for that awful despotism in church and state, which has made all the families of the earth to wail.

Constantine and his successors "ruled the nations with a rod of iron;" and united in adulterous alliance, an apostasy from apostolic christianity to the kingdom of the world. Thus, a Satanic system was established, which persecuted all "who kept the commandments of God, and had the testimony of Jesus Christ" (Rev. 12:7-9, 17). The troubles of the witnesses commenced with the institution of state christianity; and they will not cease until every state religion is abolished from the earth.

This Bartholomew massacre of 1572, marks the period of the terminating of the testimony of the two witnesses. From 1572 till 1685 was a period of war, during which unnumbered thousands fell in defence of their civil and religious rights. The war was waged with various fortune on both sides.

At first, the Hougonots were so far successful, that their valour and devotedness raised their leader, Henry of Navarre, to the throne of France. Though a Hougonot, he could not withstand the temptation of an earthly crown, for which he changed sides, and professed himself a papist. He could not, however, forget his companions in arms, but granted them in 1598 the celebrated edict of Nantes.

This charter accorded to them the right to celebrate their worship in every place in which they were resident previous to the year 1597. It permitted them to publish books in certain towns, to convene their synods, to open academies and schools for the education of youth, and to fill public offices. It also gave to them a number of cities as cautionary towns, or pledges of security, with the privilege of keeping them garrisoned, and levying taxes on their own account. Thus there was a little state within the state.

The Romanists and Hougonots were like two armies, or two nations, in view of each other. They had concluded a treaty of peace, in which the king himself was the mediator; and it was ncecssary that each of the contracting parties should obtain their guarantees for the future. This singular state of things resulted from the violation of their engagements by the papists; and from the priests inculcating the treacherous policy of not keeping faith with heretics.

Henry IV. was assassinated in 1610, by Ravaillac, a fanatic of the Jesuit order. Upon this, troubles immediately recommenced between the warlike Hougonots and papists. The former were conquered; they lost all their strong holds; and in 1628, Rochelle, their last bulwark, fell into the hands of Cardinal Richlieu.

Thus disappeared in this kingdom of the Beast their power to "devour their enemies by fire proceeding out of their (cannon) mouth" (Rev. 11:5). They had no longer "power to shut heaven that it should not rain," nor could they any more turn the waters of Piedmont, and the departments of France, into blood, and smite the earth with the plague of war "as often as they willed." Their political power was gone, and their affairs grew worse and worse, until their total wreck in the reign of Louis XIV.

Elpis Israel 3.1.

Death of The Two Witnesses - 1685

Revocation of Nantes Edict

"Soon after he [Louis xiv - France] came to the crown," says Mr. Claude, "there arose in the kingdom a civil war, which proved so sharp and desperate as brought the state within a hair's breadth of utter ruin. Those of the reformed religion still kept their loyalty so inviolable, and accompanied it with such a zeal, and with a fervour so extraordinary, and so successful, that the king found himself obliged to give public marks of it by a declaration made at St. Germains in the year 1652. Then as well at Court as in the armies, each strove to proclaim loudest the merits of the reformed."

Now, however commendable Mr. Claude and others may deem them on account of this loyalty, the simple import of the matter is, that their devotion to Louis XIV. proved that their testimony was finished. Instead of standing aloof, and testifying against the despotism of church and state, and

"contending earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints;" [Jude 3]

their pastors and congregations had sunk down into the formalism of Calvinism; and actually drew the sword for a horn, or dynasty, of the very Beast, which had "made war against the saints" with all the attendant cruelty of massacre, rapine, and ravishment; and which was destined finally to "kill them."

Calvinists in the imperio-papal, and royal, armies, of the Beasts and their horns, have forfeited all claims to divine favour as his witnesses of either class. Their mission is ended, and the sentence of death rests upon them. In about thirty years after this fatal demonstration of loyalty to the monster of the sea, God permitted their enemies to destroy them.

Moved by the Jesuits, who flattered his pride by persuading him, that for him was reserved the glory of re-establishing religious unity in his dominions, Louis XIV. determined to accomplish the suppression of Hougonotism in France. The plan was arranged in the spirit of Jesuitism, and pursued with dreadful perseverance. Referring to their new- born zeal for the Bourbon dynasty, their enemies said,

"if on this occasion the Hougonots could preserve the state, this shows likewise that they could have overthrown it; this party must therefore by all means be crushed."

***

Hence, Louis, and the abettors of the tyranny, immediately set about it.

" A thousand dreadful blows," says M. Saurin, "were struck at our afflicted churches before that which destroyed them: for our enemies, if I may use such an expression, not content with seeing our ruin, endeavoured to taste it."

They were persecuted in every imaginable way. They were excluded from the king's household; from all employments of honour and profit, all the courts of justice, erected by virtue of the edicts of Nantes, were abolished, so that in all trials their enemies only were their judges, and in all the courts of justice the cry was,

"I plead against a heretic;" "I have to do with a man of a religion odious to the state, and which the king is resolved to extirpate."

"Orders were printed at Paris, and sent from thence to all the cities and parishes of the kingdom, which empowered the parochial priests, churchwardens, and others, to make an exact inquiry into whatever any of the reformed might have done, or said, for twenty years past, as well on the subject of religion as otherwise; to make information of this before the justices of the peace, and punish them to the utmost extremity.

Thus the prisons and dungeons were everywhere filled with these pretended criminals; orders were issued, which deprived them in general of all sorts of offices and employments, from the greatest to the smallest, in the farms and revenues; they were declared incapable of exercising any employ in the custom-houses, guards, treasury, or post-office, or even to be messengers, stage coach men, or waggoners.

Now a college was suppressed, and then a church shut up, and at length they were forbid to worship in public at all by the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685. Rude popish missionaries, without learning, or decency, went from house to house, for the purpose of inducing them to abjure their religion; they interrupted the preachers; and, if the congregation forcibly ejected them, they complained to the magistrate, who seized the opportunity thus presented to suppress the meeting-house.

Consciences were bought up like articles of merchandise. Pastors were forbidden to preach beyond the places in which they resided under penalty of several years imprisonment. Children of tender age were authorised to embrace popery in spite of the opposition of their parents; who, without regard to rank, condition, or merit, were declared unworthy to serve the state.

"The great majority continued steadfast. Promises of wealth and honours, seductions, artifices, threats, failed to shake their constancy: so that their persecutors resorted to the still more energetic measures, commonly known as THE DRAGONNADES.

"These were a species of punishment unthought of by the inquisition. Profligate and merciless soldiers were sent into the houses of the Hougonots. They had orders to resort to every method except assassination to convert their victims to papalism!

They laid waste their property, destroyed their household goods, treated mothers, wives, and maidens, in an infamous manner, brutally struck the men; and, by a refinement of cruelty, hindered then taking an hour's rest until they had signed a derisive abjuration. Some crushed beneath such accumulated sufferings, lost their reason; others, led away by despair, suffered death by their own hands.

The Dragonnades still live in the memory of Frenchmen, as a fearful and horrible memento of by-gone days. But even these atrocities were insufficient to consummate the conversion of the Hougonots to Romanism.

"In 1685, as we have said, Louis the Fourteenth, signed the revocation of the edict of Nantes. The preamble of this ordinance made the king say, 'we now see; with the gratitude we owe to God, that our endeavours have had the result we proposed, since the best and greatest portion of our subjects of the pretended reformed religion have embraced the Catholic faith.'

But this did not express the truth. Hundreds of thousands emigrated from France, to seek asylums in foreign lands; into every part of Europe; and from the Cape of Good Hope to the American wilderness, they carried their faith, industry, laborious habits, and their example; and besides these, two millions remained in the land of their birth, who persevered in their opinions beneath the sword of the executioner, and in the sight of the fires of martyrdom.

***

"Those who had not quitted France were in the most deplorable condition. Deprived of their leaders, and having no regular means of religious instruction, pursued like rebels, they met at distant intervals, in some wild retreat. When they were surprised, the soldiers fired on them, as if they had been ferocious animals.

Thousands of poor victims were condemned to the galleys, and were there confounded with the vilest wretches. Others were hung, beheaded, or burned. If a dying man, moved to remorse, disavowed in his last moments the popish religion, to which he had conformed during his life, his dead body was dragged through the streets by the hangman, and was afterwards cast into a receptacle for filth, like the carcass of an unclean beast." - Abridg. of G. De Felice.

Speaking of the revocation, M. Saurin says,

"Now we were banished, then we were forbidden to quit the kingdom, on pain of death. Here we saw the glorious rewards of those who betrayed their religion; and there we beheld those who had the courage to confess it, haled to a dungeon, a scaffold, or a galley. Here, we saw our persecutors drawing on a sledge the dead bodies of those who had expired on the rack: there we beheld a false friar tormenting a dying man, who was terrified on the one hand with the fear of hell if he apostatized ; and on the other, with the fear of leaving his children without bread, if he should continue in the faith."

"They cast some," says M. Claude, "into large fires, and took them out when they were half roasted; they hanged others with large ropes under their arm-pits, and plunged them several times into wells till they promised to renounce their religion; they tied them like criminals on the rack, and poured wine with a funnel into their mouths till being intoxicated they promised to turn Catholics. Some they slashed and cut with pen-knives; some they took by the nose with red hot tongs, and led them up and down the rooms till they agreed to turn Catholics. These cruel proceedings made 800,000 persons quit the kingdom."

Thus, Oct. 18, 1685, became the epoch of the death of the witnesses. The war had been long, but the Beast subdued them at last. The voice of testimony against papalism in church and state silenced. The stillness of death pervaded, not France only, but Europe likewise; and if I were called upon to point out the darkest period of BIBLE CHRISTIANITY from the time of Constantine to the present time, I should point to the interval from the revocation of the edict of Nantes to the breaking out of the French Revolution in 1789.

During this time the holy city was laid low, and the symbolic witnesses laid dead, though unburied. Their lamps were extinguished, and "before the God of the earth" there was no light; no Illuminati; none to torment them that dwelt upon the earth with a faithful testimony against tyranny and state religion. Everything was sunk into cold formality, and the Beasts and their Image (Rev. 13:1, 11, 15) were triumphant everywhere.

Elpis Israel 3.1.

8 And their <corpses> shall lie <upon the breadth> of the Great City <styled> spiritually Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.

Corpses unburied (awaiting resusitation)

The execution of this decree [revoking the edict of Nantes] was terrible, and its consequences most deplorable. Many were cruelly tortured and put to death; many were imprisoned or sent to the galleys; dragoons, "the basest troops of the kingdom, fellows that would stick at nothing," were quartered upon them, who insulted and pillaged them, in order to force them to change their religion.

Terror and dread marched before them, and the cruelties of 1572 were enacted over again.

"Die or be catholics!"

...A million of them are said to have emigrated into other countries; and to have carried with them two hundred millions of money, besides their skill in arts and manufactures. The flame was smothered, but the embers remained, yet again to be fanned into a terrible and consuming conflagration. But for the present they were prostrated, as "corpses upon the breadth of the Great City spiritually styled Sodom and Egypt."

Such, then, was the war by which they were overcome and put to death. It continued with intermissions during a period of a hundred and thirteen years from A.D. 1572. But although their testimony was silenced, and they were as dead "among the peoples, and tribes, and tongues, and nations," upon which the Great Harlot sits in reeling instability, "drunk with the blood of the saints AND with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus" -- their inanimate polities did not suffer dissolution.

Eureka 11.3.1.

Sodom

Now Jerusalem as a daughter of Sodom, is illustrative of the moral condition of the Great City in whose breadth the witnesses were slain. It is spiritually called Sodom, because its rulers and people are the moral counterpart of the Jews in their worst condition, upon whom that name was imposed because they were even worse than "the cities of the plain" (Matt. xi. 23,24).

There is nothing affirmed by Isaiah of Jerusalem as a spiritual Sodom, which is not literally descriptive of the uncleanness and filth of the Antichristian city and dominion. It is spiritually, or allegorically, styled Sodom, because of its moral likeness thereto, and because, being destitute of even "a very small remnant," the like fate is decreed against it.

The original Sodom suddenly went down crashing into hell; so, when the Angel of the Bow, Yahweh Elohim, shall judge the Great City, "as a great millstone cast into the sea," she will go down surging and plunging into her subterranean abyss, and "be found no more at all" (Apoc. xviii. 21).

Egypt

But, the Great City is also allegorically styled "Egypt". It is the great "House of Bondage" in which Israel after the flesh, and the "very small remnant," not of the city, but trampled in it, "the Israel of the Deity," are sojourning, and waiting for deliverance. It is also spiritual Egypt because of its moral likeness to the literal land of Mitzraim.

Its superstition, its ignorance of Yahweh, its hatred and oppression of his people, its hardness of heart, its sorcery, adulteries and murders, its darkness that may be felt -- transcend the infamy of Pharaoh and his hosts in these abominations. The Great City is, therefore, well and truly styled Egypt.

But it is also thus allegorized, because the plagues of Egypt await her; and because, the Eternal Spirit will judge her to an overthrow, as terrible and effectual in the judgment as when he judged the Egyptians by the hand of Moses.

... Christ was crucified by Rome without the walls of Jerusalem. He was, therefore, crucified in a province of the Roman empire; for the Jews then inhabiting Palestine earnestly testified that they had no other king than Caesar (John xix. 15). Hence, the Great City is the empire of Rome, whose frontiers were decreed by Caracalla to be the limits of the city.

The empire and city, then, are coextensive; in other words, they are the same. In this Great City, three thousand miles in one direction, and two thousand in another, the personal and mystical Christs were both crucified, or put to death by violence of the Fourth Beast power -- Jesus in Palestine; and the witnesses of Jesus in the plateia, or western breadth thereof -- the special jurisdiction of Antichrist.

Eureka 11.3.3.

The Great City Babylon

...Thus did the Spirit select three of the most infamous centres of iniquity among the ancients by which to allegorize the Great City, upon the arena of which has been developed and matured the great Greek, Latin, and Protestant apostasy. It is "spiritually," or figuratively, called by these names, Sodom, Egypt, and Babylon, because of its striking resemblance to them in their beastiality, superstition, blasphemy, oppression of God's people, and fate.

Hence in Sodom, in Egypt, and in the Great City Babylon, "our Lord was crucified;" not in his own person only, but in that also of his witnesses; for what is done unto the least of his brethren, is done also unto him (Matt. xxv. 40); therefore in crucifying, or putting them to death, after their testimony was finished, he was again crucified with them in the Great City, they having been massacred in the noble service of witnessing for him against the deified usurper of his sovereignty and rights.

Eureka 11.3.3.

9 And they <shall see their corpses among the peoples, and tribes, and tongues, and nations > three days and an half, and <they> shall not suffer their <corpses> to be put <into tombs>.

Their corpses remained entire. Communities of them still were seen in "the breadth of the Great City" awaiting "spirit of life from the Deity" to break in upon them for their resuscitation.

Eureka 11.3.2.

Falling down of the anti catholics

The ptomata, in this text rendered corpses, are so called because they had fallen down from their former position of "standing before the God of the earth."

They were to be in this prostrate condition until something providential should occur to cause them to "stand upon their feet;" when, of course, they would no longer be corpses.

The text before us, then, informs us, that the witnessing prophets having finished their tormenting testimony, were silenced. When witnesses are put to silence, they are symbolically dead; and so long as they are compelled by authority to keep silence, they are in the death-state: and though they may continue associated into bodies, yet being forbidden to assemble, and to propagate their principles upon pain of death, as by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, they are to all witnessing intents and purposes, dead bodies, or corpses.

...they had turned the waters into blood: but this they were now no longer able to do, for they had fallen down from their standing in their midst; and the time was come for these "waters upon which the Great Harlot sits," to rejoice over them in this the day of their prostration.

Now, when people are dead, it is usual for the living to put them out of sight, or to bury them, as soon as possible; but, in the case of these corpses "they would not suffer them to be entombed." Who would not suffer it? Their enemies? Or some others friendly towards them? Certainly not their enemies; for these did their best to destroy them, and to blot out the remembrance of them for ever.

It was the protection afforded them in the Protestant States that prevented their burial and decomposition. The refugee witnesses that fled by hundreds of thousands from the presence of the Deity of the earth and his regal adherents, settled in Holland, Britain, Protestant Germany, and America; where, under the protection of the laws, they existed as corporate societies, but bearing no testimony as of old.

Some of these governments remonstrated in their behalf which was not without influence in staying the destroyer's hand. Hence, an unburied remnant of them was permitted to remain in the breadth of the Great City -- a prostrate remnant, no longer able to testify, but waiting in silence for their resurrection to life and power.

Eureka 11.3.4.

Three days and an half

The fitness of the symbol - a corpse may remain unburied for 3 1/2 days but not 105 years.

3 lunar days (30) = 90 + 1/2 lunar day (15) = 105

"is intended by these three days and a half? My answer is, that days in this eleventh verse are the same with months in the second verse, or, if you please, lunar days, reckoning as the Jews did, thirty days to a month, and as is the method in calculating the above forty and two months, to make them agree with the 1260 days in the third verse.

"Thirty multiplied by three, adding fifteen for the half day, makes 105". - Mr Bicheno, Baptist pastor.

Eureka 11.3.5.

10 And they <who> dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and <be exultant: > and <they> shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them <who>dwell <upon> the earth.

The massacre with which they were overwhelmed at the outbreak of the war against them in 1572, and which was then supposed to have entirely ruined them, when known in Rome was a cause of great joy to their enemies in that city.

...In the evening, the cannon of St. Angelo were fired to testify the public joy; the whole city illuminated with bonfires; and no one sign of rejoicing omitted that was usually made for the greatest victories obtained in favour of the Roman church. In addition to this medals were struck commemorative of the joyous event.

A copy of it is before me in Elliott's work, taken from Sir. W. Cockburn's work on the Massacre. It is about two inches and five eighths diameter. On one face is the bust of the Roman deity, Gregory XIII; and on the obverse a winged angel with an uplifted cross in the left hand, and a drawn two edged sword in the right, symbolizing the papal destroyers of "the earth" in France.

Men, women, and children are before the angel dead, dying, falling, and about to fall by his sword; while in the background is a woman, with uplifted arms supporting a mantle, and looking complacently upon the massacre, symbolizing the Catholic church. On the margin is the legend, "Ugonottorum Strages, 1572" -- The Massacre of the Hugonots, 1572.

Eureka 11.3.2.

A writer on prophecy has well remarked, that "there is no nation existing which, first and last, has produced such a number of faithful witnesses against papal corruptions, and tyrannies, as France.

No people have so long a list of martyrs and confessors to show as the Hougonots of that country; and there is no royal family in Europe which has shed in the support of popery, half the blood which the Capets have shed. Who deluged the earth with the blood of the Waldenses and Albigenses that inhabited the southern parts of France, and bore testimony against the corruptions and usurpations of Rome? The cruel kings of France slew above a million of them.

Who set on foot, and headed, the executioners of the massacre of Bartholomew in 1572, which lasted seven days, and in which some say near 50,000 Hougonots were murdered in Paris, and 25,000 more in the provinces? The royal monsters of France. A massacre this, in which neither age nor sex, nor even women with child, were spared; for the butchers had received orders to slaughter all, even babes at the breast, if they belonged to the Hougonots.

The king himself stood at the windows of his palace, endeavouring to shoot those who fled, and crying to their pursuers, 'kill them, kill them!' For this massacre public rejoicings were made at Rome, and in other papal countries. A medal was struck at Rome commemorative of this tragical event.

Elpis Israel 3.1.

11 And after <the> three days and an half, spirit of life from <the Deity broke in upon> them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon <those who beheld> them.

The FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY EPOCH, a period of about five years, signalized by the fall of the French Monarchy and the Reign of Terror 1789-94

Resurrection of the witnesses

And what length of time was to elapse from the slaying of the witnessing bodies in A.D. 1685, to their resurrection? The answer of the text is in mystical terms "three days and a half." Now during all the time of their lying dead and unburied in the breadth of the Great City, no one was able rightly to conjecture what number of years was signified by this enigmatical formula. But, when they arose and "stood upon their feet," they convulsed the Great City, and made it tremble in all its ten kingdoms.

There could be no mistaking the fact, that the advocates of civil and religious liberty and the rights of man, who had been so cruelly massacred by Louis XIV, were again, in the reign of Louis XVI, in intense and terrible activity. This was, therefore, a resurrection of the same class that had been slain. New life had entered into them, and they were again a power in the state.

On May 15, 1789, the States General of France, consisting of 601 deputies of the Third Estate; 285 nobles; and 308 clergy; in all 1254 representatives, opened their sitting at Versailles. The Third Estate, which was the popular element, desired that the three orders should form but one assembly. This the nobles and clergy at first refused to do. On the 17th June, however, some of the clergy having joined the Third Estate, the deputies declared their assembly to be the only legal one, and constituted themselves as THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY; which, on the 27th, was joined by all the rest.

On the 23rd of Aug. this new assembly published a decree proclaiming liberty of opinions, religious as well as political; on Oct. 1, it made a declaration of The Rights of Man in society; and on Dec. 24, issued a decree declaring all Frenchmen who are not Catholics admissible to all offices, both civil and military. Civil and religious liberty and the rights of man were the ancient testimony, both of the true believers, and of "the Earth" that helped them; and here we find the doctrine authoritatively reaffirmed by "the Earth" in its National Assembly, which restores these inestimable blessings to all non-catholic Frenchmen, who had been so mercilessly deprived of them in Oct. 1685.

A Louis had taken away this liberty from his non-catholic subjects; and his grandson by the same class of people was compelled to restore it.

Here, then, are two important and signal dates -- Oct. 1685, and Oct. 1789. These decrees of the National Assembly were as "the Spirit of life from the Deity;" and on the 10th July 1790 "they stood upon their feet;" for the Earth's Assembly on that day decreed, that the property of the expelled Houguenots unsold at date, confiscated by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, should be restored to their heirs.

They called this the National Justice, which it was the providential mission of the Third Estate to execute; and with terrible fidelity did they fulfil it in vindicating the oppressed, and in punishing the oppressor.

Now, between 1685 and 1790, is a period of 105 years. This is the duration of the death state in which the witnesses were deficient of all political life.

Eureka 11.3.4.

Romanism was the only view the people had of christianity; for there had been no testimony borne against it in France for ninety-eight years.

The priests taught them that Romanism was the religion of the Bible, but would not permit them to look into it to see. Need one be surprised, then, that when the democracy arose to judgement, it should abolish such a christianity as that which had destroyed them; treat the Bible with contempt; and even deny the existence of a God, who was supposed to sanction the falsehoods of Romanism, or to approve its hypocritical and licentious priests?

The liberalism of the American auxiliaries manifested itself soon after their return, in the appearance of an American party in French politics. The influence of this in connection with the scepticism of "the philosophers," became "the breath of (political) life from God." It entered into the unburied witnesses; and "they stood upon their feet," ready for action. Thus they drew their first breath in the very city where they had received their death blow.

Elpis Israel 3.2.

Revival of the Truth in the Latter Days

The time is come in which there must be no faint heartedness, and when a courageous testimony must be borne for the word of the kingdom. Ministerial favour and popularity must be utterly disregarded; and the question be, not "what saith the minister?" or "what will people think?"

It matters not what they say, or think, in the case; the simple question is, "How is it written?" "What saith the word?" Let this course be pursued in candour, and I doubt not, but in a short time a people will spring up in this island prepared for the Lord, whom he will acknowledge at his return.

Elpis Israel 3.3.

Paul M Hart - My adapted chart from Wikipedia showing origins of Chrisadelphians from Millerites (after Great Dissapoitment 1834) 

As the Bible came into free circulation there was a general onslaught upon the catholic and protestant Laodicean apostacy from various congregations and names [such as Walter Scott, Alexander Campbell, and previously Robert Sandeman] attempting religious reform. These were unenlightened witnesses against the god of the earth, but their agitations proved useful in the recovery of The Truth.

Of Sandeman -

He taught that justifying faith was a simple belief of the divine testimony, passively received by the understanding; ...that there is acceptance with God through Christ for sinners, while they are sinners, before "any act, exercise, or exertion of their minds whatsoever;" consequently, before repentance.

Hence, his theory was, justification by passive belief of the truth alone!

He was very severe, but not more so than was in accordance with the truth, in his criticism of the "popular preachers." "I would be far," says he,

"from refusing even to the popular preachers themselves what they so much grudge to others -- the benefit of the one instance of a hardened sinner (the thief on the cross) finding mercy at last; for I know of no sinners more hardened, none greater destroyers of mankind, than they."

...Papists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and others, were all made to writhe in the anguish of his tormenting testimony against them; and would willingly have extinguished him after the approved fashion of former days, but for his brethren of "the Earth," who, at the epoch of their resurrection to political life and power, had founded the new government under which he lived.

...The French army, which was sent to help "the Earth" established its independence of the Anglican Daughter of the Roman Harlot, on its return to France reimported into that land the principles of liberty and the rights of man; which, after the "three days and a half" were ended, as "Spirit of Life from the Deity, broke in upon" the constituents of the Third Estate, and caused them to "stand upon their feet" to the great terror of all who beheld them .

The works of Bro Thomas - the Revival of the Apostolic Faith

... the study of "the faith once for all delivered to the saints" was continued; and, as it broke in upon his mind, was dealt out by the press and tongue to all who had

"ears to hear what the Spirit had said to the ecclesias."

The upstanding witness

Here Bro Thomas identifies his work as the 'spirit of life from the Deity' prophesied in Rev 11:11.

Eureka 11.3.6.

Storming of the Bastille, July 1789

Great fear fell upon those [King, clergy and aristocracy in France]

who beheld them [the cloud - The National Assembly]

The nobles and titled clergy threw themselves at the feet of the King, and implored him to support their rights, which were attacked equally with his own. They strove to procure a dissolution of the States General, which would have been a dispersion of "the Cloud;" and a frustration of the providential purpose of its manifestation.

But the commons would not allow their enemies to dispose of them after this fashion. They proclaimed themselves, after a stormy sitting, THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY on June 17, 1789; whose mission it was to regenerate and restore the nation.

But, we are not to suppose that this heterogeneous cloud of deputies were the witnesses. The National Assembly contained many enemies to liberty and human rights and interests -- many who were devoted friends of the Roman Deity and arbitrary power everywhere.

...The "Great Voice" from the French throne, in commanding this Cloud of Deputies to ascend into the region of power, or "heaven," did not intend to convoke witnesses against itself, and against the nobles, the bishops, and their dependents, the natural pillars of every abomination in church and state.

The electoral body of the nation, however, had different views and purposes. In response to the "great voice out of the heaven, saying, Ascend hither!" the electors sent up some whom they knew not -- men of political integrity, lovers of justice, haters of oppression, detesters of hypocrisy and state craft, enemies of corruption, and friends of the people.

These "ascended into the heaven in the cloud; and their enemies," the Court, the bishops, and the nobles, "beheld them."

...The day of vengeance for the national crimes of 1572 and 1685, had arrived; and they were the divinely appointed executioners of judgment upon the court, aristocracy and clergy; so that no device contrived against them was allowed to prosper.

When their enemies beheld them, their hatred was the result of fear. History and prophecy both testify this. "Great fear," says John, "fell upon those who beheld them."

...Having resolved themselves into the National Assembly without regard to the court, aristocracy, and clergy, they performed an act of power, in legalizing the levy of the taxes, though imposed without the national consent; but that they should cease to be levied from the day of their being broken up: and placed the creditors of the State under the safeguard of French integrity: they then proceeded to examine into the causes of the dearth and of the public distress.

"These measures," says Thiers, "produced a deep impression. The court and higher orders were alarmed at such courage and energy." The danger was equal for them all. The junction of the clergy with the Assembly was a revolution as prejudicial to the king as to the two higher orders themselves, whom the commons declared that they could dispense with.

Eureka 11.3.7.

12 And they heard a great voice [Edict from Louis xvi] from <the> heaven [Louis' government], saying <to> them, <"Ascend hither!"> [May 1789]. And they ascended <into the> heaven in <the> cloud [the Third Estate - Tiers Etat]; and their enemies beheld them.

Since 1685, the revocation of the Edit of Nance, the Catholic monarchy, clergy, and nobility had ruled France with an iron hand, but increasing disorder and bankruptcy cause Louis XVI in desperation to summon the national assembly. 

This was the ascension of the witnesses to heaven. 

The time was right, and events soon snowballed into the execution of the king, the abolition of the nobility, or names of men, confiscation of all church property, and end of all church power, and the terrible blood bath, known as the Reign of Terror.

Out of this came Napoleon, with the vials of God's wrath against the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire that we shall see later in chapter 16.

Bro Growcott - Review of the Apocalypse

By heaven in this place, we are to understand the political heaven which ruled over the plateia of the Great City upon which the corpses of the witnesses were extended:- the political heaven of "the tenth of the Great City." It was the power of this heaven embodied in the government of the "Grand Monarque," Louis XIV, that conquered and put them to death; and it was the power of the same heaven that blindly legislated them into an erect position, so that they were able to "stand upon their feet."

...The passion for republican institutions increased with the successes of the American war, and at length arose to such a height as to infect even the courtiers of the palace. The philosophers of France used every method of flattery to bring over the young nobles to their side; and the profession of liberal opinions became as indispensable a passport to the saloons of fashion as to the favour of the people."

This combination of influences at length came to a head, and set, in a strong current, against the court. In order, therefore, to divert into another channel what might become an overwhelming flood, Louis XVI was now anxious for the convocation of the States General, the opening of which he fixed by "a great voice," or edict, "out of the heaven," saying, "Ascend hither!" on May 5, 1789.

The Third Estate

The Court ordained that the total number of the deputies should be at least a thousand; and that the Tiers-Etat, or Third Estate, should be equal to the other two orders united.

The clergy, the nobles and the deputies of the people, were the three orders of the States General. The third estate comprehended nearly the whole nation; all the useful, industrious, and enlightened classes

...a visible and recognized body in the state, or political aerial, on the verification of the powers of the members. This verification is the condensation of them into "a Cloud."

The public mind, agitated by events, full of the confused idea of a speedy revolution, was in a continual ferment. In the heat of this the elections took place. "Tradesmen, lawyers, literary men, astonished to find themselves assembled together for the first time, raised themselves up by degrees to liberty." It was an extraordinary resurrection.

The moment of the convocation at length arrived. The King alone, who had not enjoyed a moment's repose since the commencement of his reign, regarded the States General as the termination of his embarrassments! It was therefore with joy that he made preparations for this grand assembly; which was opened with great national, military, and religious pomp, by which all hearts were deeply moved.

Eureka 11.3.7.

...with every disadvantage in the outset, the sans-cullottes-soldiery became at length every where triumphant.

They were without funds, imperfectly armed and disciplined, and led on by inexperienced generals; they were opposed by well-appointed armies, with all the military talent of Europe to direct them: but God's power was with them in a way not visible to flesh.

They were contending with His foes, and avenging the blood of His saints, therefore no power could withstand them so long as they did not transcend their mission.

This history of these events ought to teach politicians, that God can punish the destroyers of the earth by an agency which in itself is without strength or wisdom. When He takes the work in hand the feeble become strong; and the poor despise riches.

His saints of Media "did not regard silver; and as for gold, they delighted not in it." Politicians speculate as though money were omnipotent; and we hear "financial reformers" predicting the inactivity of Russia and Austria for want of funds! Where did the barbarians procure funds for the overthrow of the western empire in the fifth and sixth centuries? Did they not support themselves by the spoil?

Let the Russian treasury be as empty as it is said to be, and its expenditure exceed its revenue by double the alleged deficit, it will only operate as a pressure from within, causing her autocrat to

"enter into the countries, and to overflow and pass over,"

and to enrich himself with the spoil of those he is destined to subdue.

Elpis Israel 3.3.

13 And < in that> hour [30 years] <there> was a great earthquake [Ruling elite deposed], and the tenth of the city fell, [French revolution - France no longer subordinate to Catholic Rome] and <and there were destroyed> in the [political] earthquake <seven thousand names of men> [Titles of priviledge - nobles and clerical orders]: and the <rest were terrified> [unprivileged catholic multitudes], and gave glory to the <Deity> [The 'supreme being'] of <the> heaven.

In that hour

...an hour; which, being a twelfth part of a Jewish circle of time, if that circle be a day for a year, would represent a month of days, or thirty days; or if a year-time of years, a month of years, or thirty years. I believe this is the proportional allotment of time for the earthquake and the events of the first five vials resulting from it.

...Justinian's Decretal Letter to "JOHN, the Most Holy Archbishop of the sacred city Rome, and Patriarch," dated March, A.D. 533, became thenceforth part of the civil law.

... Justinian's legislation was all devoted to the building up and strengthening of the Catholic Church; while the legislation of the National Assembly was all directed to its destruction.

It is a remarkable fact, that these two mutually antagonistic and subversive systems of legislation flourished exactly 1260 years apart from epoch to epoch; and that the one hour of 30 years added to it, or 1290, brings us to the beginning of the outpouring of the Sixth Vial, A.D. 1820, upon "the Great River Euphrates;" the drying up of whose waters prepares the way of the Sun's Resurrected Kings for the destruction of the Great City, and the redemption of the Holy Land.

Eureka 11.3.9.

An earthquake, in symbolic language, is a shaking of "the earth," which, in the political system of the world, is representative of the common people. It answers to the phrase, a democratic and social revolution.

There was to be a Great Democratic Revolution "in that hour," characterized by the ascent of the political witnesses of Jesus "in the Cloud" of Deputies "into the heaven," to the great alarm of all interested in the abuses and corruptions of Church and State. The events of that hour have since come to be spoken of as "the Great French Revolution," which has hitherto surpassed all others.

Eureka 11.3.8.

The Tenth Part

Ten has been the predominant number of the papal kingdoms; and, therefore, though they may vary at times, as the vision does not follow them in all their history, they are symbolically indicated as the Ten. Of these, France is the most conspicuous in its relation to the witnesses. It is therefore styled kat 'exochen, "the Tenth of the City," which was overthrown as a Diademed Horn by the executioners of the national justice upon the king, nobles and clergy -- the class-murderers of the saints.

Eureka 11.3.8.

... since Charlemagne, king of the Franks in the ninth century, defended the Pope and reestablished his authority in Europe, France was considered the eldest son of the church-the chief or principle tenth of the great city. And in this period France fell; that is, fell as far as Catholic power is concerned.

The Tenth of the City Fell"

... the epoch of the first French Revolution when‭ "‬the Tenth of the City fell.‭" ‬Since that time you have seen a power at work in the Roman West,‭ ‬to which all its revolutions are referrable.‭ ‬If you study its character in Belgium,‭ ‬France,‭ ‬Spain,‭ ‬Portugal,‭ ‬Sardinia,‭ ‬Austria,‭ ‬and the Italian States,‭ ‬you will find its watch-words to be,‭ "‬Down with Popery,‭ ‬Sovereignty for the Peoples,‭ ‬Liberty of the Press,‭ ‬Equality and Brotherhood for all‭!"

‭Herald of the Kingdom and Age to Come, July 1856

The object for which "the Earth" had exhaled from its stratum the Cloud of Deputies in response to the Royal Edict, saying, "Ascend hither!" was the establishment of a Constitution. The instruction given to its deputies energetically expressed its demand for this, with the understanding that the new government was to be monarchical and hereditary.

The constituents of the deputies were all agreed in desiring the regeneration of France; and the whole French nation claimed with energy the rights of the citizen, liberty, and property, and the free communication of thought. It insisted on being free; and "the genius of France," says Clermont-Tonnerre, "hurried, as it were, the march of the public mind; and had accumulated for it in a few hours the experience which could scarcely be expected from many centuries."

Clermont-Tonnerre's "Genius of France," was John's "Spirit of Life from God." It was this that "hurried on the march of the public mind," and gave it a certain amount of wisdom for the crisis beyond its experience of ages.

But the instability of the king, and the infatuation of the court and aristocracy, proved an obstacle quite insurmountable by a wise moral force, and precipitated events which threatened, and at length effected, their destruction. Had the estates of the kingdom been left to their own action, the result would probably have been in favour of the old abuses; but there were forces exterior to these orders, vigilantly observing the course of events, and ever ready to shape them into the direction it was considered they ought to go for the development of the public good.

These forces were famine and the fury of the people worked by agents invisible and unknown. The parliaments, the nobility, the clergy, the court, all threatened with the same ruin, had united their interests, and acted in concert. They were all pervaded with consternation mingled with despair.

Their policy was to have the people commit as much evil as possible, that what they called good might be brought about by the very excess of that evil. In promotion, therefore, of this "political pessimism," compounded of spite and perfidy, the aristocracy began from the time of the capture of the Bastile to co-operate with the most violent members of the popular party.

Under the influence of these antagonist forces, unexpected events would result to the astonishment and dismay of all parties. The agitation was general. A sudden terror had spread itself everywhere. On the night between July 14 and 15, Paris was to be attacked on seven points, and the National Assembly dissolved. The treachery of the court was revealed by its imprudence, and effectually defeated by the fury of the people, who stormed the Bastile, July 14, 1789, and caused the Assembly to triumph over its enemies.

But the reconciliation was only transitory. The court resumed its pride, and the people its distrust; and implacable hatred recommenced its course. Atrocious outrages were committed throughout the whole kingdom, which were rather increased than pacified by the spontaneous abolition of the feudal system, and the tithes without redemption.

The king, who sanctioned this revolution, accepted the flattering but undeserved title of "the Restorer of French Liberty." His was a struggle of power against liberty; and every concession was a victory gained by the people, and one step nearer the precipice over which "the Tenth of the City" was doomed to fall.

...The plan definitely adopted was to set the people in motion, repair in arms to the palace, and to depose the king. On the 3rd of August, Petion, the Mayor of Paris, was directed to petition the Assembly in the name of the forty-eight sections of the city, to decree the dethronement of Louis XVI.

The crisis was now approaching. Everything was arranged by the royalists for the king's flight, which at the last moment was frustrated by his refusal to fly. A general agitation pervaded Paris. The drum beat the call in all quarters. The cry, "To arms!" was raised, and the insurrection proclaimed on the 10th of August. The dismal sound of the tocsin pervaded the whole extent of the Capital. At length it reached the palace, proclaiming that the terrible night had come -- that fatal night of agitation and blood -- destined to be the last the monarch should pass in the palace of his ancestors, a sanguinary and cruel race.

...Soon after their arrival, the roar of cannon and the roll of musketry was heard. The massacre, retaliatory for that of St. Bartholomew's had begun. The resurrected witnesses were striking terror and dismay into the hearts of their enemies; and a most sanguinary combat raged. The Marseillais and Bretons, boiling with fury, rushed forward with ardor, fell in great numbers, but at length made themselves masters of the palace. The rabble, with pikes, poured in after them, and the rest of the scene was one general massacre.

...He [King Louis XVI] regarded the revolution as merely a transient popular movement that would soon be stopped by a few victories of the invaders. Neither he nor his Queen, Marie Antoinette, could be persuaded of the truth of Dumouriez's words, that the movement was "an almost unanimous insurrection of a mighty nation against inveterate abuses, the flame of which was fanned by great factions."

"Thus, by a kind of fatality," says Thiers -- yes, a fatality, apocalyptically registered, decreeing the fall of "the Tenth of the City" -- by this fatality "the supposed intentions of the palace excited the distrust and fury of the people, and the uproar of the people increased the anxiety and the imprudence of the palace.

...the President of the National Convention declared that ROYALTY WAS ABOLISHED IN FRANCE. This decree was hailed with universal applause. It was then proposed not to date 1792 the year 4 of liberty, but the year 1 of THE REPUBLIC. The year 1789, was no longer considered as having commenced liberty, and the new republican era began on that very day, Sept. 22, 1792; which was 1260 years from Justinian's delivery of the saints into the hands of the Supreme Pontiff of the Great City.

Eureka 11.3.13. 

Seven Thousand Names of Men

In the English version this text reads, "were slain of men seven thousand." This error has probably crept in through editors not being able to conceive how names could be slain. They have therefore left onomata, names, out of the text, without any good reason. In my translation it is restored as indispensable to the right understanding of the prophecy.

... The names of aristocracy are the titled orders of nobility, such as dukes, marquises, counts, and such like, to which are attached feudal rights, privileges, and immunities, denied to the common people.

Hierarchial names are representative of ecclesiastical orders and associations, which are known by their titles -- monks and priests, orders of men at once the creatures and supporters of despotism and superstition; the flatterers of princes, and the spoilers of the common people. To put these names to death would be to abolish them, both as to their associational existence, and the titles by which the classes of men, and the individuals of those classes, were distinguished.

These names are put down at seven thousand. This is the symbolical number by which the real number is expressed -- a definite totality for an undefined whole; and equivalent to all orders of monks, priests, and nobles related to the Tenth Kingdom of the Papal City. Hence, the interpretation of the text is, that "in the insurrectional agitation of the democracy all the monastic and sacerdotal orders, together with all ranks and degrees of nobility, should be utterly abolished." Such is the prophecy; and we shall find, that in the epoch of the fall of the French Monarchy, the things predicted were literally and sanguinarily fulfilled.

...They proposed the abolition of all feudal rights, which were frightfully oppressive. A sudden paroxysm of disinterestedness seized upon the Assembly, and everyone hurried to the tribune to renounce his privileges. A sort of intoxication seized all orders, all classes, all the possessors of prerogatives of every kind, who sought only to cast them all away.

As the commons had no privileges to give up, they relinquished those of the provinces and the towns. The equality of rights was thus established between individuals and all parts of the French territory. The Assembly abolished tithes without redemption, and decreed the maintenance of the clergy by the State, which was very humiliating to their pride.

The feudal system having been abolished, the Assembly proceeded to destroy those great bodies, or "names," which were enemies in the state against the state. The clergy possessed immense property, conferred on them by princes as feudal grants, or by the pious by way of legacy. Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, proposed to them to renounce the property of the ecclesiastical benefices in favour of the nation. The clergy, however, struggled against this proposition, but without effect.

The Assembly decreed that all their possessions were at the disposal of the state; by which it destroyed their formidable power, and the luxury of the high dignitaries of the order; and secured those immense financial resources which so long upheld The Revolution. It declared also, that it ceased to recognize "religious vows," and restored liberty to all the inmates of cloisters.

... On June 19, 1790, it was proposed to abolish the titles of count, marquis, baron, etc.; to prohibit liveries; in short, to suppress all hereditary titles. A noble asked what they would substitute for the words, "Such an one was created count for service rendered to the state?" "Let it merely be said," replied Lafayette, "that on such a day such a person saved the State.

"The motion was carried, notwithstanding the extraordinary irritation of the nobility, which was more galled by the abolition of its titles than by the more substantial losses which it had sustained since the commencement of the revolution. The more moderate portion of the Assembly had proposed that, in abolishing titles, those who chose to retain them, should be at liberty to do so. Lafayette tried to procure its return for amendment; but the king instantly gave his sanction, with the disingenuous intention, as some supposed, of driving things to extremities.

On July 30, 1791, decorations and orders of knighthood were suppressed; and to consummate the whole, the titles of Sire and Your Majesty were taken from the king. The Duke of Orleans assumed the name of Egalite, in English, Equality. Thus, all were reduced to an undistinguished multitude, having no pre-eminence to title one above another. Citizen and citizeness, was the designation common to all the French.

****

..."Thus the sections taking the initiation, abjured the Catholic Name as the established superstition, and seized its edifices and treasures, as pertaining to the communal domains. A great number of the departmental communes seized the movable property of the churches, which they said was not necessary for religion. All the churches were stripped, and deputations were sent to the Convention with the gold and silver accumulated in the shrines of saints, or places appropriated to devotion.

They went in procession, and the rabble, indulging in their fondness for burlesque, caricatured in the most ludicrous manner the ceremonies of catholicism, which they took as much delight in profaning as they had formerly done in celebrating them. Men wearing surplices and copes, came singing hallelujahs, and dancing the Carmagnole, to the bar of the Convention. There they deposited the host or Wafer-god, the boxes in which it was kept, and the idols of gold and silver. They made burlesque speeches, and sometimes addressed the most singular apostrophes to the saint-daemonials themselves. 'O you,' exclaimed a deputation from St. Denis,

'O, you instruments of fanaticism; blessed saints of all kinds; be at length patriots. Rise in mass. Serve the country by going to the mint to be melted, and give us in this world that felicity which you wanted to obtain for us in the other.'

...Such was the putting to death among the "seven thousand Names of men," of the beast's "Name of Blasphemy," in all the territory of the Tenth of the Great City (Apoc. xiii. 1). It was a conflict between reason based upon the "vain philosophy" of Voltaire, and idolatry sustained by the power of the State. The power had first to be destroyed, and then the idolatry fall. Unenlightened reason and vain philosophy were too strong for catholic ghost and relic worship, and therefore it was destroyed. Thus one abomination was played off against another, and the most guilty before God was treated by a base rabble even as contemptible and vile.

How admirably the Deity avenges his own.

He cast down the bloody throne of the Bourbons; caused the royal representatives of the murderers of his saints and witnesses first to be humbled in the dust and impoverished, then tried for their crimes by "vile plebeians," and insultingly condemned, and finally ignominiously guillotined before the mob; and as the crowning expression of his indignation, exhibited the symbols, superstition and imposture of his enemies to the contempt of an awakened world.

These were wonderful events, all consequent upon the ascent of the political witnesses of Jesus "in the cloud;" and an earnest of that grander and universal judgment of the Great City, when the Lord God, YAHWEH ELOHIM, Shall arise to exterminate its temporal and spiritual power, and to bless all nations in their deliverance.

The Rest Were Terrified

The rest, styled in the text hoi loipoi, the others not of the titled and privileged orders, became terrified. These terrified people composed that inert and patient part of the population of France, on which political experiments were being made. They were the swinish multitude of catholicism, which still clung to the worship of demonials and the works of men's hands.

The refractory priests* were the living deities of these terrified heirs of capture and destruction. In this great judgment the Deity of Heaven first smote "the world rulers of the darkness, and their spirituals of the wickedness in the heavenlies;" He was now about to descend in terrorism upon the guilty devotees of blasphemy, who in a past generation had lent a willing hand in slaying His witnesses, and suppressing their enlightening testimony.

*Refused to abjure Catholicism

The wicked are Deity's sword for vengeance upon blasphemers of His word and Name, until the time come to give the execution of judgment into the hands of the saints. We need not, therefore, be surprised at finding among his political witnesses and avengers such men as Marat, Danton, Robespierre, St. Juste, surnamed "the Apocalyptic," and such like.

If He did not employ "the basest of men" to execute terrifying vengeance upon guilty nations, how would such have been punished during the past eighteen centuries?

If nations will "blaspheme His name, and His tabernacle, and them that dwell in the heaven;" if they will persist in upholding spiritual impostures, and in making his word of none effect by their absurd and impious traditions, they must be punished as nations; and, as real, scriptural, saints are so scarce, the vengeance of Samuel upon Agag must be in the meantime executed by wicked men as the blind instruments of his will.

A terrified people implies the existence of terrifiers; and that these terrorists were stronger than the terrified. The history of the period is in rigid harmony with this implication. The retributive and righteous providence of Deity, by successive shocks of the great earthquake, had brought the besotted worshippers of the daemonials and idols under what has been styled by eminence

 "THE REIGN OF TERROR."

This power was more terrific than any that has oppressed society since the flood. The twenty-five millions of affrighted catholic French "dared no longer express any opinion. They were afraid to visit their friends lest they might be compromised with them, and lose liberty and even life. A hundred thousand arrests, and hundreds of condemnations, rendered imprisonment and the scaffold ever present to their minds.

They had to bear heavy taxes. Sometimes they had to give up their crops, or their most valuable effects in gold and silver. They durst no longer display any luxury, or indulge in noisy pleasures. They were no longer permitted to use metallic money, but obliged to take and give a depreciated paper, with which it was difficult to procure such things as they needed.

They were forced, if storekeepers, to sell at a fictitious price; if buyers, to put up with the worst commodities. They had but one sort of black bread, common to the rich as to the poor, for which they were obliged to contend at the doors of the bakers, after waiting for several hours.

Never had power overthrown with greater violence the habits of a people. It threatened all lives, decimated all fortunes, fixed compulsorily the standard of the exchanges, gave new names to all things, and abolished with insult the superstition of the 'terrified'."

This terrible power that blindly avenged the saints, found vent through the Jacobins of the Mountain*. Of these, the most terrible was Marat. He was born of Calvinist parents, with a hideous face, and head monstrously disproportioned to his size. He had a daring mind, an ungovernable imagination, a vindictive temper, and the heart of a tiger.

*The governing group of the States General

... It was blood which was Marat's constant demand; not in drops from the breast of an individual, not in puny streams from the slaughter of families; but blood in the profusion of an ocean." "None exercised a more fatal influence upon the period in which he lived. To him was owing the idea realized at a later period -- the extermination of multitudes.

...This pitiless avenger was supported by Danton, Robespierre, and others like them; sat in the National Convention as a member of the Mountain, presided over the Society of Jacobins, and was ultimately deified in this carnival of blood.

...From this class of agents issued the sanguinary terror by which "the rest were affrighted."

Twenty-four priests were sent to the Abbaye for refusing to take the oath to the constitution. On descending from the coaches to enter the prison, they were immediately pierced by a thousand weapons, amidst the howls of an infuriated populace. Led by Maillard, they rushed to the church of the Carmelites, where they butchered two hundred priests of the Catholic Baal who had been confined there.

...The kings of France are computed to have put to death in torments a million of the witnesses for Jesus under the Satanic inspiration of the Romish priests. Can we, then, in reading the horrors perpetrated in the Reign of Terror, and which principally fell upon the clergy and their adherents, forbear to exclaim,

"Righteous art thou, O Lord, who 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. True and righteous are thy judgments!" (Apoc. xvi. 5).

The Terrorists were the sword and scourge of Deity upon the guilty. They were raised up by Him to retaliate upon the king, court, nobility, priests, and people, the murders and crimes of every sort, which had accumulated upon their heads until his longsuffering was exhausted.

The nation was paralyzed, as well as astounded and affrighted. It was the Terrorists that condemned the king and queen to lose their heads, by which they broke definitively with royalty and all thrones; and afterwards destroyed the Girondins for their want of zeal in the regeneration of France by the guillotine. This was the overthrow of all legality, and the establishment of the Terrible Dictatorship, developed in the Committee of Public Welfare.

...The judgment-seat of this fearful committee was the Revolutionary Tribunal, whose institution was caused by Danton. Its familiars pervaded the land, and all the great cities of France experienced its vengeance. "THE MOUNTAIN" was now in the ascendant -- it ruled with terror in the heaven into which it had ascended when called up thither by the "great voice," or edict of the king.

The ruling power in the Mountain was Robespierre and the Jacobins. The Committee and Tribunal were directed by them; and however great their vengeance upon nobles, priests, the rich, and their adherents, greater vengeance was soon to be displayed in Paris. It is a remarkable fact, that the cities and districts where the blood of the saints and witnessing prophets of Jesus had been poured out most abundantly and with the greatest barbarity, suffered the most horribly in the Reign of Terror.

Eureka 11.3.15.

And they gave Glory to the Deity of the Heaven

This was the last demonstration of "the Earth" in its extraordinary agitations. In the prophecy four things are particularly noted as characteristic of the Great Earthquake which consummated the Sixth Trumpet, or Second Woe, namely:

1. The Fall of the Tenth of the City;

2. The putting to death of Seven Thousand Names of Men;

3. The affrighting of the Rest; and

4. The Ascription of Glory to the Deity of the Heaven.

These four characteristics have met in no other revolution of past ages than in that of the French Epoch from A.D. 1789 to A.D. 1794.

...As we have seen, in the total abolition of the names of men, the CATHOLIC NAME was abolished also. The destruction of this name in France was, in effect, to the glory of God; although its ruin was by the agency of a set of dissolute, fanatical, atheists. But these creatures marred the good work by decreeing likewise, that there was no Supreme Being, who was before all things, who made all things, and by whose power all things are sustained.

"The fool has said in his heart, There is no God."

The denial of Deity, and the deification of Reason, was, therefore, the work of fools. The prime movers of this blasphemy, however, were soon afterwards sent to the guillotine, which silenced their folly for ever.

The proclamation of the Parisian authorities denying the existence of Deity was exceedingly offensive to the deists of the Committee of Public Welfare and the Convention.

... The deistical committee ...resolved to say what is always said to priests who accuse you of impiety because you do not believe in their dogmas --

"WE BELIEVE IN GOD."

"....If some of them did not believe, they nevertheless all felt a want of order among men, and for the support of this human order, the necessity of acknowledging in the universe a general and intelligent order.

This is the first time in the history of the world that the dissolution of all the authorities left society a prey to the government of purely systematic minds, and those minds which had outstripped all the received ideas adopted, retained the ideas of morality and faith in God. This example is unparalleled in the history of the world: it is singular, it is grand, it is beautiful: history cannot help pausing to remark it."

M. Thiers did not know that he was pausing to remark upon an event that had been predicted eighteen centuries before by the Exile of Patmos -- by that beloved companion of Jesus, who had distinctly spoken of these so-called "sectaries;" and expressly declared that they should do that "singular, grand, and beautiful" thing, of pausing before the idea of faith in God, in "giving glory to the God of the heaven" in the throes of a grand convulsion, that should abolish monarchy, the names of men, and "the most stubborn of all religions." It was an event which no historian of repute could venture to ignore.

Eureka 11.3.16.

The 'supreme being' of French republicanism

Robespierre was reporter on this interesting occasion. He was the head of the Committee of Public Welfare, was consulted on all matters, and spoke only on important occasions. "For him," says M. Thiers, "were reserved the high moral and political questions, as more worthy of his talents and his virtue.

The duty of reporter on the question belonged to him of right. None had spoken out more decidedly against atheism, none was so venerated, none had so high a reputation for purity and virtue, none, in short, was so well qualified by his ascendancy and his dogmatism for this sort of pontificate.

"On May 7, 1794, about ten weeks before he lost his head, he addressed the National Convention upon the subject of 'giving glory to the God of the heaven.' He was listened to with profound attention. He justly observed, that it was not as the authors of systems that the representatives of the nation ought to discourage atheism and to proclaim DEISM, but as legislators seeking what principles are most suitable to man in a state of society.

In the eyes of the legislator, all that is beneficial to the world and good in practice, is truth. The idea of the Supreme Being and of the immortality of the soul is a continual recall of justice; it is therefore social and republican."

In his address he strove to counteract the idea that, in proclaiming the worship of the Supreme Being, the government was laboring for the benefit of the priests. "What is there in common," said he, "between the priests and God? The priests are to morality what quacks are to medicine. How different is the God of Nature from the God of the priests!

I know nothing that so nearly resembles atheism as the religions which they have framed. By grossly misrepresenting the Supreme Being, they have annihilated belief in him as far as lay in their power. The priests have created a God after their own image: they have made him jealous, capricious, greedy, cruel, and implacable: they have confined him in heaven as in a palace, and have called him to earth only to demand of him, for their own interest, tithes, wealth, honours, pleasures, and power.

The real temple of the Supreme Being is the universe; his worship, virtue; his festivals, the joy of a great nation, assembled in his presence to knit closer the bonds of universal fraternity, and to pay him the homage of intelligent and pure hearts."

Eureka 11.3.16.

The terrible witnesses

...The "they" who gave the glory were the constituted authorities in the republican heaven, and who had been unwittingly invited up thither by the royal edict, and had ascended to their sovereign position "in the cloud."

They were as impious, sanguinary and cruel as "Yahweh's Anointed Shepherd," Cyrus, and "his sanctified ones," the Medes and Persians, who ravished wives, spoiled houses, had no pity on the fruit of the womb, dashed children to pieces, and destroyed adults without mercy.

This was the spirit that inspired Robespierre and his colleagues of the Convention and its committees, who all figured in this festival. On the days preceding and following that on which they were giving glory to the Supreme power of the heaven, they sent forty-three victims to the guillotine.

Some of his colleagues did not like the festival. They said it had alienated many minds, and that those ideas of the Supreme Being, of the Immortality of the Soul, and those pompous ceremonies, looked like a return to the superstition of former times, and were likely to give a retrograde impulse to the Revolution.

Robespierre was irritated by these remarks, and insisted that he never meant to make the revolution retrograde, but had done everything to accelerate its course; in proof of which he had drafted a law to make the Revolutionary tribunal still more sanguinary.

The law was passed, and in the forty-nine days succeeding the festival 1386 victims lost their heads on no other ground than suspicion. We are not, therefore, to suppose that the glory given commended the actors in the festival to Deity. John merely predicted it as an event that would obtain in the great earthquake, and as a sign by which that revolutionary crisis might be known to be the epoch of the ascent of the TERRIBLE WITNESSES against the Romish Idolatry to power.

Eureka 11.3.16.

14 The second woe [a calamitous period of 732 years ending AD 1794]<has passed>; behold, the third woe <comes immediately>.

The fifth trumpet, which summoned the Saracens against the Greek division of the Catholic Apostasy, was the first woe, and the sixth trumpet, which sounded forth the four angel-powers to put to death the Greek Catholic dominion, was the second woe. This was not only to extinguish this dominion, but to torment with a terrible testimony the world rulers and spirituals of the European Commonwealth in church and state, symbolized in the prophecy by "the beast with seven heads and ten horns."

Hence, the judgments of the Second Woe were widely diffused over the whole of the Great City from the Euphrates to the Danube, the Rhine, and the ocean.

They began their desolating career A.D. 1062, and continued in their work of death upon the worshippers of the Demonials and Catholic Idols, until the demonial worship was destroyed in France, and its national homage transferred from the Roman "God of the earth" to "the Deity of the heaven," A.D. 1794, a calamitous period of 732 years.

The ascription of glory to the Supreme Being was the remarkable act by which the second woe was consummated.

...The Second Woe had exhausted itself upon "the Tenth of the City." The Reign of Terror ended with the execution of Robespierre and his colaborers. Forty-nine days after the Festival their heads rolled into the basket of the guillotine.

Applause accompanied every descent of the fatal blade; and joy prevailed on every side, and the system of terror was overthrown. The woe had "passed away," and the time had come for republicanized France to become an angel-power of destruction against the worshippers of the beast in the other Tenths of the Great City.

Eureka 11.4.

Immediately

...between the end of the second and the beginning of the third, there was no appreciable interval. It may therefore be considered as beginning in the year of the Festival, A.D. 1794. This third woe is, of course, the Seventh and Last Trumpet -- the Seventh Trumpet Division of the Seventh Seal.

This is the grand result of the sounding -- a consummation to be perfected as the result of the sounding of the seventh trumpet.

Eureka 11.4.

The Third Woe Cometh Quickly

There is much cheer in these words for the saints; first, by reason of the nature of the third woe, and next because of the time indicated in the declaration.

"The second woe is past;" so we are now able to say, in the fulness of historic truth. We look back seventy-five years, and see all its features distinctly discernible in the terrible events of the French Revolution:

"And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of the names of men seven thousand, and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven."

The French monarchy, as one of the ten horns of the Roman Body Politic, was the tenth part of the Great or Roman City, which was co-extensive with the territory of the Roman Empire. This tenth part of the city fell with a crash which terrified Europe.

All titles and names of honour were abolished and thousands upon thousands slain. The Reign of Terror set in, and this was succeeded by a reaction which resulted in the ascription of glory to God. "This, the second woe is past," and behold the third woe cometh quickly—that is quickly in comparison with periods which preceded it. It is fifty-eight years since the closing reverberations of the second woe died away at Waterloo.

The Christadelphian, Nov 1873

15 And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in <the> heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become <our Lord's and his Christ's>; and he shall reign for <the aions of the aions.>

Abraham's Seed in possession of the gate of his enemies.

...the consummation of the seventh trumpet will woefully surpass the Reign of Terror. This was limited to a single nation, of which the mighty were hurled from their seats into the lowest depths, and the rest sent empty away.

But the terminal epoch of the seventh trumpet now upon us, will make the ears to tingle only to hear the report of its terrors. Daniel was informed that it would be "a time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation to that same time" (xii. 1). "The time of the end" of the third woe trumpet is a time of unsurpassed calamity, and will extend to all nations in all parts of the earth.

Their trade and commerce will be ruinously perturbed; their countries devastated by war; their hundreds of thousands prostrated by famine, pestilence and sword; their armies scattered like chaff before the wind; their "religions" abolished as "abominations" and blasphemies; their priests, clergies and ministers punished as sorcerers, murderers, impostors, hypocrites, and plunderers of the poor; and their kings, nobles and gentry destroyed as "the destroyers of the earth."

The Spirit of the Eternal in Jesus and his Brethren is "the Lord and his Christ," by whom this world-wide revolution will be developed and directed. The political witnesses of Jesus developed and directed the great French Revolution. Theirs was a great and mighty, as well as a terrible work; but it is the witnesses of the Holy City, the One Body, who will constitute the Revolutionary Government, and to whom the higher and nobler, mightier and more terrible mission is assigned, of breaking in pieces the political fabric of the world; of emancipating the nations from the reign of ignorance and strong delusion, and of blessing them in Abraham and his Seed.

This is the work that is before them, and which, when accomplished, will introduce them to the reign of the aions of the aions, or THE THOUSAND YEARS.

And when this Millennial Sabbatism shall be duly established by the Eternal Spirit, the One Body, in glorious manifestation, and symbolized by the Four and Twenty Elders before the Deity, and "on their thrones," 

"fall upon their faces and do homage to the Deity, saying, We give thanks to thee, O Lord, the Almighty Deity, who is, and who was, and who art the Coming One, because thou hast assumed thy great power, and reignest."

Eureka 11.4.

The mystery of The Deity shall be finished

The seventh trumpet changes the face of the world. It puts an end to human rule, and establishes the kingdom of God in all the earth. This is a glorious change, but not to be effected without the putting forth of much destructive power,

"dashing the nations in pieces like a potter's vessel" (Psa. 2:8-9; Dan. 2:44-45)

and causing a time of trouble such as never has been (Dan. 12:1).

It might be supposed that the fifth and sixth trumpets (the Saracenic and Ottoman) having occupied such a long time, and the seventh being with them one of the three woe trumpets, it must be a long time yet before the saints attain that salvation which is to be brought to them under the seventh trumpet in the establishment of the kingdom of God.

......"there should be time (delay) no longer: but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God shall be finished".

This declaration and the symbol taken together, show that the third woe (or seventh trumpet) is not to be protracted like the first and second (or fifth and sixth trumpet), a conclusion further confirmed by the remark in Rev. 11:14,

"The second woe is past; and, behold, the third woe cometh quickly."

It may be asked, how does the symbol support this conclusion? The answer is, it does so by its manifest identity with Christ and the saints in their corporate relation to the world in the day of their glory. The angel, of course, is a symbol, standing for a class sent, for it is clothed in a cloud -- the symbol of a multitude. It is a class exercising conquering power on sea and land, for the angel places his right foot on the sea and his left on the land. It is destructive power, for his feet are fiery.

It is for beneficent purposes, however: for a rainbow encircling his head speaks of sunshine after rain. It is an effective class that can command the world's attention, for he cries with a voice that resembles a lion's roar. It is a voice controlling executive authority; for seven thunders (the symbol of war) are let loose by its utterance. It is not a fallible human community; for the thunders so loosed divulge revelation.

Thirteen lectures on the apocalypse

16. <And the twenty and four elders sitting upon their thrones in the presence of the Deity,> fell upon their faces, and <did homage to the Deity,>

The kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom - Dan 7: 27

For this cause, therefore, in the ascription of thanks to YAHWEH AIL Shaddai, the four belligerent Living Ones are withdrawn from the figuration; and the four and twenty elders only are in prostration before the Everliving One. The reader is aware that the saints are symbolized both by the Four Living Ones and the Elders, only in different relations.

The Four represent them in their militant antagonism to the powers that rule the nations; while "the elders" represent them as victorious kings and priests in the glorious and peaceful possession of their conquests. When "the war of the great day of AIL Shaddai" is over, and peace obtains in all the earth, there is no more premillennial work for the saints to do as the "Four Living Ones full of eyes." As militants they have

"gotten the victory,"

and their community is wreathed with the coronals which "they cast before the throne." These are cast there when the cause of thanksgiving, rejoicing, and prostration has been developed. Hence, ch. 4:10, is parallel with ch. 11: 16.

The saints, no longer belligerent, give thanks because YAHWEH AIL-Shaddai has acquired great power on the earth and reigned. When this thanksgiving was dictated to John in Patmos, it was the revelation of a purpose - an end which Deity had predetermined. The "great power" had not been taken, nor the reign commenced, when the apocalypse was given to John. Nor have they yet; nor will they be till the end of the seventh trumpet.

Eureka 12.2.

17 Saying, We give thee thanks, O Lord < the almighty Deity, who is and who was and who art THE COMING ONE,> because thou hast <assumed> thy great power, and <reignest.>

18 And the nations were <made> angry, and thy wrath <came>, and the time of the dead <to> be judged, <and to give the> reward to thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, <even to those who> fear thy name, < to the> small and <to the> great; and <to> destroy <those who corrupt> the earth.

The nations were angry

The resurrection first comes in a time of trouble -- a trouble which has doubtless begun, and which will not diminish, but increase, until there be great wrath among the nations.

Eureka 11.4.

Sixth Sign of the Times

We do not yet see the nations of the Habitable "enraged" but we have seen them in great "perplexity," from which they are not yet delivered. The Nations were angry or enraged. This is given in Rev. 11:18, as their condition immediately preceding the booming forth of the wrath of Yahweh against them.

This enraged condition of the nations then, is future; but anterior also to the resurrection; and may be stated as the condition resulting from the operation of the Frog-inspired Powers upon the Kings of the earth, and of the whole habitable. It is foretold in Isai. 17:12, in which the prophet says,

"Hark to a multitude of many people, which make a noise like the noise of the seas; and the rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing of many waters! The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters; but he shall rebuke him, and he shall flee far off; and he shall chase him as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like thistle down before the whirlwind. And behold at eventide sudden destruction, and before the morning he is not. This is the portion of them that spoil us, (Israel inclusive of the Saints,) and the lot of them that scatter us."

When this obtains the world of nations will be in an uproarious and tumultuous condition. It is to this the Lord Jesus refers in saying,

"There shall be upon the earth, disquietude of the nations in perplexity, the sea roaring and rolling; men expiring from fear and anticipation of the things coming upon the Habitable; for the Powers of the Heavens shall be shaken. And afterwards they shall see the Son of Man coming with a cloud (of warriors,) with power and much glory. And these things beginning to come to pass, look up and lift up your heads; for the day of your redemption draweth nigh."

Herald of the Kingdom and Age to Come, Dec 1860

The beginning of "the Time of the End" is "the time of the dead." The work of this time will take time; but how much time it will consume the testimony does not reveal. The Lord Jesus Christ who is "the resurrection and the life," as well as "the truth and the way," descends to Mount Sinai while the present Sixth Vial is continuing to pour out. "Behold!" says he, "I come as a thief." He comes before "the kings of the earth and of the whole habitable" are gathered into the region termed

"in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon."

How long before is not revealed; but between his thief-like advent and the Armageddon-gathering is "the time of the dead" and when his work is finished with his dead ones, "He gathers the kings together" -- he operates upon a situation already created by the Frog Power; and brings on the catastrophe, which that power is not capable of accomplishing.

But, how many months or years the work of setting in order his own Melchizedec Household will consume I know not. It will take time. The Lord is never in a hurry. He is always deliberate and dignified.

Eureka 11.4.1.

The Reward

But what is the promised reward the righteous shall enjoy? "Of the Lord," said Paul to the saints at Colosse, "ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance." In writing to the saints in Galatia, he says, "The Deity gave the Inheritance to Abraham by promise."

By these testimonies we are taught that the subject-matter of the reward is an inheritance, or an estate to be possessed, when the time for the fulfilment of the promise shall arrive; and that this estate was given to Abraham, not actually donated and received before he died, but promised to him as an estate to be possessed when he should rise from the dead.

"He died in faith," says Paul, "not having received the promises, but saw them afar off, and was persuaded of them and embraced them." And he tells us why he did not obtain immediate possession of the reward: it was because

"the Deity has provided some better thing for us, that without us he might not be made perfect."

There is no difficulty in learning what the estate is, and where it is situated, if we attend to what has been revealed in the word. Moses tells us that it was promised to Abraham that he should possess the country in which he was then living, the land of Canaan, in a certain far off age. That he should possess it for ever; and that his seed should be numberless as the stars; that he should be the father of many nations, which should be blessed in him and his Seed.

Paul tells us, that these promises were made to Abraham and the Christ who was to descend from him; and that they were consequently to be "THE HEIRS OF THE WORLD." Thus, the possession of the world was annexed to the possession of the land of Canaan; so that he who could prove that he was the divinely constituted heir of the one, proved also that he had a right to the other.

The Holy Land and the World of Nations were promised to Abraham and Christ; and people of all nations were invited by the gospel preached to become heirs with them of the same promise; on condition of believing the promises, the Christship of Jesus, and the things concerning his name; and of being immersed into Christ, and thenceforth patiently continuing in well-doing. In this way they become Christ's; and, says Paul,

"if ye be Christ's then are ye Abraham's Seed, and heirs according to the promise."

***

..."The Reward," in relation to its several elements, is exhibited apocalyptically under a diversity of symbols. ...To be strengthened with incorruptible life in the time of the dead, is

"to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of the Deity" (ii. 7).

To be an immortal king, is to receive "the crown of life" (ver. 10). To be approved, and acquitted of all guile and fault before the throne, and to be physically like Jesus Christ, is to eat of the hidden manna, to receive a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, and known only to the receiver (ver. 17).

To operate with the Lamb in the setting up of the promised kingdom, is to receive power over the nations, to rule them with a rod of iron, and to shiver their image to pieces as a potter's vessel (ver. 26,27).

To be endued with a clean and incorruptible nature, and to be divinely honored, is to be clothed in white raiment, and to be confessed before the Father and his angels (iii. 5). To become Deity manifested in glorified nature, and a constituent of the New Jerusalem, is to be made a permanent pillar in the Nave or Most Holy of Deity, with the Name of Deity, and the name of the city of Deity, the new name written upon him (ver. 12).

And to reign with Christ, is to sit with him in his throne (ver. 21). Such is

"the reward to be given to the prophets, to the saints, to them that venerate the Name of Deity, small and great;"

so that, "even the least in the kingdom of the heavens," though a star of the smallest magnitude and glory, will be greater than the greatest of all the prophets in the mortal state.

Eureka 11.4.2.

Climate Change

is now a leading topic of world leaders (COP 27 in Indonesia ) when the earth's global temperature is exceeding 1.5C above normal, because of atmospheric pollution.

God will destroy those that destroy the earth (Rev.11: 18] and this is what man is doing physically and morally. His insatiable greed and plunder are wrecking the planet

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.

For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. Is. 60: 1,2

The Apocalyptic Messenger, Dec 2022

19 And the <nave [Most holy place in the presence of Yahweh] of the Deity> was opened in <the> heaven, and <the ark of his covenant [Lord Yahoshua -the cherubim overlooking the blood spattered mercy seat his Brethren "glorified together] was seen in his nave>: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunders, and earthquake, and great hail.

The Nave of Deity Opened

This nineteenth verse is parallel with ch. iv. 1, in which John says, "a door had been opened in the heaven;" and looking through the door, he saw "a throne and one sitting upon it."

This throne and its glorious occupant is identical with the Ark of the Covenant.

In the typical Mosaic Tabernacle, the Ark stood in the Nave, or Most Holy Place. It was Yahweh's throne in Israel, on which He was said to sit between the Cherubim.

From thence proceeded all His decrees for peace or war issued through the Prince of the host, the High Priest of Israel. It was a symbol of great significance in its appointed place.

...The Nave and the Ark were beyond the Veil, which represents the flesh (Heb. x. 20). The opening of the nave is therefore equivalent to that which constitutes the nave, being no longer simply holy in the flesh, but most holy in spirit-nature, having passed from flesh to spirit.

The opening of the nave is a wonderful manifestation of power. It implies the descent of him, who is the resurrection and the life; the reorganization of the ashes of the saints, and the restoration to each of them of their identity; and their subsequent transformation into spirit-bodies by the instantaneous operation of the Spirit.

And when this process is complete, to give them a commanding position "in the heaven," that, as the Ark of the Covenant, they may be the depository of almighty power, and prepared for the work of ruling in righteousness all the kingdoms, or heavens, of the world, and retaining undisturbed possession of them for a thousand years.

Thus, the Ark of the Covenant seen in the opened nave, is the Deity in most holy manifestation -- manifested by spirit in Jesus and his Brethren "glorified together." Collectively they form the Ark and Cherubim, the Spirit answering to the manna, the budding almond-rod, and the testimony.

This is evident from the discourses of Jesus as recorded by John. The anointing Spirit, or Christ-Spirit, speaking by Jesus, declared, that he is the bread of life, or true manna; the resurrection, or budding rod; and the covenanted truth, or testimony.

The container of such a power is the chest, or ark thereof; and therefore styled the Ark of the Covenant -- of the New Covenant, the Abrahamic; with a blood-sprinkled propitiatory or mercy seat, even Jesus; and all in him who worshipped in the altar. This is the throne, the Eternal Spirit's throne, to be established as such in Jerusalem, the Mother City of the Kingdom of the Ancient of Days.

And there were lightnings and voices and thunders, and an earthquake, and great hail

"a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great" (xvi. 18).

In the fourth chapter, the Ark of the Covenant is distributed. The mercy seat and ark of which it is the coverlid, are exhibited there as the throne encircled with the rainbow of covenant-testimony; and the cherubim full of eyes, are taken down and placed about the throne, surrounded with a circle of representative royal presbyters.

This distribution, when synthesized, or put together, constitutes the apocalyptic Ark. The time of the fourth chapter symbols is synchronous with "the time of the dead," when the judgment of the House of Deity shall have been completed; and the saints shall be ready, by their immortalization, to execute the judgment written against the world without.

...These are the same that burst forth out of the throne, as represented in ch. iv. 5; and are the consummation of the wrath of the Eternal Omnipotence upon the objects of apocalyptic vengeance. These lightnings, voices, thunderings, earthquake, and great hail, of the fourth and eleventh chapters, are symbolical of the judgments of the Seventh Vial; which is the consummation of the judgments of the Seventh Trumpet, and of the Seventh Seal.

"No one can enter into the nave until the seven plagues of the seven angels be finished"

(xv. 8).

This entering into the nave, is in the sense of entering into the kingdom, consisting of "the kingdoms of the world;" for it will require all the judgments of the Seventh Vial to complete the transfer of those kingdoms from the grasp of the wicked, or, "the Devil and his Angels," who now hold them, to the Saints who are to possess them for a thousand years.

In all the period of the Seventh Vial

"the Nave is filled with smoke from the glory of the Deity."

The nave then exists, as constituted of glorified Christadelphians, or Brethren of Christ; but they smoke with burning and consuming indignation against the governments of the world and their armies; and until that smoke has passed away in victory, by which their wrath is assuaged, the Nave, in the sense of the most holy and blessed constitution of the thousand years can be entered upon by none.

The Hail

...a great hail falls upon the people, whose wickedness is great. It falls upon them "out of the heaven." It descends upon them from the Nave,

"every hailstone about the weight of a talent."

A talent is figurative of an individual. When he descends as a hailstone, he falls from the heaven of power upon the enemy to be judged. A multitude of such descending upon their enemies, becomes to them as a storm of hail. They constitute a mighty and strong power,

"which, as a tempest of hail, and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand" (Isa. xxviii. 2).

With such a hail will men be plagued; but instead of repenting of their iniquity, transgression, and sin, they will

"blaspheme the Deity; for the plague of the hail will be exceeding great" (xvi. 21).

Eureka 11.4.3.

ARK OF GOD'S TESTAMENT.

-"And there was seen in God's temple the Ark of His Testament."-(Rev. 11:19)

The Greek ἠ κιβωτος rendered ark, is the representative of ahrön,‭ ‬and signifies a‭ ‬chest,‭ ‬or‭ ‬box.‭ ‬In‭ "‬the form of the knowledge and of the truth‭" ‬contained in the Mosaic system,‭ ‬the ark occupied the Most Holy,‭ ‬and is styled ahron berith [YHWH],‭ ‬the‭ ‬Ark of Yahweh's covenant‭;‬ and ärön hahaiduth,‭ ‬the‭ ‬Ark of the Testimony.

It was made of wood overlaid within and without with pure gold,‭ ‬with a crown of gold also round about:‭ ‬and above upon the ark was the kaphporeth,‭ ‬which signifies a‭ ‬lid or‭ ‬cover.‭ ‬The blood of the sin-offering was sprinkled by the high priest upon this cover‭; ‬so that when besprinkled it was le kaphpair, for covering the sins of the worshippers.-(Lev. 16:10).

And because this kaphporeth or coverlid of the ark, was to the offerer, whether individual or nation, as the covering of his sins, it was the footstool of the seat or throne of mercy. "Blessed," saith the Spirit in David, "are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered over" (επεκαλυρθησαν).-(Psalm 32:1); and quoted by Paul in Rom. 4:7.

In the typical or Mosaic ark were deposited the pot of manna, Aaron's rod that came to life or budded; and the Tables of the Law, styled "the Two Tables of Testimony, tables of stone, written by the finger of God;" and on which were engraven the Ten Commandments. They are also termed "the Tables of the Covenant."

In "the Revelation of the Mystery" exhibited in the apostolic writings, the Lord Jesus Christ is identified as the one foreshadowed in the law and institutions of Moses. Paul declares that "God set him forth an ἱλαστηριον, hilastðrion, on account of the faith in his blood," for all and upon all who believe the gospel.-(Rom. 3:25, 22.)

The king of Egypt's seventy translators of Moses and the prophets render the word kaphporeth in Ex. 25:17, by ἱλαστηριον επιθεμα, hilasterion epithema, which signifies the expiation cover. Hence, by the use of the substantive with the adjective, understood, Paul styles Jesus an "expiation cover;" and declares that as such, God has set him forth a covering for sin for all and upon all believers of the gospel, who also believe the divine testimony concerning the condemnation of sin in his flesh.

Thus the teaching of Paul, in this place, exhibits the Lord Jesus as the antitype of the Mosaic ark. In him as an ark, are deposited the things represented by the manna, the rod, and the testimony; namely, the bread of heaven, life by resurrection, and the Word. Therefore, said he,

"I am the bread that came down from heaven;" "I am the resurrection and the life;" "I am the truth."

The Holy Father is all this, who spoke these words by His Spirit. The Son of Mary was the ark in which these things were covered or enclosed; and by voluntarily surrendering himself to death, he sprinkled that cover with his own blood, and so became a berith, covenant, or testament. "My blood," said he,

"is the blood of the new (or Abrahamic) covenant, shed for the remission of the sins of many."

From these premisses, then, the reader will readily perceive that the Apocalyptic title, "the Ark of God's Testament," is indicative of the Lord Jesus. When he is seen in the midst of his brethren, "the ecclesia" (Heb. 2:12), "the ark of God's testament" will be "seen in his temple."

ro Thomas scraps from his writings

The Christadelphian, June 1872