SO

they in our view been materially affected by the new explanations and defence contained in the Letters of Mr Elliott. We shall merely give an example or two below.*

*Mr Elliott had interpreted the first seal (where the symbols are, the rider on a white horse, with a bow, having a crown given to him, going forth conquering and to conquer), of the Roman empire in the times of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines-viewing the horse as the proper symbol of the Roman empire, its white colour as indicative of a period of prosperity, the bow as the distinctive badge of the Cretans, to whom, by his ancestry, the first of the above series of emperors belonged, and the crown and destination to victory as significant of the success in war which should generally distinguish the period of those successive reigns. Omitting some minor points, Dr Keith had objected to this representation, that the bow was so commonly in use among ancient nations, that there was no necessity for resorting to Crete for an explanation of the symbol, as if that island had a sort of prescriptive right to its possession-that, had it been otherwise, still Nerva, being connected with Crete only by a remote ancestry, while his family had been long domesticated in Italy, and had borne even some of the highest honours of the state, could no longer be fitly designated by a symbol which pointed only to the almost forgotten birth place of his ancestors-that, especially, when elevated to the imperial throne, and contemplated as the representative and head of the empire, his distinctive insignia should necessarily have been of a Roman, not of a provincial, character-that in the case, besides, of the other members of the series, who had nothing, either by birth or by extraction, to do with Crete, the bow, if characteristic of Nerva only as a Cretan, could not properly be emblematical of them-and finally, that, with the exception of Trajan, the reigns in

complains, not without reason, of the insinuations and charges with which the objections to his scheme were accompanied—although, we think, he has sometimes found more in these, or at least given them a more intensive and personal meaning than But if we have to acknowledge this much in rethey were perhaps intended to convey. But Mr gard to Dr Keith's part in the controversy, we must, Elliott has returned in his Letters a full swelling in fairness, also concede to Mr Elliott what goes a response to the note originally struck by the Doctor.considerable way to equalize the account; for he There is no mincing of the matter here; but, on the has certainly detected several inaccuracies and contrary, a regular and merciless onset, a keenness blunders in the statements of his opponent; he has of edge and a vehemence of assault, in comparison succeeded in showing, that the historical representaof which the not unusual vagueness and indirect- tion given in the Hora is not open to all the charges ness of his opponent looks rather tame and pointless. brought against it by Dr Keith; and, by instituting He will be satisfied with nothing short of killing outright his assailant, and exposing his carcase to the fowls of heaven. Indeed, Mr Elliott has fallen upon a device, which seems not only to allow, but even to demand, some warmth of indignation and sharpness of invective. He splits his opponent into two, distinguishing between Dr Keith, the veritable author of the Signs of the Times, and the writer of the Strictures on the "Hora." These Strictures are stamped with the spirit of uncharitableness," and even" of personal enmity and malice," that he cannot believe the estimable and respected Dr Keith is the author of them; it must be some vile Jesuit, who has abused the Doctor's confidence, and under his worthy name directed such a foul and senseless attack against the author of the Hora Apocalyptica. Mr Elliott is not, therefore, to be understood as belabouring Dr Keith in the charges he brings against the writer of the Strictures, when he speaks of dulness of perception, studied misrepresentations, malignant surmises, farragoes of absurdity, but only this wretched Jesuit in disguise. With such an adversary lurking in the bush, why should he stay his hand, or repress his indignation? But why, on the other hand, should he think it strange if others descry in this invention of For, the question in such a case as this is not, whether some obscure the Jesuit only a shallow disguise under which he might shoot more bitter arrows against his opponent? And, if it became him to feel so indignant at Dr Keith in having only incidentally, and merely in respect to the entertainment of views which the Doctor deems irreconcilable with the true honour of Jesus, "insinuated his resemblance to the traitor-disciple" (p. 2), what may not Dr Keith justly feel at having his production thus deliberately and formally branded with a name, from which every honest mind recoils as the appropriate badge of chicanery and deceit ?

It will not be expected that we should enter at any length into the merits of the controversy carried on by the two disputants before us; since, not holding with what may be regarded as peculiar to either of their schemes, it cannot be supposed that we should consider it for the edification of our readers to make them intimately acquainted with their respective differences. Dr Keith's principles of interpretation are not such as to render him a more satisfactory and consistent expounder of the Apocalypse as a whole than his opponent (in some respects the reverse); he, consequently, does not urge what, in our opinion, are the most radical and fundamental objections against the Hora; and, even where he has a valid ground of objection in a historical point of view, the defective nature of his own principles of interpretation prevents him from taking the full benefit of his advantage. We owe it to the Doctor, however, to say, that by much the greater and weightier portion of his objections from the historical territory are justly raised against the Hora, nor have

question were not remarkably distinguished by success in war,

which seems plainly to stand out as the most prominent feature in the symbol. Now, in Mr Elliott's reply, while there is an immense dea! said about one and all of these topics, and the most strenuous effort is made to accommodate the history to the interpretation, not one of the objections is fairly met and satisfactorily removed.

epigrams and incidental notices can be found to give some colour of verisimilitude to the view maintained, or whether several distinct notes of correspondence can be made out between the symbols and

the history? but, whether the correspondence is of so broad, clear, and marked a character, as to render the symbols employed the natural and distinctive embodiments of the history? This is the real question at issue; and viewed in respect to it, the main objections urged all stick as so many fatal darts; nor in so far as concerns the chief purport of the symbol, successful war and continuous victory, is there even any seming correspondence in the history, excepting only in the case of Trajan. If we pass from the first to the last seal (of which the ghastly symbols are Death riding upon the pale horse, followed by Hades, indicating, if anything could, fearful carnage and desolation), we find the same want of clear and palpable correspondence between the character of the symbols and the period assigned to them in Mr Elliott's interpretation. Allowing that some of Dr Keith's objections are untenable, which we think they are, still the main strength of his argument remains unbroken, viz., that the reigns of Claudius, Aurelian, Probus, Carus, and Diocletian, were by no means so characteristically sad and disastrous as the symbols require, and that it was a period not less distinguished by great and splendid achievements than by various troubles and distresses. We are thoroughly persuaded, that no one, drawing simply from an impartial view of the history, would ever have thought of representing the periods assigned by Mr Elliott to Then, to refer only further to the third seal (where the chief thing the first and fourth seals by such diametrically opposite symbols. in the symbol is the pair of balances with the accompanying words, barley for a penny, and see that thou hurt not the oil and the wine"), "A measure (or chonix) of wheat for a penny, and three measures of which Mr Elliott understands of the era of Caracalla, reaching from about A.D. 212 to A.D. 248, and especially of the hardships and op pressions inflicted upon the empire by the increased taxation arising out of an edict of Caracalla, there are here, again, so many qualifying admissions to be taken in-so many brighter points relieving the darkness, alone demanded by the symbol, that exactness of representation is no longer to be found. So Dr Keith has shown, and Mr Elliott admits that his usual author, Gibbon, does not here altogether bear out his view, and he has recourse for more correct descriptions to the original historians. But, alas! what is so minute as to require being thus sought out by a sort of microto that, the case is gone. Dr Keith has said little about the

scopic scrutiny is of no use in a matter of this kind: when it comes symbols here, and is evidently himself quite wrong about the pair of balances, which he takes in the sense of yoke; but we consider Mr Elliott also wrong in some other parts, as we think we could show, if our space permitted.

import. 2. But, again, the theory in question is opposed to the natural and obvious impression (to which much weight is always due in the interpretation of symbols) arising from the great diversity in the symbols, such as we should not have expected, if they only represented different phases of the same power-the Roman empire. If we look to the first four seals, the horses there are each of different colours, the riders upon them bear entirely different insignia, and the results disclosing themselves are of the most dissimilar, or even opposite, descriptiondifferences which seem plainly to indicate so many distinct powers or agencies, not the successive developments, or several modifications of the same. Elliott has tried to meet this diversity in the symMr bols, by introducing different parties, as representing at successive periods the Roman empire-hence, we have the symbols referred in the first to a series of emperors, in the second, to the turbulent and bloody military, in the third, to the provincial governors, while, lo! in the fourth, the empire seems to have no officials whatever to represent it, but in their stead come only war, famine, pestilence, and wild beasts of the earth. Has the author forgot that, by the supposition the horse is the empire, so that the rider throughout on it should be the living head, or agent, that represents its vitality and power? Consistently with this supposition, the rider in all the first four seals could only have been a kind, or series of emperors; and Mr Elliott himself, at a subsequent stage of his inquiries, when treating of the sevenheaded wild beast, makes no account of all those subordinate officials and incidental agencies, but looks simply, during the whole of this period, to the emperor as the representative, or living head, of the empire. Then, when we come down to the fifth seal, which is understood to symbolize the Diocletian persecution, instead of the agency being, as we should certainly have expected, most distinctly marked, it vanishes altogether-there is no horse or rider to be seen at all-the empire apparently is passive-and the recoil from the persecution, as represented by the cry of the souls under the altar, is all that appears. The defect is, if possible, still more visible in the sixth seal, which, if it really symbolized the conversion of the empire to the side of Christianity, and the overthrow of the old paganism, surely demanded, beyond any of the preceding epochs, the exhibition of a powerful agency to effect the change; least of all could such a change be regarded as a silent and lifeless result. We confidently affirm, that such a striking diversity, such a marked dissimilarity of images and modes of representation, to denote one and the same power in its various fortunes and successive outward changes, is without any parallel in the symbolical language of Scripture, as it is in itself most unnatural and arbitrary.

But the scheme is open to still another class of objections; for, 3. It seems particularly wanting in verisimilitude, in the view it presents of the fifth and sixth seals. The order and series of events supposed to be symbolized in the first four seals are all of a civil and worldly kind (we take leave to say, in passing, to Mr Elliott, not precisely the kind of events that we should reckon "most appropriate to the prophetic chart," especially since everything, in his view of them, seems to be estimated by a worldly standard, as well as to be of a worldly character, viz., that being always counted prosperity, or the reverse, which is so in the eye of the world); they relate, we are told,

to the victories, the defeats, the varying troubles and vicissitudes of heathen Rome; the kingdom of God is not even remotely glanced at in any of them. But presently, in the fifth and sixth seals, the kingdom of God not only comes into view, but the things that vanish out of sight. How improbable, and contrary concern it rise into such prominence, that all others to all analogy, that the political should be so exclusively regarded in the earlier, and the spiritual in the later! Besides, those souls appearing under the altar in the fifth seal, how came they there? They persecution, the era of the martyrs, as it is sometimes are affirmed to be representative of the Diocletian and it is fair to ask, why, since such insignificant called-not so called, however, in strict propriety; events as the conquest or loss to imperial Rome of carefully taken into account under the preceding remote provinces are so minutely scanned and so should be altogether omitted, and the tenth only, the seals, nine persecutions of the Christian Church But, not to press this, allowing that this persecution last under heathen Rome, deemed worthy of notice? might alone be accounted of, as it certainly was the severest and the longest, we might then have perceived some kind of probability in the interpretafalling beside the altar, or in some attitude which tion given, if those souls had been represented as would have bespoken that the persecution was in progress. But the case is entirely altered, when they are presented to our view as already lying under the altar, and in the act of uttering a complaint to God, Could a representation be conceived more singular that he should be so long in avenging their blood. and extraordinary, if the object had been simply to characterize a persecution actually proceeding? We should despair of being able to gather a certain information from any symbol, if it might not be conclusively gathered from this, that the shedding of the blood was already in part, at least, accomplished, and the time apparently come for retribution. But if so, whence, we again ask, did these martyred souls come? of a merely political and worldly kind; and not a hint The preceding epochs are all understood to have been has been dropt that so much as a saint existed, far less that multitudes of saints had been martyred!

The apparent contrariety is not less, but rather more, when we come to the sixth seal, which, under lowed by the blackening of the sun, the moon such appalling images as a great earthquake, folbecoming as blood, the stars of heaven falling, the heaven itself departing as a scroll, the mountains and islands of the earth moving out of their places, and is interpreted of the change that passed over the a universal terror seizing all the adversaries of God, tianity as the established religion. It is impossible Roman empire, when paganism gave place to Chriswhen we place alongside of this magnificent descripnot to be sensible of the most lamentable discrepancy tion the historical reality. And this will always be the reality from the most exact and faithful historians the more felt, the more we take our impressions of

such, for example, as Neander, who looks beneath the surface of things, and views the change that took place with something like a Christian eye. The transition is thus found to lose nearly all its grandeur and advances, amid an almost equal admixture of the importance; it proceeded by very slow and doubtful earthly and the spiritual, and with so mingled a the effect, upon the whole, was rather disastrous than result for the interests of genuine Christianity, that

otherwise. We need not dwell on this, for Mr Elliott substantially admits it. Here, then, the broad and palpable characteristics in the symbol are entirely awanting in the reality; and it is, we confess, marvellous to us, how Mr Elliott can glide so easily over such palpable roughnesses in his way, under this seal, while he has applied such laborious industry and painful research to square even the smallest particulars under the earlier seals. In comparing the one with the other, one cannot but think of the "straining at the gnat and the swallowing of the camel."

upon its whole aspect indubitable marks of a higher reference, and in some respects may be held to serve as a key to the rest. For, a book so constructed of symbolical and figurative representations as the Apocalypse, would, unless interpreted by some infallible authority, necessarily remain for ever, if not absolutely unintelligible, at least uncertain and doubtful in its meaning, if there were not scattered through it at intervals certain sunny spots-representations in which the symbolical rests so plainly upon other and more direct revelations of Scripture, that it becomes in a manner transparent by being seen in An appeal, no doubt, is made to images somewhat their light; and of such passages, wherever they are similar in the Old Testament prophets, used by them to be found, the interpreter should serve himself, as in reference to changes produced in earthly states- so many sure guiding-posts to help him to track his particularly in regard to Babylon, Egypt, and Jeru- way through the more obscure aud intricate portions. salem. But, not to mention that the passages refer- We have no difficulty, for ourselves, in descrying red to are far from coming up to the one before us one such passage in the vision of the sixth seal, which in strength of language, and particularity of detail, is almost wholly written out in the language used by there are three most essential differences between our Lord to describe the immediate signs and accomthe two cases, quite overlooked by Mr Elliott and paniments of his second advent. (Matt. xxiv. and those who concur with him in this view-First, no- Luke xxi.) The correspondence is so close and thing even approaching to such language is ever used striking, that nothing but the supposed impossibility of the changes wrought upon mere earthly states, of adapting such a view of the contents of this seal without clear and determinate indications of what is to its place in the Apocalyptic scheme, could have intended-the states in question being named, and led interpreters to give a different turn to its import. the other parts of the description leaving no doubt of Even when so viewed, however, the language of the the figurative import of the expressions. But such sixth seal does not cease to be symbolical: it still so notes and indications are entirely wanting here. far preserves that character, that it describes the Then, in the Old Testament representations, it is the things which are to happen, not by the actual occuractual subversion of the kingdoms-their subversion rences, but by the excited and alarmed feelings of as kingdoms, and that as a terrible act of judgment on the spectators. The earthquake, the sackcloth apthe part of God-which is uniformly meant when pearance of the sun, the incarnadining of the moon, they are spoken of under images betokening a general the falling of the stars, and the flight of men to hide convulsion of nature. But in the present case, it is themselves in the dens and caves of the earth-these, not the Roman empire, by the supposition, that is even when understood of the consummating acts and the subject of the convulsive shock: the whole that final termination of this world's history in its present takes place here is a change in the established, per- constitution, are manifestly not a literal but a figu haps we should rather say the professed, religion of rative delineation of the grand moral revolution which the empire-a change which, as it actually took is then to take place, and which shall seem to men's place, did not materially affect the constitution or agitated feelings thus to confound heaven and earth. existence of the empire, nor anything belonging to The distinctive aspect, too, which the whole picture it, which had been brought into notice in the previ-here bears, is precisely the one that usually appears ous symbolical history. And, lastly, not only was the revolution in question brought about in the most gradual and vacillating manner-the most unlike to a great convulsion of nature-but it was also in its own nature of a beneficial character (that is, so far as it could be fitly called a revolution at all); while, in the cases where language somewhat similar was applied to earthly kingdoms, the revolution indicated was uniformly of a violent, injurious, and destructive nature. It is no answer to this to say, that the revolution in the age of Constantine was violent, injurious, and even destructive, as regards the interests of heathenism; for this would imply, that the empire had appeared upon the prophetic chart with a special respect to these interests-that not the world-monarchy, but simply the heathendom of Rome, was the subject of prefiguration in the history of the seals. By the scheme under consideration, however, it is precisely the reverse: it is the empire, as such, that is contemplated, and, consequently, it is the empire in that respect also which should have gone down, if the images in the sixth seal were to be interpreted in a manner at all parallel to those of the Old Testament prophets.

These objections seem to us quite fatal to the current application of the first six seals, and, in particular, of the sixth, which especially appears to bear

in the representations given of the Lord's final dealings with the inhabitants of the world. It is emphatically the time of the great tribulation, when the tribes of the earth shall mourn, because it is the time for inflicting judgment upon the adversaries of God, and bringing in the everlasting reign of righteousness and peace.

But we anticipate the objection, that such a view of the sixth seal is rendered impossible, by the very place it occupies in the Apocalyptic visions; and the fact, so often pressed by Mr Elliott, that John presently goes on to tell us, "After these things I saw four angels holding the winds, that these might not hurt the earth," &c., is held, most certainly, to intimate, that the earth still remains substantially in its present form, after the action of the sixth seal has spent itself. That the expression, “ After these things I saw," does indicate some kind of sequence and posteriority, is unquestionable; but not necessarily in regard to the occurrence of the events symbolized, more probably in regard to the order of their symbolical exhibition to the eye of the apostle. The visions presented to him cover such immense periods of the world's history, and unfold such various aspects of it, that he must receive them in successive portions, though still possibly many of them may, as it were, overlap each other, and may, to a considerable extent,