CHAPTER IV.

THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH VIALS.

"And the second Angel poured out his Vial upon the sea and it became as the blood of a dead man. And every living soul died in the sea.-And the third Angel poured out his Vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters aad they became blood. And I heard the Angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art and wast, the Holy One, because thou hast judged thus for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets; and Thou hast given them blood to drink. And I heard [a voice from] the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty true and righteous are thy judgments. -And the fourth Angel poured out his Vial on the sun : and power was given him to scorch men with fire. And the men were scorched with great heat. And they blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues; and repented not to give him glory."-Apoc. xvi. 3-9.

Here is described the outspreading of the evil, and of the mortality and destruction consequent thereon, to different parts of Anti-Christendom.—And first, under the second Vial, to its sea.

I. THE SECOND VIAL.

"And the second Angel poured out his Vial on the sea and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea.

The very parallel judgment of the second Trumpet on the western division of the old Roman earth was thus described. "The second Angel sounded; and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea and the third part of the sea became blooo; and the third part of the creatures which were in the sea and

had life died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed." And we saw reason to interpret this of the destruction by bloody wars of the maritime provinces, power, and commerce of Rome: the agency being that of Genseric and his Vandals; and the most characteristic feature of the vision the maritime parts, noted as the local scene and subject of the judgment. In similar manner we seem bound to interpret the judgment of the second Vial, as a judgment (probably not unconnected with that of the first Vial) that would fall on and destroy the maritime power, commerce, and colonies of the countries of Papal Christendom: that is, of France, Spain, and Portugal; these being the only Papal kingdoms to which such maritime colonies and power attached. And the fulfilment of the prophecy, so interpreted, stands conspicuous in the history of the wars that arose out of the French Revolution.

A twofold agency was made subservient, under the over-ruling of Divine Providence, to accomplish this :— first, that of the democratic revolutionary spirit of the first Vial, propagated, like a pestilence, across the sea into the French and Spanish colonies; secondly, that of the maritime power of England, long separated from the Papacy, though once the tenth part of its city, and now the bulwark, not of Protestantism only, but almost of the very profession of Christianity itself.

The first agency began to act before the second. Its earliest scene of operation was the greatest and most flourishing of the French West Indian colonies, St. Domingo. On the news of the meeting and revolutionary proceedings of the National Assembly at Paris, the Frenchmen of that colony in similar revolutionary frenzy planted the tree of Liberty, convoked their National Assembly, and proclaimed equality and the rights of man: but, on the mulattoes and then the negro slaves (the

2

1 "As the volcanic shocks, which forty years before destroyed Lisbon, extended across the ocean as far as Peru, so did the revolutionary spirit pass through the countries of the earth; and at St. Domingo, in the West Indies, there were proceedings as tempestuous as at Paris." Barthe, p. 459.

2 This was in April 1790.

2

vast mass of the population') claiming their share in those rights, indignantly rejected the claim; and had influence at home to procure the annulment of the celebrated French decree of May 15, 1791, previously past in their favour, or at least in favour of the coloured population. Then began that dreadful civil and servile war of St. Domingo, which continued above twelve years, from 1792 to 1804 :-a war in which 60,000 blacks are said to have been slaughtered; but which ended in the utter defeat and expulsion of the French armies,* the extermination of the white colonists,5 and establishment of the island in 1804 as the independent Negro Republic of Hayti.

Meanwhile the great naval war between France and England was in progress; which from its commencement in February 1793 lasted for above twenty years, with no intermission but that of the short and delusive peace of Amiens: in which war the maritime power of Great Britain was strengthened by the Almighty Providence that protected her to destroy everywhere the

1 Said to have been sixteen times more numerous than the rest of the population.

2 It declared that all the people of colour, born of free parents, in the colonies, should enjoy all the privileges of French citizens.-It was on this occasion that Barnave made the memorable exclamation: "Perish the colonies rather than sacrifice our principles !"

3 Dessalines, in his Proclamation of 1804, "asserted that in the inhuman massacres by the French, more than 60,000 of his brethren had been drowned, suffocated, hanged, and otherwise put to death." Quarterly Review, No. XLII. Among the murdered may be classed the celebrated Toussaint l'Ouverture; one who was, until the Revolution, a negro slave, then the victorious general of his countrymen, and example too, both to them and to the world, how the moral virtues, as well as intellectual talents, might adorn a black as fully as a white man. But in the acme of his glory and usefulness he was at last treacherously kidnapped by General Le Clerc, Bonaparte's brother-in-law, carried off to France, and left to die by a slow death in a wretched and damp French prison.

4 An English fleet co-operated with the blacks in the conclusion of the war. To them the French general Rochambeau capitulated with 8000 men, the remnant of the French army.

5 General Dessalines' Proclamation (see Note 3 above) led to a general massacre of the whites remaining in the island.

So M. de Levis. In the Quarterly Review, No XLII, in an article on the Past and Present Prospects of Hayti, this exclamation is attributed to Robespierre. But, besides the authority of M. de Levis, (Souvenirs et Portraits,) who reproaches Barnave for it as a crime, the character of Barnave is one with which the reported saying suits well; with that of Robespierre, I should think, not

at all.

4

French ships, commerce, and smaller colonies; including those of the fast and long-continued allies of the French, Holland and Spain. In the year 1793 the greater part of the French fleet at Toulon was destroyed by Lord Hood: in June 1794 followed Lord Howe's great victory over the French off Ushant: then the taking of Corsica, and nearly all the smaller Spanish and French West Indian Islands: then, in 1795, Lord Bridport's naval victory,3 and the capture of the Cape of Good Hope: as also, soon after, of a French and Dutch fleet sent to retake it; 5 then, in 1797, the victory over the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, and that of Camperdown over the Dutch: 6 then, in succession, Lord Nelson's three mighty victories,-of the Nile in 1798, of Copenhagan in 1801,7 and, in 1805, of Trafalgar.Altogether in this naval war, from its beginning in 1793 to its end in 1815, it appears from James' Naval History that there were destroyed near 200 ships of the line, between 300 and 400 frigates, and an almost incalculable number of smaller vessels of war and ships of commerce.8 It is most truly stated by Dr. Keith, that the whole history of the world does not present such a period of naval war, destruction, and bloodshed.9 In the figurative language of prophecy, "The sea became as the blood of a dead man."

Finally, after that all the ships of war and maritime

1 December 1793.

4 By Admiral Elphinstone, given up, but taken again by

All but Guadaloupe.

3 Off L'Orient. Sept. 16, 1795. At the peace of Amiens it was a British fleet and army under Sir Home Popham. 5 By Admiral Lucas.

The one by Sir John Jervis, the other by Admiral Duncan.

7 A victory by which,-in conjunction with the sudden death of the Russian Emperor Paul,* and the succession to his throne of a man of the most opposite spirit, the Emperor Alexander,-the great northern confederacy against England's maritime supremacy was broken up; and with it the hindrance to her continuing to fulfil her destined work (as I suppose) under this Vial.

8 This total destruction of the French marine and commercial power is the more remarkable from the circumstance of Buonaparte's sense of its importance, and craving after "Ships, colonies, and commerce." But all-powerful on land, where he had to fulfil prophecy, he was impotent in what prophecy denied him. 9 Signs of Times, ii. p. 124. His interpretation of this Vial, so far as it goes, agrees in what I have given. Only he scarcely adverts in it to the loss of the Papal colonies. He dwells all but exclusively on the revolutionary naval war.

He was strangled in a conspiracy of some of his nobles, after giving evidence of insanity.

commerce and power of the Papal nations on whom the judgments fell, had been swept from the sea by the English victories, and all their smaller colonies also reft from them, the same revolutionary principle which had long previously introduced civil war and bloodshed into the great French colony of St. Domingo, was now the cause of similar civil wars, bloodshed, and separation from the mother country, of the yet greater Spanish colonies in South America. The colonists there had read the works of the French philosphers and politicians;' and during the twelve years, from 1796 to 1808, of Spanish subjection to France,2 had become familiar with the French revolutionary doctrines. And thus when, on Napoleon's entrapping the King of Spain, and usurping the throne for his brother Joseph, the Spanish nation had risen, and the Cortes, assembled at Cadiz, had promulgated with their own authorization the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people,3-these colonists were the better prepared to claim their full share of the rights of citizens. And when the claim was rejected,-when the Cortes (like the French colonists of St. Domingo) had decreed that the slightest tinge of African blood should be a bar to participation in the rights of citizenship, and England's offer of mediation between Spain and her colonies had been rejected by the former,5then in Mexico, and Venezuela, and Buenos Ayres, and Chili, and Peru, the flames of civil war broke out successively, and spread into an universal conflagration. The atrocities of that war are said by a writer in the Quarterly Review 6 to have been unparalleled in the civil wars of ancient and modern times. Doubtless he must have forgotten Lyons and La Vendée, in so writing. Bloody, however, and full of horrors it was. Its re

' Quarterly Review, No XXXIV. p. 561: an Article which gives a brief summary of the origin and earlier progress of the South American Revolutions.

2 During this time they were virtually separated from Spain; their commerce, and the intercourse with them, being only carried on by the intervention of neutrals. This too was a helping preparatory cause to the revolution that completed and perpetuated the separation. 3 Ibid. 541. 6 Ibid. 554.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid. 551.