first alone that will accord with the associated scene and living persons in the text the scene that of the Red Sea; the persons harpers, with harps devoted to God's praise, standing on its shore: besides that the brief sketch that is given of the subject-matter of the song agrees completely, as we shall presently see, with this prototype, not with the other.-With regard to "the song of the Lamb," the conjunction K which connects it with the clause preceding, may be simply exegetic, in the sense of even: so implying that the victors seen by St. John in emblematic vision, were members of the spiritual Israel, that had the Lamb for their leader, and sang the gospel-songs of his dispensation; just as the literal Israel were under Moses' guidance, and sang the songs of his dispensation an evangelic application of the song almost presignified to the Jews, as it was sung each sabbath evening in their temple service, on the lamb's sacrifice. Or, possibly, the Ka may be used in its common additive sense; and signify that besides the song of Moses, sung by Israel after Pharaoh's overthrow in the Red Sea, these harpers sang also the song of, or associated with, the sacrifice of the paschal lamb. For a particular song was customary at the Passover; viz. Psalm cxiv, and the three Psalms following, beginning "When Israel came out of Egypt," &c. And it is sup : 1 Daubuz uses the expression "having harps of God," as an expression indicative of the heavenly or paradisiacal state of them that sang it. But the phrase is a well-known Hebraism, in signification either of the excellence of a thing, (as Psalm lxxx. 10, cedars of God, Psalm lxviii. 16, mountains of God, &c.) or of the thing being devoted to God's service, as in 1 Chron. xvi. 42, and 2 Chron. vii. 6, "musical instruments of God." It seems to me probable that a special and real devotion may be here intended by the phrase: as if in contrast with the harps of the vast multitude of mere formal harpers alluded to in Apoc. xiv. 2; representing (as has been shown) the earthly-minded multitudes of professing Protestantism. See p. 263–266 suprà. 2 So Vitringa.-Schleusner gives, in illustration of this exegetic or explanatory meaning of kaι, among others the examples following: Matt. xiii. 41, Zvλλe§voW εκ της βασιλειας παντα τα σκανδαλα, και τους ποιούντας την ανομίαν John x. 33 ; Αλλα περι βλασφημίας, και ότι συ ανθρωπος ων ποιεις σεαυτόν Θεόν.-In the Apocalypse we have, xiii. 12, Ποιει την γην, και τους κατοικούντας εν αυτῇ and xii. 12. Ουρανοι, και δι σκηνούντες εν αυτοίς. 3 Bingham's Antiquities, xiii. 5, 4, from Lightfoot. He says that Moses' song, given us in Deut. xxxii was sung by the Levites in the sabbath morning service, and that of Exod. xv in the evening sabbath service. posed that our Lord himself sang it with his disciples, just before leaving the table of the last passover for Gethsemane.'-Practically there is no great difference of signification, whichever way we take the clause. For in either case the song has reference to Israel's deliverance as God's own chosen people, from the plagues of Egypt and power of Pharaoh.-It is to be observed that as in the original song of Exod. xv, so in the Apocalyptic song given in brief by St. John, a reverential fear of God's majesty, and admiration of his excellency, as revealed to them, as well as gratitude for his goodness, characterized the spirit of the harpers. And thus, for the subject-matter of their songs, they celebrate first his almighty power and acts, specially, it would seem, as illustrated in the overthrow of their enemies; next, his faithfulness and truth, specially as manifested in the ways of the Divine Providence towards them his redeemed ones, by the King of nations; thirdly, his inimitable holiness, in contrast with all other representations of God; even as the only Holy One. And then, finally,—judging their own wonderful preservation, and that of the revelation committed to them, just as in Israel's case, to be no isolated or inconsequent event, they anticipate from it, and some cotemporary manifestation of God's righteousness and gospel-scheme of salvation,2-not, as the Israelitish harpers by the Red Sea, the assured establishment of his reign in Canaan only, but over the whole 1 Ibid. - 2 Τα γαρ δικαιωματα σου εφανερώθησαν. The word δικαιωματα is either used in the forensic sense of justification, as Rom. v. 16, 18, and probably Apoc. xix. 8; or, yet more frequently, of God's ordinances and statutes: not of his judicial infictions. So Luke i. 6, Πορευομενοι εν πασαις ταις εντολαις και δικαιώμασι τα Κυριο Rom. ii. 26, Εαν ἡ ακροβυσια τα δικαιωματα του νομου φυλασσῃ Heb. ix. 1, Είχε μεν ουν ἡ πρωτη σκηνη δικαιώματα λατρειας &c. In the Septuagint innumerable examples of the same kind occur; for which see Trommius. Neither in the New Testament, nor in the Septuagint, is there one single example, I believe, in which dikawμaтa is used (so as кpiois Apoc. x. 19,) in the sense of judicial inflictions and punishments. See Schleusner in Voc.-Vitringa, p. 920, had recourse to the Hebrew, and not very successfully, to justify his here so explaining the Greek Word. On the words occurring Apoc. xix. 8, he gives it my explanation. See his p. 1098. In the text I have given in paraphrase what I conceive to be the evangelic, and so the Apocalyptic sense of the word. Compare the observations at Vol. ii. p. 95. world yea, that "all nations shall come (come speedily, it is implied) and worship before Him." " Thus on the whole, as before intimated, this vision seems to have foreshown to St. John, that during the five first vials to be poured out on the mystic Egypt, or Papal Christendom, the faithful ones of Christ's true Protestant Church all safely preserved before the world, would join in songs of holy and glowing anticipations as to Christ's coming reign, such as never before :-a view well accordant with that of the other two parallel figurations of the same period considered before. § 2. THE HISTORICAL FULfilment. It remains to trace the FULFILMENT OF THE THREE VISIONS in the history of Christ's true Church and servants during the time of the judgments of the French Revolution. It was England, we saw,-insular England, to which living Protestantism, and the 144,000 that alone understood its new song, seemed almost confined just before the time of that tremendous political outbreak. And we also saw how lamentably, even there too, (as the result of a long century of declension,3) religion had fallen; 1 The reader will find it worth his while to compare parallel parts of Moses' song in Exodus with those in this brief Apocalyptic abstract: e. g. verses 2, 6, "The Lord is my strength and song: thy right hand is become glorious in power: "-verse 11, "Who is like thee among the gods, glorious in holiness, reverend in praises, doing wonders?"-verses 13 and 17, 18; "Thou hast guided (or, shalt guide) them (the people which thou hast redeemed) unto thy holy habitation. . . . . Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance; in the sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established. The Lord shall reign for ever and ever." Also Exod. ix. 16, referred to Rom. ix. 17; "For this purpose have I raised thee (Pharaoh) up, that I might show my power in thee, and that my name might be declared through all the earth." 2 See p. 271 suprà, and the chapter which it concludes. 3 In 1713 Bishop Burnet, in his Pastoral Charge stated “that most of those who came to be ordained were ignorant to a degree not to be apprehended by those who were not obliged to know it." In 1728 Bishop Gibson, in his Pastoral Letters, complained "that profaneness and impiety were grown bold and open." And Archbishop Secker's Charges, from 1738 to 1766, present a similarly melancholy picture of the spiritual condition of the kingdom during the whole of though not indeed without some recent signs of improvement. What a religious revival then was needed in the nation, in order, (according to God's usual rule of judicial dispensation) to its escaping from the judgments directed against apostate Christendom! What a new missionary spirit, in connection with such religious revival, and leavening in some measure of the popular mind with it, and perhaps too of the government; in order to the accomplishment of missionary work on the scale figured or implied alike in the figuration of the opening of the Apocalyptic temple-gate, the vision of the Angel with the everlasting Gospel, and song of the harpers by the glassy sea! What a concurrence, moreover, of other favouring circumstances;-as of the supply of fit instrumentalities, moral and intellectual, the accomplishment of religious combination, and nationally not the mere political safety of England, but its colonial and maritime supremacy and aggrandizement! It was all needed, and we know was all supplied. The revival of religion in England at the time of the French revolution,-its preservation and successful progress in maritime and colonial power, amidst dangers unprecedently great, which threatened its very existence, -and coincidently, its outburst of missionary feeling, missionary action, and missionary anticipations and song, are now among the best known, as well as most memorable historic facts, of the era spoken of. It was when the continental nations were agitated with the rethat period. To which add Bishop Horsley's declaration (already given before p. 271, Note 1) to the effect that during the larger half of the eighteenth century the preaching of the great majority of the clergy of the English Church had been "little better than a system of heathen ethics." Bishops Porteus and Barrington, in Charges delivered during the first ten years of the French Revolutionary war, speak in similarly sad terms of the then general decay of religion in England. So Bishop Wilson has remarked, in his Preface to Wilberforce's View, p. xxxviii. And Mr. Wilberforce himself often mournfully laments over it; declaring it at one time (A.D. 1792) to be "practical atheism." Life, i. 107-In fact, like Cowper, Mr. Wilberforce had prognosticated coming evil on England, in consequence of its prevalent ungodliness, before the French Revolutionary outbreak. Writing in 1785 he says: "I fancy I see storms arising, which will by and by overspread and blacken the whole face of heaven. It is not the confusion of parties, and their quarrelling in the House of Commons, which makes me despair of the Republic; but the universal corruption and profligacy of the times." Ibid. i. 84. volutionary earthquake and storm, (to borrow again the Apocalyptic figurative phraseology,') agitated, as a living observer expressed it, "like poor Calabria," 2 when the infection of French democratic and infidel principles, having spread plague-like across the channel, threatened the outbreak (had not the virus met its counteracting antidote) of ulcers noisome and sore in the English body politic, just as in the French,3-when both the sea, with its European Papal colonies, and the rivers and kingdoms of the European continent were dyed with blood, its most ancient thrones subverted, and chiefest lights in its political heavens eclipsed or darkened,-when the apparently irresistible power of France under Napoleon, having been the scourge and plague of the mystical Egypt,' i.e. Papal Christendom, seemed ready to concentrate its efforts in all the bitterness of enmity against that chief nation, that, like Israel at Pihahiroth, had escaped out of it,—it was during this awful period of the outpouring of God's vials of judgment, and when so imminent was the danger to England, that the cry of one of the most eminent prelates of the day, "Nothing but the interposition of heaven can save was but the echo of the thoughts of them who us," 2 "What a world we live in! The nations are agitated like poor Calabria. When they will rest in quietness, He only knows, who knows all things." So Mr. Hey of Leeds; writing to Mr. Wilberforce about (as I infer) the year 1792. Life of Wilberforce, ii. 80. 3 It well deserves the notice of a prophetic student, how naturally and frequently this Apocalpytic symbol of the first Vial was applied by writers of the day, to any such outbreak in a political or social body of democratic infidel principles, as that in revolutionary France. So Mr. Wilberforce, speaking, though at a later æra (A. D. 1812), of a temporary and limited outbreak of the kind among the operatives of the manufacturing body in Yorkshire, thus writes. "The state of the lower orders in the manufacturing districts is such as I can illustrate only by the figure of the confluent small-pox on a human body. It is breaking out all over." Life, iv. 36.-The Biographers again, in reference to the year 1792, observes: "At this time revolutionary France established affiliated societies in foreign nations, and threatened our own population with the infection of her leprous touch." Ibid. i. 342. And Col. Creyke (Wilb. Correspondence, ii. 63), and Bishop Wilson (Preface to Wilberforce's View, p. xxxii) liken the same to a plague. Compare my observations pp. 308, 309, 323, suprà. 4 Apoc. xvi. 3, 4, 8, 10. See my Note 3, p. 386. Vol. ii. 6 Luther in his Table Talk, ch. iv, spoke very naturally of the reforming leaders, as having through God's assistance brought the Protestants out of the bondage of the Roman Antichrist, even as Moses led Israel out of Egypt. 7 Bishop Porteus, writing A. D. 1793. Life of H. More, ii. 366. So again in 1795. Ibid. 456, &c. |