is concerned, the variation in the management of the leading symbol is immaterial: and it is not unworthy of note, that Zechariah himself has authorised the variation in the Apocalypse; for, in another of his prophecies, he mounts the ruling powers upon the backs of single horses, instead of seating them in chariots drawn by several horses '.

The imagery of St. John thus being evidently borrowed from the imagery of Zechariah and thus conveying moreover precisely the same general idea in the abstract, we are naturally led to suspect, from the identity of the numbers, that the quaternion of the one denotes, in point of application, the very same four military Empires that are denoted by the quaternion of the other. For, as it is certain that no four such Empires can be discovered immediately after the days of St. John : so it is equally certain, that exactly four such Empires had started into existence anterior to the days of St. John; and it is also certain, that, both with Daniel and with Zechariah, those four Empires have constituted the grand theme of calendarian prophecy. Hence I am led to conclude, that the four managed war-horses of the four first seals can only denote the four great military Empires of Babylon and Persia and Greece and Rome: and in this opinion I am the rather confirmed, because, by its adoption, we bring out a beautiful harmonic correspondence between Daniel and St. John. On the presumption

· Zechar. i. 8.

that the opinion is well founded, the Apocalypse of St. John will bear, to the prophecies of Daniel, a yet closer affinity, than has hitherto been supposed. Sir Isaac Newton justly remarks, that the Apocalypse of St. John is written in the same style and language with the prophecies of Daniel, and has the same relation to them which they have to one another, so that all of them together make but one complete prophecy. But, if I err not in my proposed application of the four first seals, the Apocalypse also spreads over the same great prophetic calendar, as that which constitutes the gage and measure of Daniel's predictions: for, commencing retrospectively with the appearance of the Babylonian Empire in the calendar, it passes through the entire times of the Roman Empire, and at length conducts us to the final consummation of the universe.

(1.) To this arrangement it may be objected, that such an application of the four first seals is inadmissible, because it contradicts the declaration of the voice to St. John: I will shew thee things, which must be HEREAFTER 2. The voice asserts, that future matters are about to be revealed to the Apostle. Now the very earliest of these revealed matters are the contents of the four seals. Therefore the four seals must respect matters future, not matters past.

Observ. on the Apoc. chap. ii. p. 254.

2 Rev. iv. 1.

The force of the objection I allow : but I meet it by adducing the analogy of Daniel's confessedly parallel prophecies. In more than one of those predictions, we have a retrospective pröem, no less than a prospective annunciation. Daniel states what is past, before he advances to what is future. Now I require nothing more than the admission, that St. John may write upon the same perfectly intelligible plan : a plan, so obvious and so natural, that the specific history of any given period is usually, for the sake of greater perspicuity, prefaced by a brief introductory account of the preceding period; and I need scarcely to remark, that prophecy is, in effect, no other than anticipated history. On this ground, I conceive that there is nothing really objectionable in making the four first seals a retrospective introduction to that portion of the Apocalypse which alone is truly and properly prophetic.

Still it may be urged, that the declaration of the voice is too precise and too definite to admit of any such modification : I will shew thee things, which must be HEREAFTER ; or, according to a yet more literal rendering of the original, I will shew thee things, which must be AFTER THESE THINGS '.

My answer is, that an equally express declaration in the writings of Daniel has never been thought sufficient to prevent, what every one feels to be, the just and necessary exposition of the vision of the

Gr. pista taūra.

edly occurred many centuries before the declaration of the voice was heard by the Apostle !

(2.) St. John, employing the four first seals for the purpose of an introduction which should at once distinctly connect his predictions with the predictions of Daniel and should cause the chronological line of the Apocalypse to commence with the commencement of the grand prophetic calendar, uses, as we might naturally expect from the circumstance of the four great Empires having been already treated of with much copiousness by the more ancient Hebrew seer, a studied measure of brevity. He was writing only a connective introduction: and prolixity would have been foreign to his object. Yet, brief as may be his statement, there is, in his management of the topic, a peculiarity which must by no means be pretermitted in silence.

At the time when St. John wrote, the Baby

Accordingly, the interpreting angel himself declares, that the symbol respects things, both past, present, and future. The seven heads are seven kings : five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come. Rev. xvii. 9, 10. Compare Rev. xiii. 1. Every commentator, indeed, with whose writings I am acquainted, finds himself compelled to place the opening of at least the first seal anterior to the time when the visions of the Apocalypse were seen by St. John. For those visions were seen by him in the year 96: and commentators, according as they understand the oracle of the first seal ecclesiastically or secularly, are wont, without incurring any special chronological censure, to place the opening of that seal either in the year 33 or in the year 70.