the chronology of the five prophetic months or the 150 natural years.

As this is the period, during which the locusts are permitted to be a woe to Christendom, it must of course be calculated from the time when they emerged out of the smoke that rose from the pit of the abyss. But their emergence occurred, as we have seen, in the year 612. From this year, therefore, the period must be calculated. If, then, we reckon 150 years from the year 612, we shall be brought to the year 762 as the close of the first great woe.

Accordingly, it was in this year, that the Caliph Almansor founded Bagdad as the future seat of his Empire, and called it the city of peace'. At that point of time, the Saracens ceased from their locust devastations, and became a settled and lettered and civilised people. Henceforth, they no longer made such rapid conquests as they had formerly done; but only engaged in ordinary wars, like other nations: insomuch that a modern historian considers the foundation of Bagdad, as a marked chronological era in the Saracenic Empire; the period which precedes it being that of the undivided Caliphate or the rise of the Saracenic Power, while the period which succeeds it is that of the divided Caliphate or the decline and fall of the Saracenic Power2.

The foundations of Bagdad were laid, A.H. 145; which corresponds with A.D. 762. Hist. of Decline, vol. x. p.

35.

Mills's Hist, of Mohammedism, p. 44, 104, 105, 132, 133.

5. At the conclusion of the prophecy respecting the locusts, it is added, One woe is past: but, at the conclusion of the second woe, it is asserted, Behold, the third woe cometh quickly'. This difference of expression clearly marks, that a much longer interval was to elapse between the first woe and the second woe, than between the second woe and the third woe; a circumstance, which, as we shall find in the sequel, has been exactly accom→ plished.

The

II. At the sounding of the sixth trumpet or the second of the three woe-trumpets, a command is given to loose the four angels who were hitherto bound in the regions bordering on the great river Euphrates. Accordingly, after a season of preparation which precedes the sounding of the sixth trumpet, they are let loose, during the period of a prophetic day and month and year, in order that they may destroy the third part of men. armies, which they command, are described as consisting of innumerable hosts of cavalry: the warriors appear to the prophet, as wearing breastplates of fire and hyacinth and brimstone : from the lionlike heads of their horses seem to proceed smoke and brimstone and fire, by the agency of which the third part of men are killed and the horses themselves, like the Saracenic locusts, have power no

'Rev. ix. 12. xi. 14.

* Gr. Ἐπὶ τῷ ποτάμῷ τῷ μεγάλῳ Ευφράτη : on the great river Euphrates, not in it,

less in their tails than in their mouths; for their tails are like serpents provided with heads, and with them they inflict injury. Yet, notwithstanding the death of the third part of men, those, who escape these two successive woes, still harden their hearts, and repent not of their idolatry and their sorcery and their spiritual fornication '.

Respecting the general import of this prediction, there has been the same agreement among commentators, as respecting that of the last. Almost unanimously, the Euphratèan horsemen are pronounced to be the Turks.

The lords of a great part of Asia, which lies between the Indus and the Bosporus, proceeded originally from the nation which dwells in the Khozzer or Khozzez plains, at the north-east of the Caspian sea. They were called Turks or Turkmans and their first important emigration took place in the tenth century. The counsels of the monarch were guided by the talents of his emir Vekauk. On the death of the minister, his son Seljuk headed the armies of the sovereign : but this officer fell into disgrace; and was thence compelled, with his family and his friends, to flee from the court into the territories adjacent to Samarcand. These Tartars, like most others of their nation in their emigrations to the south, embraced the Mohammedan religion. The followers of Seljuk increased: his residence became

1 Rev. ix. 13-21.