time was being fulfilled the prophecy which said “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased”. The nearer they approached the culminating end the clearer would they see the things revealed.
There were three classes of men – continued the lecturer – who believed in the Apocalypse; one who believed it to have been fulfilled in the days of Nero and Domitian, but of this there were very few; another, that the whole of the Apocalypse remained to be fulfilled, and that all the prophesies of that book would be crowded into the space of a few years at the close of the present dispensation; and others, like himself, who believed that a portion had been fulfilled and the remainder rapidly drawing to a consummation. This, he thought was being made clearer and clearer. It appeared to him that the Apocalypse was a prospective history written in symbols, but symbols that had keys to unlock or decipher them; and which gave us, not a perfect apprehension of all that was to transpire, but such a view as would convince us that Christ’s church was not the church of a mere nook, but a church of the wide, wide world; and that the mighty force brought to play against the battlements of the church of Christ should, at the end, fall powerless at its foundation – that Christ should be exalted King of kings and Lord of lords.
[Applause].
The reverend lecturer then explained these symbols, 21 in number, as containing the whole prospective history of that which was to take place from John’s time until the new Jerusalem should come like the bride adorned for the bridegroom. They were divided into three classes, the seven seals, seven symbolic trumpets, and seven vials; and, as was demonstrated by the Rev. E. Elliott, these sets of symbols drew out from one another like a telescope; that was to say, the whole of the seven trumpets were included in the last of the seven seals, and the whole of the seven vials in the last of the seven trumpets. These symbols began with the description of seven horses of different colours. The first was described as a white horse, the rider of which had a bow and a crown, and he went forth conquering and to conquer; the second was a red horse, and power was given to him that sat thereon “to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another, and there was given to him a great sword”. From 185 to 220 civil wars raged and blood flowed in all directions. The next was a black horse, and was accompanied with a voice which said “a measure of wheat for a penny -
