John says, that he saw ho Hades, following with Death. This word haides, or hades, is usually derived from a privative, and idein, to see; others regard it as "most clearly derived from aeides, invisible." It therefore means that which is concealed from present vision. This is the most common acceptation of the word -- the unseen, whether as to place or state.

The expression oikos Hadou, corresponds both in form and sense, to the Hebrew baith olam, Eccl. xii. 5, "man goeth to the House of Olam," house of the unseen, instead of long home, as in the English Version; that is, the grave. When men are therein deposited they are invisible; hence the grave becomes their house, oikos, in which they are unseen. They are then in hades. Xenophon in his life of Agesilaus, says: "And thus this man spent his life in the service of his country, and having at length died he was carried down into the invisible dwelling" -- eis ten aidion oikesin kategageto. So also Diodorus Siculus, in his account of the Egyptians, says: "They call the habitations of the living, inns, because we dwell in them for a short time; but the abodes of the departed they style hidden houses, because in the unseen they remain the unknown cycle" -- aidious oikous prosagoreuousin, hos en Haidou diatelounton ton apeiron aiona (lib. 1.51). The word Haidos, in relation to world, time, place, can only signify boundless, eternal, everlasting, in the sense of heathen boundless inexperience and ignorance of invisible things. The phrase eis Haidou, is eliptical for eis oikon hadou, into the house of the unseen, or the grave; and is supposed to have been derived from the baith Olam of the Hebrews.

The pulai hadou, the Gates of Hades, or the gates of the unseen, is used in Matt. xvi. 18. To say as there, that they should not prevail against Christ’s ecclesia, was to predict the resurrection of his saints; and that they should no more be shut in from the outside world by grave or sepulchre. The dead are truly themselves the unseen, as well as in the unseen. Open the graves of the generation of this seal, as an instance; lay them all into one vast unpartitioned area; let us descend and enter there, and view the mighty hollow, and ask, where are all the dead? They are all invisible. The grave, which is the mouth, or gate, of this vast subterranean hall, has eaten them up, and consumed their form. Ask for them; but you ask in vain; they are all there, but you cannot see them; therefore they are in Hades, or in Sheol.

"Our Saxon word Hell," says Lord King, "in its original signification, exactly answers to the Greek word Hades, and denotes a concealed or unseen place; and this sense of the word is still retained in the eastern, and especially in the western counties of England; to hele over a thing is to cover it." The modern, or Laodicean use of hell is not the scriptural use of hades or sheol; but the old mythology of the heathen -- the fabulous theory according to which they fitted up and furnished, the vast subterranean we have supposed, with flames, sulphur, brazen-throated dogs, furies, and such like. Plato, speaking of all this mythological apparatus and the legends appended to it, says, "Which, under the name of Hades and similar titles, men (that is, pagans) greatly fear, and dream about living and dissolved of bodies." This last expression is explained by what he says elsewhere: "For be well assured, O Socrates, that when any one is near that time in which he thinks he is going to die, there enter into him fear and anxiety. For then the old stories about Hades, how that the man who has here been guilty of wrong must there suffer punishments, torture his soul. Wherefore he who in the retrospect of his life, finds many crimes, like frightened children starting from their sleep, is terrified, and lives in evil forebodings." Thus, as Paul says, "through fear of death they were all their lifetime subject to bondage" -- afraid, like the heathen of the Laodicean Apostasy, of what awaits them in the unseen. Hence, when they approach dissolution of body, terror seizes them, and they send for the priest of Plato, or some minor god, in ancient and modern times, to calm their panic by the pseudo-consolations of their respective delusions.

Such, then, is Hades abstract from this fourth seal; not "a place of departed spirits;" not a place divided into two grand compartments or chambers; in one of which the spirits of "virtuous heathen," ancient and modern, of "all names and denominations of professors" and christians, are provisionally cribbed, cabined, and confined, in a sort of dreamy blissfulness, awaiting their reunion, at some indefinite epoch, with their old grave-eaten mortalities, as a condition upon which they shall enter upon eternal fulness of felicity and joy, beyond the bounds of Hades, yea, "beyond the bounds of time and space," if any one can tell where that is! Not a place, in the other compartment of which, "the spirits of the damned" are in view of the dreamy blessed, heightening their felicity, with their torment-developed wailings and gnashing of teeth. It is no such pagan, papal, protestant, and sectarian "hell," "purgatory," "heaven," or "intermediate state," as this; but simply, the receptacle into which is carried down all the remains of a man when he is dead, with this single exception -- his character. Before he is born he is in a sort of Hades, the womb of his mother; and when he is dead, he is deposited in the womb of his mother earth, a larger excavated Hades, in which, if one of "the faithful in Christ Jesus called saints," he sleeps death’s sleep until awaked by the Spirit’s power, when "in the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning, he has the dew of his birth," (Psa. cx. 3). This is Hades abstract from the seal -- Hades in the abstract.

In Isai. v. 14, the Spirit speaks of Hades, by the name of Sheol, and as a female with a mouth that is insatiable -- Sheol is never satisfied (Prov. xxx. 15,16). "My people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge; and their honorable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst; therefore Sheol, or Hades, hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it." Though metaphorical, this is very intelligible. It predicted great destruction of all ranks and classes in Israel; and consequently, a great shovelling of them into the never filled receptacle of the dead. This insatiable nature of Sheol, or Hades, is the reason of her being styled "cruel." Thus, "love is strong as Death; jealousy, cruel as Sheol" (Cant. viii. 6).

Again, in the Spirit’s prophetic address to Belshazzar, as the Lucifer of the Babylonish Heavens, he says, "Sheol or Hades, from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee ... who say, Art thou become weak as we? Thy pomp is brought down to Hades ... the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee! Thou art cut down to the ground; thou art brought down to Sheol or Hades, to the sides of the pit. All the kings of the nations lie every one in his own house, but thou art cast out (violently excluded) from thy kever, sepulchre ... as a carcase trodden under feet; thou shalt not be joined with them in burial" (Isai. xiv. 9-20). Here, this cruel subterranean unseen is personified. She has the dead in custody, all their individual graves and sepulchres being the houses or cells of her vast prison. She is metaphorically supposed to arouse all her prisoners to meet a great destroyer when he is about to be brought by bearers into his sepulchre; and to taunt him with his iniquity perpetrated above ground. She is that vast prison; and all whom she has swallowed, she devours with the worms spread under and over, "which cover," the weak and helpless, and unconscious, unseen sleepers in their cells.

This Hades is a great and voracious destroyer, the cruel ally of Death. They are companions in nature, as they are made symbolical associates in the fourth seal. It is, however, comforting to know, that, though Death and Hades went forth on such "a dreadful and terrible" mission of destruction by sword, famine, pestilence, and beasts of the earth, in this fourth seal-period of apocalyptic development, yet both of them shall be destroyed when the purpose of the Deity shall have been fully apocalypsed. "O Death," saith the Spirit, "I will be thy plagues; O Sheol or Hades, I will be thy destruction" (Hos. xiii. 14). And the earnest of this we have in the manifestation of the Deity in our nature, as Jesus Christ; "who has prevailed," as the Seven-Horned and Seven-Eyed Lamb, "to unroll the scroll, and to unloose the seven seals thereof;" and hath abolished death through death, and brought life and incorruptibility to light through the gospel of the kingdom (Heb. ii. 14; 2 Tim. i. 10). Still, we see Death reigning, and Hades following with him, on every side. True; but the Spirit tells us by Paul, that Death is the last enemy, and shall be destroyed; and apocalyptically by John, that "there shall be no more death," and "no more curse" (xxi. 4; xxii. 3). "Death, is," then, "swallowed up in victory," which victory is obtained through Jesus Christ. Temporarily, victory is on the side of Death and his companion Hades; but when he and she have come to "the End," their power and victory over the faithful will prove to have been without permanent results. Then, "O Death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where thy victory?" Both abolished with the abolition of every curse for sin will be served no more on earth; and therefore, "the wages of sin," which "is death" will no more be earned and paid; so that Hades having no more victims for her devouring maw, is herself destroyed -- she dies for the want of sustenance.

What a glorious and blissful consummation is this of human affairs. Instead of generation after generation of our unhappy race, rushing like a torrent into the deep caverns of the unseen never more to see the light of day; instead of sword, famine, pestilence, and all the mishaps of fire, flood and field, sweeping them for seven thousand years into a subterranean prison-house, within whose gates they are barred up for ever; instead of this, the time will have arrived for every individual dweller upon the earth to be, what Jesus Christ is now -- incorruptible, deathless, glorious, and powerful; Deity manifested in glorified nature -- ho Theos ta panta en pasin, the Deity the all things in all men.

But from the contemplation of this brilliant and eternal future, we must return to the consideration of the fearful and gloomy past, when DEATH sat, as it were, the grim and livid occupant of the imperial throne: and HADES reigned with him, the cruel and voracious goddess of his dominion.

As the rider on the pale horse symbolized a class of ruling agents sold to the work of death, and in the midst of it to a violent death for themselves; so "Hades following with him," is representative of another class of destroying agencies which co-operate in the destruction of the horse-people, so as to bring their body politic to the verge of dissolution, as indicated by the color of the hieroglyphic.