This section of the subject answers to those things written within the scroll pertaining to the concluding portion of the Ephesian, and commencement, or first part of the Smyrnean, state of the Body of Christ.

ACT I. -- SEAL PERIOD FIRST.

Chap. iv. 1,2

The Archer of the White Horse goes forth from the Lamb with his Bow on a career of conquest.

A.D. 96.

I. INITIATION OF THE SEAL-PERIOD.

1. "And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard from one of the four living ones saying as a voice of thunder, Come and see!"  

In spirit John was in the Lord’s day, and "saw" spirit-manifestations, or spirit-forms, styled by us symbols or emblems; and among these was the spirit-manifestation, or "sign," of this first-seal period. It was all a visual creation of the spirit "signified to his servant John," that through this recorded rehearsal, might be shown to the fellowservants of the apostle, his brethren and companions in the Domitian tribulation, and in the kingdom and patient waiting for Jesus Christ ha dei genesthai en tachei, things which must come to pass speedily.

These honored "servants of the Deity," while John was in Patmos, shared with him in the great tribulation inflicted upon the whole community of the faithful at the close of the first century by the government of "the timid inhuman Domitian." This man was son of Vespasian, and brother of Titus, the renowned destroyers of the holy city and temple of the Jews. These had learned in the school of experience the value of reason, humanity, and justice in the government of mankind; and they accordingly exhibited a character which, in some of its parts, was still new on the throne previously occupied by Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero and Vitellius -- the character of wisdom, propriety, and humanity, assumed for its own sake, and without any intention to circumvent the people, or to impose on the world. But the fortunes of their family soon devolved upon a person equally unfit to sustain them, and equally unfit to be endured by a submissive world.

Domitian ascended the throne of the Caesars, A.D. 81; and, as a "destroyer of the earth," his tyranny was endured for fifteen years. The greatness of his family alarmed his pusillanimity, which could only be appeased by the blood of those Romans whom he either feared, or hated, or esteemed. His ferocity does not appear to have been inflamed against the christians immediately upon his accession to power. He increased in cruelty as he approached the end of his reign, when he renewed the horrors of Nero’s persecution, imputing to his victims the guilt of "atheism and Jewish manners," which was the common charge against christadelphians* on account of their refusal to worship the idols of Greece and Rome. "Many," says Dion, "were condemned who had embraced Jewish customs, part of them were put to death, and others spoiled of their goods and banished." Tertullian says, he ordered John to be cast into a caldron of boiling oil, but that he came out unhurt. If this really happened, it did not bring liberty to the apostle who was forthwith driven from the haunts of men, and confined in Patmos, a solitary island of the sea.

In this state of things at the close of Domitian’s maladministration of power, there was nothing answerable to the spirit’s symbolization of the first seal period. There was no whiteness in the situation nor the times for pagan, Jew, or Christadelphian. How much longer the tyrant should redden them with their own blood, and desolate their hearths with his fierceness, who could tell? A gloomy cloud was impending; and, as there was no habeas corpus for the defence of liberty, the lives and property of the whole people were suspended on the fiat of "the basest of men."    

* The word Christadelphian is used in this volume as representative of the real Brethren of Christ in contradistinction to the common herd of professors who undeservedly appropriated to themselves the name of christian, which has long since ceased to represent the believers of "the truth as it is in Jesus."