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Eureka

AN EXPOSITION OF THE APOCALYPSE
Sixth Edition, 1915
By Dr. John Thomas (first edition written 1861)

 

 

Chapter 8

Section 2 Subsection 1

"And there were Voices."


 
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The Angel of the Golden Altar, as we have seen, represents a community -- a community consisting of all the saints, with their Chief within the Veil, contemporary with the generation existing in the days of the silence, the voices, the thunders, the lightnings, and the earthquake. These saints were the sufferers by the persecutions of Constantine and his clergy; their prayers would therefore be for deliverance, and divine retribution upon the oppressor who was ruling them unrighteously with a rod of iron (xii. 5). "And shall not the Deity avenge his own elect, who cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you, said Jesus, that he will avenge them speedily" (Luke xviii. 7). This was verified in the instance of these saints. Before the half hour of silence was fully expired, their frankincense bowl was dramatically filled with fire of the sacrificial altar, and it was cast into the earth. This symbolic action indicates the nature of their prayers. Fire is the symbol of judgment against those upon whom it falls; and it was cast in answer to the prayers of all the saints; by which therefore we may know that they had been praying for the avengement of their wrongs upon the heads of their enemies.

It was dramatically cast out of the heaven into the earth. We have seen that the saints who constitute the tabernacle and its apparatus of worship, "dwell in the heaven"; because they constitute the holy and heavenly corporation. In relation to them, the Gentiles of the outside arena, or world, whether they be rulers or nations ruled, are "the earth" and "the inhabiters of the earth"; while these, in relation to affairs peculiarly heathen or gentile, have a heaven, and earth and sea special to themselves. The judicial fire being cast at the prayerful instance of "them who dwell in the heaven," it is represented as falling thence "into the earth," although it especially affected those who dwelt in that other heaven where the silence reigned. The saints did not dwell in this heaven. The Imperial Bishop of the Laodicean Apostasy, and his Hierarchy of Arian and Athanasian Priests, dwelt in the heaven out of which the Great Red Dragon had been cast, and from which silence was about to depart. The saints lived under this heaven, not in it; and were sun-stricken and scorched by the day-star of its firmament (vii. 16).

Voices were the first results of the Lamb’s response to the prayers of his saints. The offering of perfumes in the tabernacle being ended, the noise began in the court without. They were the voices of the Lamb rendering recompense to his enemies. On the twenty-second of May, A.D. 337, death terminated the life of Constantine, at the age of sixty-four. The demonstrations of mourning were excessive. His body, adorned with the vain symbols of greatness, the purple and diadem, was deposited on a golden bed, in an apartment of his palace at Constantinople, splendidly furnished and illuminated for the purpose. The forms of the court were strictly maintained. Every day, at the appointed hours, the principal officers of the state, the army, and the household, approaching the person of their dead emperor with bended knees and a composed countenance, offered their respectful homage as seriously as if he had been still alive! From motives of policy, this theatrical representation was for some time continued; and, in the language of Laodicean flattery, it was remarked that Constantine alone, by the peculiar indulgence of heaven, had reigned after his death.

But this reign could subsist only in empty pageantry, and therefore by the favor, not of heaven, but of fools and assassins; who, while they were performing their idolatrous antics before the corpse of their deceased sovereign, were intriguing against the welfare of his kindred. His ministers and generals conducted their intrigue with zeal and secrecy till they had obtained a loud and unanimous Voice from the soldiery, that they would suffer none except the sons of Constantine, to reign over the Roman empire. These military factions continued above four months; and, if they had proceeded no further than to make this loyal declaration, Constantine’s three sons, Constantius, Constantine and Constans, would have entered peaceably into the possession of the empire, and the silence in the heaven would have remained unbroken. But this was not the purpose of the Deity. His name had been blasphemed, His truth perverted, His worship superseded by theatricals, and His saints oppressed, and therefore vengeance must be executed upon the guilty. It was destined to begin in the heaven by putting an end to the silence there with a voice of the cry of shepherds, and a howling of the princes of the imperial house. Astonished and overwhelmed by the tide of popular fury, they remained without the power of flight, or of resistance, in the hands of their implacable enemies. Their fate, however, was suspended till the arrival of Constantius, who, according to Athanasius, made oath for the security of his kinsmen.

But the oaths of princes are mere matters of convenience. Having allayed their apprehensions by an imperial promise, his next business was to trump up some specious pretense by which he might release himself from its obligations. The arts of fraud were made subservient to the designs of cruelty; and a manifest forgery was attested by Eusebius, the catholic bishop of Nicomedia. He handed to Constantius a fatal scroll, affirmed to be the genuine testament of his father; in which the emperor expressed his suspicions that he had been poisoned by his brothers; and conjured his sons to avenge his death, and to consult their own safety by the punishment of the guilty. The spirit, and even the forms, of legal proceedings were violated in a promiscuous massacre; which involved the two uncles of Constantius, seven of his cousins, of whom Dalmatius and Hannibalianus were the most illustrious, the patrician Optatus, who had married the sister of the late emperor, and the praefect Ablavius, the proud favorite of Constantine, who had long directed his counsels and abused his confidence, and whose power and riches had inspired him with some hopes of obtaining the purple. "If it were necessary," says Gibbon, "to aggravate the horrors of this bloody scene, we might add, that Constantius himself had espoused the daughter of his uncle Julius, and that he had bestowed his sister in marriage on his cousin Hannibalianus. These alliances, which the policy of Constantine, regardless of the public prejudice, had formed between the several branches of the imperial house, served only to convince mankind, that these princes were as cold to the endearments of conjugal affection, as they were insensible to the ties of consanguinity, and the moving entreaties of youth and innocence. Of so numerous a family, Gallus and Julian alone, the two youngest children of Julius Constantius, were saved from the hands of the assassins, till their rage, satiated with slaughter, had in some measure subsided. The Emperor Constantius, who, in the absence of his brothers, was the most obnoxious to guilt and reproach, discovered, on some future occasions, a faint and transient remorse for those cruelties which the perfidious counsels of his ministers, and the irresistible violence of the troops, had extorted from his inexperienced youth."

The massacre of their kindred was succeeded by a division of the empire between the three brothers. Constantine, the eldest, ruled Gaul, Spain, and Britain; Constantius, Thrace, and the countries east; while Italy, Africa, and the Western Illyricum, acknowledged the sovereignty of Constans.

But, after this partition, three years had scarcely elapsed before these unnatural brothers seemed impatient to convince the world of their total unfitness for their position. Constantine soon complained with a voice of discontent, that he was defrauded of his just proportion of the spoils of their murdered kinsmen. He therefore demanded of Constans the cession of the African provinces, as an equivalent for Macedonia and Greece, which he had acquired by the death of Dalmatius. Constans’ want of sincerity in the negotiation which proved tedious and fruitless, exasperated the fierceness of his temper; and he eagerly listened to his favorites who suggested that both his honor and interest were concerned in the prosecution of the quarrel. At the head therefore of a tumultuary band, suited for rapine rather than for conquest, he suddenly broke into the dominions of Constans, who, on the voice of this invasion reaching his ears, detached some Illyrian troops against him. The conduct of his lieutenants soon terminated the unnatural contest. By artful appearances of flight, Constantine was betrayed into an ambuscade concealed in a wood, where, with a few attendants, he was surprised, surrounded, and slain.

The fate of Constans himself was delayed about ten years, and the revenge of his brother’s death was reserved for the more ignoble hand of a domestic traitor. The vices and weakness of Constans had lost him the esteem and affections of the people. The public discontent encouraged Magnentius, an ambitious soldier, to assert the honor of the Roman name. Aided by the friendship of Marcellinus, count of the sacred largesses, he was enabled to persuade the soldiery to break the bonds of hereditary servitude, and to salute him as emperor in the place of the degenerate Constans. In February of the year 350, Magnentius became master of the troops and treasure of the palace and city of Autun. The voice of the desertion of his soldiers and subjects, left no alternative to Constans but flight or instant death. He fled for a seaport in Spain, but ere he could reach it, he was overtaken near Helena at the foot of the Pyrenees, by a party of light cavalry, whose chief, regardless of the sanctity of a temple, executed his commission by putting him to death.

The usurpation of the sceptre of the West by a perfidious barbarian, excited the indignation of Nepotian, a rash youth, son of the princess Eutropia, and nephew of Constantine. Arming a number of desperate slaves and gladiators, he overpowered the feeble domestic guard of Rome, received the homage of the Senate, and assuming the title of Augustus, precariously reigned during a tumult of twenty-eight days. The march of some regular forces put an end to his ambitious hopes; the rebellion was extinguished in his blood, in that of his mother Eutropia, and of his adherents; and the proscription was extended to all who had contracted a fatal alliance with the name and family of "Constantine the Great."

Another voice that disturbed the tranquility of "the heaven" was the ferocious administration and tragical death of the Caesar, Gallus A.D. 354. Gallus, and his half-brother Julian, afterwards styled "the Apostate" by Arian and Trinitarian Laodiceans, were the two nephews of Constantine, who were saved from the fury of the catholic soldiery when they massacred his kindred. Gallus was then about twelve, and Julian about six, years of age. The jealousy of Constantius consigned them to the strong castle of Macellum, near Caesarea, an ancient palatial residence of the kings of Cappadocia. Carefully educated in the philosophy and science falsely so-called of the day, they passed six years of their existence there, deprived of fortune, of freedom, and of safety, in the company of slaves, devoted to the commands of a tyrant, who had already injured them in the murder of their kin beyond the hope of reconciliation. At length, however, the emergencies of the state compelled Constantius to invest him with the title and authority of Caesar, and to cement the political connection, to give him the princess Constantina, the cruel and ambitious daughter of Constantine, for wife. His residence was fixed at Antioch, from whence he ruled with delegated authority the eastern prefecture during three years; while his brother Julian obtained an appearance of liberty, and the restitution of an ample patrimony.

But he soon proved himself incapable of reigning. A temper naturally morose and violent, instead of being corrected, was soured by solitude and adversity; and the ungoverned sallies of his rage were often fatal to those who approached his person, or were subject to his power. Constantina, his wife, is described as one of the infernal furies tormented with an insatiate thirst of human blood. She exasperated the fierce passions of her husband whose cruelty was sometimes displayed in the undissembled violence of popular and military executions; and was sometimes disguised by the abuse of law, and the forms of judicial proceedings. A general consternation was diffused through the capital of Syria, the provinces, and among his own courtiers. But he forgot that he was depriving himself of his only support, the affection of the people; whilst he afforded the unnatural and timid emperor the fairest pretence of exacting the forfeit of his purple and of his life.

As long as the lightning of internal war was flashing between Constantius and Magnentius, the emperor dissembled his knowledge of the weak and cruel administration to which his choice had subjected the East. But when victory was decided in his favor, Constantius privately resolved, either to deprive Gallus of the purple, or at least to remove him from the indolent luxury of Asia to the hardships and dangers of a German war. Two ministers of illustrious rank, Domitian and Montius, were empowered to visit and reform the state of the East. The rashness of these commissioners hastened their own ruin, as well as the Caesar’s. Discarding all prudence, Domitian delivered a concise and haughty mandate, importing that the Caesar should immediately repair to Italy, and threatening that his delay or hesitation should be punished, by suspending the usual allowance of his household. Gallus replied to this by delivering Domitian to the custody of a guard. Upon this, Montius aggravated the situation by his reproaches; and by requiring the civil and military officers, in the name of their sovereign, to defend the persons and dignity of his representatives. By this rash declaration of war, Gallus was provoked to embrace the most desperate counsels. He ordered his guards to stand to their arms, and appealed to the populace for safety and revenge. His commands were fatally obeyed. They seized on Domitian and Montius, and tying their legs with ropes, dragged them through the streets of Antioch, and precipitated their mangled and lifeless bodies into the Orontes.

The arrest of Gallus in his capital from this voice appearing to be dangerous, the slower and safer policy of dissimulation was practised with success. He was deceived by the affected tranquility, and frequent epistolary professions of confidence and friendship from "the Head of the Church." After so many reciprocal injuries, Gallus had reason to fear and distrust. But he had neglected the opportunities of flight and of resistance; and being deprived of the credit of his wife by her unseasonable death, the ruin in which he had been involved by her impetuous passions was completed.

After a long delay, the reluctant Caesar set forwards on his journey to the imperial court. Having arrived at Hadrianople, he received a mandate, expressed in the most haughty and absolute style, that his splendid retinue should halt in that city, while the Caesar himself, should hasten to the imperial residence at Milan. The dissimulation which had hitherto been preserved, was laid aside at Petovio in Pannonia. He was conducted to a palace in the suburbs, where the general Barbatio awaited the arrival of his illustrious victim. In the evening, he was arrested, ignominiously stripped of the ensigns of Caesar, and hurried away to Pola in Istria. His horror was increased by the appearance of his implacable enemy the eunuch Eusebius, by whom, with the aid of a notary and tribune, he was interrogated concerning the administration of the East. Sunk under the weight of shame and guilt, he confessed everything with which he was charged. Constantius was easily convinced that his own safety was incompatible with the life of his cousin. The sentence of death was signed, despatched, and executed; and the nephew of the great Constantine, with his hands tied behind his back, was beheaded in prison like the vilest malefactor. Such were the VOICES by which silence was excluded from the heaven; and the family of "the First Christian Emperor" nearly exterminated from the earth! How true it is that "the seed of evil-doers shall not be renowned to the Olahm. Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers, that they may not rise, nor possess the earth, nor fill the face of the world with cities" (Isa. xiv. 20). This was said of Belshazzar in whose kindred it was verified, as it was afterwards so notably in Constantine’s. Constantius was the only one of them who died a natural death. Why was slaughter prepared for Constantine’s kindred? The only scriptural answer that can be given is that he was preeminently an evil-doer. He was the Antichrist of his day, the newly born Man-Child of Sin, and Son of Perdition; "who opposed and exalted himself above all that is called Power, or an object of veneration; so that he as a supreme power sat in the temple of the Power, showing himself that he is supreme." The bloody fate that befell his family by "the voices" is significant of the like consummation that awaits the family of Antichrist by the "lightnings, thunders, and voices" which are to "proceed out of the throne" at the approaching "apocalypse of the sons of the Deity." The sanguinary extermination of the modern family of the Antichrist, will be as complete as that of Constantine. The Voices of the Deity are terrific to all evil-doers. They spared Gallus and Julian in childhood; but when their characters were developed, and they proved themselves evil as their catholic fathers were, voices were uttered against them also, and they too were swept from among the living.
 

 

 


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