the Church of the corrupt Latin Empire: so, by all commentators, the figurative vintage is acknowledged to denote the final overthrow and destruction of the Roman beast and his false ecclesiastical prophet in the battle of Armageddon, which takes place under the seventh vial. But the general conversion of the Gentiles and the gathering of all nations into the millennian Church succeeds the overthrow of the antichristian faction and the judg ment of the vine or apostate Church of the Roman earth; which overthrow, and which judgment, by removing every obstacle, do, in fact, prepare the way for the universal reception of the pure Gospel. Hence it is plain, that an event, which succeeds the figurative vintage, cannot be intended by that allegorical harvest of the earth which is described as preceding it.

Thus I think it manifest, that the harvest, occurring as it does during the effusion of the seventh vial, that is to say, occurring, not in a season of grace and mercy, but during the infliction of an eminent plague, can only mean a harvest of judgment for any other interpretation is no less incongruous with the declared object of the seventh vial, than it is irreconcileable with prophetic chronology 3.

1

3

See above book i. chap. 1. § II. 5. (3.)

Rev. xix. 11–21.

It may not be improper to observe, that this inauspicious sense of a figurative harvest is that which is adopted by the ancient onirocritics. Achmetes remarks: 'Ear in i Barideve χώραν θεριζομένην ἢ θερισθεῖσαν, καὶ ἐλογίζετο οἰκείαν εἶναι

2. The poetical imagery of the harvest and the vintage, as is the case almost universally with the apocalyptic imagery, is borrowed from the ancient Hebrew prophets: to their writings, therefore, we must have recourse for the due elucidation of it.

On adverting, then, to the ancient prophets, we find, that a great judgment about to befall Babylon, which city is the constant apocalyptic type of the Roman Church and Empire, is by Jeremiah expressly termed a harvest. In the use, indeed, of the figure, there is this difference between Jeremiah and St. John; that the one dwells upon the last process of the harvest or the threshing, while the other selects the imagery of the first process or the reaping yet the context of both passages sufficiently shews, that a harvest, not of mercy, but of judgment, is intended.

After a similar manner, the final destruction of God's enemies by the victorious Messiah, which St. John describes under the figure of a vintage, had been long previously described, under the very same figure, by the prophet Isaiah, in a sublime passage, which exhibits the Lord as coming with died garments from Bozrah, after he had indignantly trodden the bloody wine-press of the mystical Edom 2.

αὐτὴν, ἀκούσεται ταχέως σφαγὴν τοῦ λαοῦ αὐτοῦ. If a king shall behold a country reaping or reaped, and shall understand it to be his own country, he shall quickly hear of the slaughter of his people.

1 Jerem. li. 33.

2 Isaiah lxiii. 1-6.

According to what I deem the just interpretation of the Rabbins, the Edom of this august vision is the Roman Empire. Hence, as they rightly suppose, it relates to the same great catastrophè, as that of the ten-horned beast with his little horn foretold by Daniel and that catastrophè, a Christian may add, is no other than the overthrow of the ten-horned beast with the false prophet and the kings of the earth, predicted by St. John both in express words and under the figure of a dreadful vintage'.

But the vision, which the apocalyptic prophet had specially in his eye when he selected such imagery, was doubtless that of Joel. This sublime bard, foretelling the same ultimate destruction of the antichristian confederacy which both Isaiah and St. John dwell upon with such vivid energy, and pronouncing it like Daniel and every other ancient prophet to synchronise with the restoration of Judah, uses, in one continued prediction, precisely after the manner adopted in the Apocalypse, the two-fold figure of a successive harvest and vintage of judgment, to describe and to heighten the horrors of that dreadful period. Now, as no prophecy is of its own insulated interpretation 3, and as Joel clearly predicts those identical events which St. John arranges under the seventh vial: there can be no reasonable doubt, that the harvest and the

3

'See Mede's Works, book v. chap. 8. p. 902, 903.

2 Joel ii. 30-32. iii. 1-17.

• Πάσα προφητεία γραφῆς ἸΔΙΑΣ ἐπιλύσεως οὐ γίνεται. 2 Pet. i. 20.

vintage of the one are the very same as the harvest and the vintage of the other. But, in the vision of Joel, they equally though successively relate to God's last great controversy with his irreclaimable enemies. Therefore, in the vision of St. John, they must equally though successively relate to the same grand catastrophè.

3. Since the whole of this prophecy relates to matters concealed as yet in the womb of futurity, it would be idle to say any thing definite or circumstantially precise on the subject. We can only pronounce, therefore, in general terms, that, since the figurative harvest is distinguished from the figurative vintage, and since the natural harvest precedes the natural vintage; the figurative harvest. must be some eminent judgment or calamity which occurs at the beginning of the time of the end or at the commencement of the seventh vial, while the figurative vintage must be the concluding judgment or calamity which occurs at the close of that period.

1

(1.) According to the account which Daniel gives of the time of the end, a war, between the wilful Roman king on the one hand and the kings of the South and the North on the other hand, is the first calamitous event, by which that time is marked': and, according to the account which St. John gives of the seventh vial which synchronises with the time of the end, this war must be identified with the

'Dan. xi. 40.

voices and thunders and lightnings and hail, which, at its effusion, begin to operate '.

Hence it seems most probable, that by the harvest we are to understand this desolating war, which, although but the beginning of the last troubles, will in its progress mow down vast multitudes of God's enemies, and will occasion a high degree of misery throughout the apostate Roman Empire. (2.) But, whatever may be intended by the harvest, there is no difficulty in ascertaining the event intended by the vintage.

As all commentators are agreed, this closing judgment can only mean the final destruction of the Roman beast with the false prophet and the confederated kings of the earth in the battle of Armageddon: and this final destruction corresponds with the parallel final destruction of the wilful Roman king; who will, at that time, act as the then revived, though now defunct, seventh head of the Roman Empire.

Rev. xvi. 18, 21.