This symbol is in the tenth chapter evidently distinguished from the one
in the fifth chapter. It is considered by several interpreters as
containing all that follows to the end of the book. According to this
view, it would be larger than the sealed book, (ch. v. 1.) Such a view
is altogether untenable, involving, as it does, almost a palpable
contradiction. The little book is indeed comprehended in the sealed
book, as a part of the whole; or it may be viewed as an appendix or
codicil, or perhaps still more correctly as a _parenthesis_,
interrupting the series of the trumpets, that the object of the seventh
or last woe-trumpet maybe thus described and rendered intelligible when
sounded.
Mr. Faber is correct in saying, "the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and
fourteenth chapters, in point of chronology run parallel to each other;"
but he is mistaken when he says the "little book comprehends these four
chapters." It comprehends only so much as intervenes between the close
of the ninth chapter and the fifteenth verse of the eleventh chapter;
or, in other words, between the sounding of the sixth and seventh
trumpet. To be more correct and explicit,--the tenth chapter introduces
the little book, and the eleventh chapter, from the first to the
fourteenth verse inclusive, exhibits an abstract of its contents,--a
condensed narrative or mere outline of the contest during the 1260
years.
THE DEATH OF THE WITNESSES.
Many divines have considered the death of the two witnesses, as
consisting in a moral slaying, equivalent to apostacy. Mr. Faber views
their life and death as altogether political. He censures Mr. Galloway
for "want of strict adherence to _unity of symbolical_ interpretation,"
but he inadvertently falls into the same error. Assuming, as he does,
that the two witnesses are the Old and New Testament _Churches_, where
is the "unity of symbolical interpretation" when he tells us that the
witnesses were politically slain in the "disastrous battle of Mulburgh
in the year 1547, by the total route of the protestants under the lead
of the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse?" The _political_
death of two churches in the battle of Mulburgh!--Such language
exemplifies neither the accuracy of historic narrative, nor the "unity
of symbolical interpretation:" nor does it accord with another rule of
the writer, one of his three cardinal rules, namely,--That "no
interpretation of a prophecy is valid, except the prophecy agree _in
every particular_ with the event to which it is supposed to relate."
Mistaking the character of the witnesses, as one of the primary symbols
in the Apocalypse, he is unable to ascertain in history either their
identity or work, their life or their death. Having imagined their
political death in 1547, he supposes their resurrection to political
life in 1550,--"by the accession of Edward the Sixth to the throne of
England!" and "the defeat of the Duke of Mecklenburgh in the October of
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