Thus closes the vision of the trumpets. They represent the messengers whom God employs to call men to repentance, the methods he avails himself of to forward the kingdom within and without us. He will not cease to strive with us until every appeal likely to reach us has been tried. When nature and the supernatural, the word of God in providence and the richer word of God in revelation, have exerted their power the resources of the divine Being have been, we may with all reverence say, exhausted, and the time is ripe for the closing of the drama of probation, that he which is righteous may be righteous still, and he which is filthy may be filthy still. Yet the writer of the Revelation does not allow us to remain in doubt as to the result of God’s efforts to save a lost world. The wisdom of God is not astray. “He will rest in his love.” He has himself absolute confidence in the success of the plans of redemption. When the _seventh_ and last trumpet shall sound the curtain will fall upon a world restored to God, upon a paradise regained, and great voices in heaven shall say, “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign forever and ever.” PART IV The Foes of the Kingdom PART IV =The Foes of the Kingdom= WITH chapter xii another section of the Apocalypse begins. Two great truths relating to the kingdom of Christ have been discussed――the fundamental principle of mediatorial sovereignty upon which it is based, and the instruments, providence and the written word, by which it is advanced. It follows very naturally and logically that the antagonists by whom the kingdom is opposed should also be disclosed to us. Out of his abundant grace and in tender compassion for human ignorance, God has made known to us, through this marvelous book, the adversaries with whom we must contend before the kingdom can attain its consummation in our hearts or in the world at large. While no part of the Revelation is easy of interpretation, or can be made intelligible without very careful study both of itself and of the whole Bible, there has been added to this part of it the embarrassment of the _odium theologicum_. Bitter controversial strifes have raged around the interpretation of it and have raised a cloud of prejudices, through which the truth has been sometimes dimly seen. From all such prejudices we must free ourselves. We are approaching holy ground, and it behooves us to put off our shoes, that nothing of human invention may intervene between our naked feet and the sacred floor of God’s temple.