But it is urged that these souls must be conscious; for they cry to God. How easily our expositors forget that language has any literal use, when they wish it to be figurative, or that it is ever used as a figure, when they wish it to be literal. There is supposed to be such a figure of speech as personification, in which, under certain conditions, life, action, and intelligence, are attributed to inanimate objects. Thus the blood of Abel is said to have cried to God from the ground. Gen. 4:9, 10. The stone cried out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber answered it. Hab. 2:11. The hire of the laborers, kept back by fraud, cried; and the cry entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. James 5:4. So these souls could cry, in the same sense, and yet be no more conscious than Abel’s blood, the stone, the beam, or the laborer’s hire. So incongruous is the popular view that Albert Barnes makes haste to set himself right on the record as follows:-- “We are not to suppose that this _literally_ occurred, and that John actually saw the souls of the martyrs beneath the altar--for the whole representation is symbolical; nor are we to suppose that the injured and the wronged in Heaven actually pray for vengeance on those who wronged them, or that the redeemed in Heaven will continue to pray with reference to things on the earth; but it may be fairly inferred from this that there will be _as real_ a remembrance of the wrongs of the persecuted, the injured, and the oppressed, _as if_ such a prayer was offered there; and that the oppressor has as much to dread from the divine vengeance, _as if_ those whom he has injured should cry in Heaven to the God who hears prayer, and who takes vengeance.”--_Notes on Rev. 6._ But it is said that white robes were given them; hence it is further urged that they must be conscious. But this no more follows than it does from the fact that they cried. How was it? They had gone down to the grave in the most ignominious manner. Their lives had been misrepresented, their reputations tarnished, their names defamed, their motives maligned, and their graves covered with shame and reproach, as containing the dishonored dust of the most vile and despicable characters. Thus the church of Rome, which then molded the sentiments of the principal nations of the earth, spared no pains to make her victims an abhorring unto all flesh.