"And I heard a great voice out of the temple, saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. And the first went, and poured out his vial on the earth: and there broke out a noisome and evil ulcer on the men who had the mark of the beast, and on them that worshipped his image.” Apoc. 15:1–16:2.

Such was the introduction and commencement on the Apocalyptic scene before St. John, of the Vial-outpouring; that development of the primary contents of the seventh and last Trumpet of God’s judgments on an apostate world. They were spoken of in the heavenly song that hailed the seventh Trumpet’s sounding, as judgments “against those that destroyed or corrupted the earth.” Nor do I know any so clear classification of the figurations that depicted them, as that which is thereby suggested: the first of the Vials appearing to figure the spirit and principle of the judgment, as first set in action; the three next its continued operation against the apostate nations of Papal Anti-Christendom; the fifth, judgment against the very throne of the Beast, or Pope, the head of the long established antichristian apostasy; the sixth, judgment begun, and perhaps completed, against the Euphratean Turkman, and the poisonous and false Mahometan religion, associated with and headed by him.—I purpose therefore to make each of these divisions the subject of a separate Chapter: reserving for yet another Chapter the striking and contrasted symbol, (a symbol continued evidently through the whole æra of the Vials’ outpouring,) of “the temple of God appearing opened in heaven; “together with certain other symbols, and intimations, of the same character and bearing.

Let me however, before entering on the 1st Vial, make one or two introductory remarks, suggested by the immediate context of one of the Apocalyptic passages that heads my present Chapter, on the Vials generally, and on the four first Vials more in particular.

As regards then the particular symbol of the Vials, or Cups, I need scarcely, first, remind the Reader of the use of a similar symbol in other Scriptures, in designation of judgment. So in that notable passage, Psalm 75:8: “In the hand of the Lord is a cup, and the wine is red; it is full mixt, and He poureth out of the same: as for the dregs thereof, the ungodly of the earth shall wring them out and drink them.” So again in another equally notable, Jer. 25:15; “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel; Take the wine-cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations to whom I send thee to drink it: and they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad, because of the sword that I will send among them.” And, yet once more, in that similar passage Isaiah 51:22; “Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of my fury; thou shalt no more drink it again: but I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee.”—Further, secondly, I would observe that in the plagues themselves there is a manifest resemblance to the plagues of ancient Egypt,—its boils, darkness, frogs, and blood-converted rivers; with this implied difference only, that, as Papal Christendom was the figurative Egypt, so it would be visited apparently by plagues figuratively resembling the Egyptian ones.—As to the circumstance of new angelic agencies being now commissioned to be the executioners of judgment,4 in place of the four angels of the winds, it might perhaps (as before observed) betoken that these would be no more judgments of foreign invasion and aggression, but rather judgments of internal origin: while the Angels’ coming forth from the temple, habited as priests in pure white linen and with golden girdles, might not unfitly signify the special interposition of God’s providence in the matter; as done by agents standing before, and commissioned in, his immediate presence. Also the circumstance of one of the Living Creatures, the most eminent of the company of beatified saints in Paradise,2 giving to these Angels the Vials of God’s wrath, might partly indicate its being in vindication of the persecuted saints of former generations that the judgments were now to be poured out on the Roman earth; very much as in the case of God’s judgments on Jerusalem, and of those on Egypt, long before. But this is but conjectural.

2. As regards the four first Vials in particular, it will be well to remark the similarity in these four Vials to the four first Trumpets: a similarity which has been often noted, and is indeed too striking to escape the eye of a reader of any observation. More particularly the specified scene and subject of the successive vial-judgments was almost precisely the same in each case as those of the trumpet-judgments corresponding;—viz. the earth (i.e. Roman earth), the sea, the rivers and fountains of waters, and the sun. It is of course required by consistency that the same meaning be here attached to these phrases as before: that is, that the earth should be interpreted of the territorial state of Western Roman Christendom; the sea as including its maritime colonies or provinces; and the rivers and fountains as signifying its Alpine streams, and two great boundary rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, with their respective valleys; also the sun as the symbol of its royal and imperial ruling powers. Such accordingly will be the principle of my interpretation ensuing.—And let me take this opportunity of observing that if the solution of the four Vials on which we are now about to enter, as well as of the four Trumpets earlier discussed, be shown, as I think it will be, to answer on this same principle of interpretation to historic fact, that circumstance will constitute of itself the most satisfactory additional corroboration of the truth of the principle:—additional, I mean, to the arguments originally used to justify it.
This premised, I proceed without further delay to that which is the more proper subject of my present Chapter, viz.

THE FIRST VIAL

“The first Angel poured out his Vial on the earth: and there broke out a noisome and grievous ulcer (ἑλκος κακον και πονηρον) on the men which had the mark of the Beast, and on them that worshipped his image.”

The word ἑλκος, expressive of that in which the emphasis of this plague consisted, is used in Exodus 9:9, &c., of the boil that broke forth upon the Egyptians, on Moses sprinkling the ashes of the furnace: with reference to which, and to its becoming thenceforth probably a disease indigenous in Egypt, it was afterwards called by Moses “the botch of Egypt.”3 Besides which we find the word also used of the boil or scab of leprosy; of that with which Job was so sorely visited;2 of that by which Hezekiah was brought to the gates of the grave; and, once more, of the boils of Lazarus, as he lay at the rich man’s gate full of sores.4 From all which examples the painfulness and deadliness of the ulcers spoken of under this word in Scripture, and of the diseases connected with them, is evident.—As to the particular kind of ulcer here intended, considering that the land on which the infliction was to fall was spiritually or figuratively called Egypt, and that a general Egyptian character attaches, as was before observed, to the judgments of the Vials, we may perhaps reasonably suppose that which was specially the botch of Egypt (the sore or evil botch, as it is called by precisely the same epithet in the Book of Deuteronomy) to have been the prototype of the Apocalyptic figure. And this may not improbably be the modern plague-boil or ulcer. For we know by historic evidence that the plague was in a manner indigenous in, and characteristic, of Egypt; and moreover that its plague-boil or ulcer was both very painful, and otherwise well answered to the Egyptian boil described by Moses. Or perhaps, and indeed as probably, the botch meant may have been that of small-pox: for this it is which no mean authority has judged to be the true ancient plague and plague-boil of Egypt. Supposing either of which to be the sore of the Apocalyptic figure, we must add to its other characteristics of the noisome, the painful, and the loathsome, that also of being in a high degree infectious, or contagious.—Other solutions seem to me in the comparison less likely and suitable.3

Thus then, resolving the metaphor, and turning from the body natural in the figure to the body politic, (just as in the similar metaphor of Isaiah,) we seem bound to interpret the judgment of this Vial as some extraordinary outbreak of moral and social evil, the expression of deep-seated disease within, with raging pain and inflammation as its accompaniment,—disease of Egyptian origin perhaps, in the Apocalyptic sense of the word Egypt, and alike loathsome, deadly, self-corroding, and infectious,—that would arise somewhere in Papal Europe, shortly after the cessation of the Turkish woe, and on the sounding of what might answer to the seventh Trumpet’s blast; an evil too which would soon overspread and infect the countries of Papal Europe generally, and their inhabitants.—And, such being the force of the symbol, I explain it, in common with many other interpreters,2 to prefigure that tremendous outbreak of social and moral evil, of democratic fury, atheism, and vice, which was speedily seen to characterize the French Revolution:—that of which the ultimate source was in the long and deep-seated corruption and irreligion of the nation; its outward vent, expression, and organ in the Jacobin clubs, and their seditious and atheistic publications; its result, the dissolution of all society, all morals, and all religion: with acts of atrocity and horror accompanying, scarce paralleled in the history of man; and suffering and anguish of correspondent intensity throbbing throughout the whole social mass, and corroding it:—that which from France, as a centre, spread like a plague, through its affiliated societies, to the other countries of Papal Christendom; and proved, wherever its poison was imbibed, to be as much the punishment as the symptom of the corruption within.

I spoke of all this as having speedily characterized the French Revolution. For I wish it to be distinctly noted, that at first, and up to the memorable 4th of August inclusive, when, as before stated, an end was put to absolute monarchy and feudal oppressions in France, its character was by many altogether mistaken: indeed by not a few it was hailed as the harbinger of the triumph of liberty, and jubilee of deliverance to the oppressed in European Christendom. Even the fury of the populace, manifested just previously on the taking of the Bastile, did not quench the ardency of their sympathies and hopes: the destruction of the prison-house of a despotic monarchy being regarded as but the symbol of the destruction of despotism and tyranny itself.—But, speedily after this, the true character of an infidel democratic spirit in power exhibited itself, such as I have described it. First, on Aug. 18 came the National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, that Code of anarchy and revolution. Next, in the October of that same year, followed the atrocity of the night-assault by the Parisian mob on the palace at Versailles, the cold-blooded murder of two of the Royal bodyguards, ferocious attempt at murdering the Queen, and abduction of the King in bloody triumph to the capital;4 there to be, together with the National Assembly itself, under the surveillance and power of the sovereign democracy of Paris: then, in Jan. and April 1790, the parcelling out of France into provincial and municipal democracies, subordinate to the central one at Paris, and subjection to them of all power civil, judicial, and ecclesiastical:2 then, in the November following, the confiscation of all the church estates:—then, in 1791, under the Legislative Assembly, the speedy ascendancy to power of the Paris Jacobin Club, and numberless affiliated Jacobin provincial Associations; followed by the attack on the palace,4 massacre of the Swiss guard, imprisonment and dethronement of the King, and murder with demoniacal ferocity of some 5000 Royalists in the prisons:—then under the National Convention, or third National Assembly, the iniquitous trial, condemnation, and execution of the King, with the Queen’s soon following:7 then, in 1793, the declaration of war against Kings, and fraternization with Revolutionists all over the world: then the reign of terror under Robespierre,9 the revolutionary tribunal, and civil war and massacres in La Vendée and Lyons;11—massacres in the mass by shooting, drowning, or roasting alive, such as almost to pale the horrors of Corcyra itself, in the comparison:—then finally, with the threat of dethroning the King of Heaven, as well as kings of the earth, (so did the people rage,2 and take counsel against the Lord and against his anointed,) the public renunciation of Christianity and of God;4 followed by the worship of a prostitute as Goddess of Reason, with all the orgies of licentiousness accompanying, (a meet sign that morality, as well as mercy, had perished with religion,) the abolition of the Sabbath and of all religious emblems and worship, the proclamation of death being eternal sleep, and finally the procession at Lyons in mockery of Christianity:—in which last-mentioned procession, (I must just sketch the blasphemy,) an altar having been raised to an atheist democrat, a crucifix and gospel was burnt upon it, the consecrated bread trampled under feet of the mob, and an ass, which had been led about the city bearing the sacred vessels, compelled to drink of the sacramental wine out of the communion-cup.—Such was the development of the real character of the Revolution, as the National Convention settled it, and as the Directory three years after received, and handed it down to the first Consul, Napoleon. And, looking at the fever of infuriate passions that it sprang from, the horrid moral corruption that it both exposed and engendered, the heart-corroding sufferings caused by it, and the infectiousness by which it was its own propagator, with every wind, and in every country adjacent,—what could more fitly prefigure it than the Apocalyptic symbol of the men of Papal Anti-Christendom, as if plague-struck, breaking out all over with its corrupt, loathsome, contagious, eating ulcers? Truly, “the whole head was sick, the whole heart faint: from the sole of the foot even unto the head there was no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores.” As for bandage that might have bound up its miseries, or ointment to mollify them, it had in the madness of the paroxysms of the plague rejected and destroyed them all.—Such were the consequences of the nation’s rejecting God: such the first expression of his wrath, in answer to their wrath. He gave them up to their own reprobate minds.3 He left their passions to unchain themselves against their fellow-men; passions earthly, sensual, devilish. He said, “Ephraim hath joined himself to idols; let him alone!”5

It has been intimated that, as the literal evil ulcer was peculiarly an Egyptian plague, so it might seem that the symbolic ulcer of the Apocalypse was one originating somewhere in the symbolic Egypt; i.e. in some country of them that had the mark of the Beast and worshipped his Image:—and, as in a Roman Catholic country, so probably out of Roman Catholic principles. In precise accordance with this it may be shown that the source and first origin of the French revolutionary sore is traceable to the corruptions of the Papal religion itself, among the people and in the kingdoms, (France more especially,) where it was established. And I must beg to pause for a few moments to prove this. For the historic evidence will serve at once to illustrate the imagery of the text; and also to impress upon our minds, how on the scale of nations, as well as of individuals, apostasy from the faith contains within itself, in God’s righteous retributive providence, the principle and germ of its own punishment.

1. Thus, first, the infidelity and atheism, which acted so tremendous a part in the convulsions of the French Revolution, may be considered as both the child and nursling of the Papal system established in France:—its child, as having originated in no little measure from the revolting of man’s reason at the incredible dogmas propounded by it, and of man’s natural moral sense at the cruelties and oppression with which it enforced them;2—its nursling, as having been not only tolerated by it, in its earlier speculative and quiescent form, but even adopted by many of the most talented and literary of professing Roman Catholics, both lay and clerical. For the Jesuitism in power under Louis XIV, though it had persecuted and banished Protestantism,4 and persecuted and almost banished Jansenism, and the really spiritual, though nominally Catholic religion, as well of Fenelon2 as of Pascal, yet cared not to attack, and rather showed indulgence towards, the ingenious infidel speculations, and infidel spirit, of outward conformists.—But the infidelity thus cherished was not always to be merely speculative. So soon as it might have assured to itself complete security from penalty and punishment, so soon its innate hatred to the God of revelation, and to his blessed Gospel, was sure to impel it forward to assume the aggressive. This was quickly seen under the reign of Louis XV, next following. Secured from injury by the very circumstance of its long tolerance and large diffusion, the infidel philosophy collected its strength and venom: and, under Voltaire and other leaders, formed and carried on that celebrated and monstrous conspiracy, of which the object was the overthrow of all religion; the bitterness exprest in its very motto, “Crush the wretch,” meaning Christ and Christianity; and the organ atheistic schools, and cheap atheistic publications, everywhere diffused,6 with all the energy and perseverance of a master-passion: its most effective weapon and argument being the absurdities, hypocrisies, immoralities, cruelties, and wickedness of the Papal Church and religion, as if forsooth a fair representative of Christianity; and its success such that the whole literary, and almost the whole popular mind of France, became in the course of the 18th century fully tainted by it. And then when, at the outbreak of the Revolution,—all royal and legal power that might have controlled it having been overthrown,—it aimed its deadly blow against both the religious establishment in France, and religion itself, there was no popular voice or inclination to uphold the one or the other. And first the Papal priesthood, the official leaders in the worship of the Beast and his image, had to experience all the bitterness of privation, contempt, and suffering: and then the nation also,—above all, its nobles and gentry, so long a chief support to the priesthood in the Papal worship,—had to feel throughout its whole body politic the throbbing agonies consequent on the dominancy of a ferocious and relentless atheism.

2. The moral licentiousness, which aggravated so greatly the horrors of the Revolution, is also traceable, and yet more directly, to the Papal Jesuit system received and established by Louis XIV in France. For what were the principles of morality inculcated by them under his reign, in their books on ethics and in the confessional? I cite but two: first, “That the transgressions committed by a person blinded by the seduction of lust, agitated by the impulse of tumultuous passions, and destitute of all sense and impression of religion, however detestable and heinous in themselves, are not imputable to the transgressor before the tribunal of God:” secondly, “That those persons may transgress with safety who have a probable reason for transgressing; that is, any plausible argument or authority in favour of the sin they are inclined to commit.” Who can wonder, when such was the morality of their very religion, at the licentiousness of Louis XIV himself, religious bigot though he was, and of his court and nobles? Nor did it, nor could it, stop there. As no counteracting influence arose to arrest it, but rather it was fostered by the rising infidelity,2 the evil only increased in the reigns succeeding. “The conduct of the Regent Duke of Orleans and his minions,” says Sir Walter Scott, “was marked with open infamy, deep enough to have called down in the age of miracles an immediate judgment from heaven: and crimes, which the worst of the Roman Emperors would have at least hidden in the solitary isle of Caprea, were acted as publicly as if men had no eyes, and God had no thunderbolts.” He adds; “From this filthy Cocytus flowed those streams of impurity which disgraced France during the reign of Louis XV, and which continued in that of Louis XVI to affect society, morals, and literature.”—Such was the state of French morals, and so originated, at the time of the outbreak of the Revolution. And indeed it is remarkable that the very derangement of the national finances, which was the primary cause that necessitated the convocation of the revolutionary States General, had arisen in no little measure from this cause.5 But what I here wish chiefly to impress on the reader is, that when the Revolution broke out, the vitiation of the moral sense of the nation, thus accomplished, prepared them for the flood of the yet fouler impurity which then inundated all society in France; and thereby (all the sacred and humanizing domestic ties having been thus confounded) for those brutal ferocities which were acted out at the same time, and which were but indeed the natural accompaniments of such brutal licentiousness.

3. The democratic regicidal principle itself of the Revolution was precisely that which had been previously advocated, and acted on, by both Papal Jesuits and other Papists in France, lay and clerical, against the Protestants.—So long as the kings of Christendom remained faithful to the Papacy, there was of course no need of recurrence on its part to any but the monarchical principle. But after the Reformation, when many monarchs had revolted from the Popedom,—when, besides the Protestant German princes, the revolt had affected royalty in England, where Queen Elizabeth had been even declared Head (that is, temporal Head) of the Church, and in France Henry the Third, the ruling monarch, was apparently a favourer of the Hugonots, and Henry of Navarre, the heir presumptive, a Hugonot himself,—other political principles seemed expedient at Rome, and were accordingly promulgated and acted upon. By the highest ecclesiastical authorities, both there and in France, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people was asserted. It was laid down that the supreme temporal power was placed by God in their hands; and that they thus retained an indefeasible right to alter the forms of Government, resume the sovereignty, and dethrone (some said even to execute) a king, for violation of his duties. So the Romish canonist Bellarmine; so the whole body of the Jesuits; so, A.D. 1587 and 1589, in solemn enthusiastic and twice repeated declaration, the French doctors of the Sorbonne.—And then mark the manner in which in that “most Christian” kingdom, the first-born of the Papacy, this doctrine was at once, on the occasion I refer to, carried out into action. (Let me beg attention to the details: they well deserve it.) First the French citizens were stirred up by preachers everywhere, to unite in league against the half-heretical king and government; a solemn oath of devotion to the popular Papal cause, even unto blood, administered and taken; and in Paris all the sixteen sections of the city organized, with a view to insurrection, by secret clubs and committees:—the primary one meeting in a monk’s cell in the Sorbonne; and delegates from the Provincial towns (as from Orleans, Lyons, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Rouen) being admitted to the union, all similarly sworn to tolerate not a Hugonot in France, and to remove the abuses of the government. So the mine was prepared: and, on the King ordering the Swiss troops to enter Paris, it exploded. The town was barricaded, the Swiss driven back, the Bastille and Hotel de Ville seized on, the Louvre threatened, King Henry III compelled to take flight, and in a little while assassinated by the monk Clement, with the full sanction and approval of the Papists;—just as Henry IV, a few years after, by another Jesuit fanatic, Ravaillac.—Might not one almost fancy that we were reading in all this (a few names and dates only having to be corrected) of the proceedings in Paris on the great modern Revolution?—It was in August 1589 that the assassination of Henry III, as an anti-Papal king, followed on the outbreak of democratic Jesuit clubs at Paris, under Papal sanction and direction. It was in 1789, just 200 years after, that the democratic outbreak exploded, in association with Jacobin clubs in Paris and the provinces, against a Papal King, Papal Church, and Papacy itself in France; an outbreak ending in that same King’s murder. And, as if to mark the connexion and parallelism, in respect of principle and character, of the two transactions, the Jacobin club whence the regicide measure originated, had the pictures of Clement and Ravaillac hung up in the gloomy conventual Church of the Dominicans that they assembled in; as the models avowedly looked to by them, to admire and to imitate.

4. Yet once more, in regard to the atrocities and cruelties practised on principle against the French Papal priests, and their aristocratic and other adherents at the Revolution, it is to be observed that precedents were but copied therein of similar atrocities practised in earlier days by the Papal clergy, Papal king, and Papal nobles of France, against their unoffending Protestant brethren. These precedents were in fact remembered, and held out to public notice and execration, at the time. It is mentioned by Burke that the ancient chronicles were searched and cited by the revolutionary leaders for instances of the cruelty of the Popish clergy in other days against those whom they called heretics: and that, more especially, the horrid Hugonot massacre of St. Bartholomew’s day2 was represented in the theatre; the Cardinal de Lorraine, in his robes of function, being depicted on the stage as the chief actor and instigator.—Nor was it in vain. At Paris, (witness especially the Septembrist massacres in the prisons,4) at Lyons, in La Vendée, and elsewhere, the examples thus set before them were copied too faithfully:—copied by a populace again “drunk with fanaticism;” only not, as once, that of Popery, but of Atheism; not, as once, against Protestant fellow-citizens, but against Papists. The shootings, the drownings, the roastings of the Roman Catholic loyalists, both priests and nobles, (not to speak of other injuries great, yet less atrocious,) had all their prototypes in the barbarities of another age, practised under the direction of the Popes and French Papists, both priests and nobles, against their innocent Hugonot fellow-countrymen.

Thus, if the Apocalyptic figure of a noisome and grievous sore indicated the outbreak into painful ulceration of corruptions previously existing in the body politic of them that worshipped the Beast’s image and bore his mark, the figure was fulfilled in the facts of the French Revolution. Whether we consider the horrors and sufferings arising out of the national atheism, licentiousness, revolutionary democratism, or bloodthirstiness of spirit then exhibited, they were but the evolution into violent action of the corrupt principles, religious, moral, social, and political, existent long before in the nation; and which had been indeed in no little measure infused and cherished, as a part of Rome’s religious system, by the Papal Beast that it worshipped.
So first and specially in France. But, though the outbreak of the evil was first and chiefly in France, that “most Christian” of the ten Papal kingdoms, yet the infidel democratic plague-fever spread speedily to other kingdoms, and its noisome sore broke out there also. It has been noted, both by Burke at the time and by historians subsequently, how the distemper spread, by means of its revolutionary newspapers and affiliated Jacobin clubs, into Savoy and Switzerland, Italy and Germany, the countries of the Rhine, Belgium, Spain, and even Holland and England. In England, through God’s great mercy, the true and scriptural religion professed and established in its reformed church, was made the means of repelling and (for a time at least) almost expelling the mischief. In the countries of the Popedom however, (that is, distinctively, in the countries specially marked out as the objects of the first Apocalyptic Vial,)2 it so rooted itself as to be like a plague afflicting them:—the plague alike of irreligion, and of a revolutionary spirit in the breasts of the lower classes against the higher; which prepared everywhere, as will soon appear, for the Gallic sword to follow it.

And thus we are led onward. In the Apocalyptic Vial-outpourings one quickly followed another: and scarce had the noisome ulcer of the first Vial developed its earliest malignity in France, and begun to taint with its contagion the states conterminous, when other Vials of wrath,—a second, third, and fourth,—involving fearful judgments of war and bloodshed, by sea and by land, succeeded.—How could it be otherwise? The malignant spirit of the first Vial had a fury of propagandism in itself, like as if the frenzy of the madman (the οργη following the ἑλκος) was on him that had the plague and its lazar-sores. As well might the smoke of Mahommedism from the abyss fail of sending forth its locust-like fanatics to propagate it,2 as the infidel democratic fanaticism of the Revolution. “The first burst of popular fury,” says Alison, “was followed by an ardent and universal passion for arms.”4 And again; “Thus commenced the greatest and most bloody … war which has agitated mankind, since the fall of the Roman empire;” and one too of unequalled “general exasperation.” The “infernal energies of the destroying principle” were, in God’s righteous judgment, to be manifested before men:2—that principle which, as Alison elsewhere says, “was destined to convulse the globe.”


Elliott, E. B. (1862). Horæ Apocalypticæ; or, A Commentary on the Apocalypse, Critical and Historical (Fifth Edition, Vol. 3, pp. 352–376). Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday.