Thumbnail image

Last Updated on : Saturday, November 22, 2014

 


sp

DOWNLOAD EUREKA volumes in PDF: Eureka downloads page

Eureka vol. 1 TOC | Eureka vol. 2 TOC | Eureka vol 3 TOC

Previous section | Next section

 

Eureka

AN EXPOSITION OF THE APOCALYPSE
Sixth Edition, 1915
By Dr. John Thomas (first edition written 1861)

 

 

Chapter 6

Section 3 Subsection 6

Fulfilment of the Prophecy


 
spacer

 

The declining health and last illness of S. Severus, inflamed the wild ambition, and black and blackening passions of Caracalla. He attempted, more than once, to shorten Severus’ life, and with as little success, to excite a mutiny among the troops. Severus deliberated, and threatened, but was too fondly parental to punish his son and colleague in the throne; and this last, and only instance of mercy he was ever guilty of, was more fatal to the empire than a long series of cruelty. At length he expired at York in Britain, A.D. 211, leaving his two mutually detesting and impetuous sons, Caracalla and Geta, the imperial chiefs of the Roman world.

Proclaimed by the army and cheerfully acknowledged by the Senate, the people, and the provinces, the two brothers commenced their reign, with equal and independent power. But they were implacable foes, who neither desired nor could trust a reconciliation. It was visible that only one could reign, and that the other must fall; and each of them judging of his rival’s designs by his own, guarded his life with the most jealous vigilance from the repeated attacks of poison or the sword. They met only in public; and each surrounded by a numerous train of armed followers. Even on these occasions of ceremony, the dissimulation of courts could ill disguise the rancour of their hearts.

This latent civil war already distracted the whole government. To remedy this, it was proposed to divide the empire between them. But this scheme was defeated by the influence of their mother; and Caracalla got rid of Geta by an easier, though more sanguinary process. He artfully listened to his mother’s entreaties and consented to meet his brother Geta in her apartment, on terms of peace and reconciliation. In the midst of their conversation, some centurions, who had contrived to secret themselves, rushed with drawn swords upon him, and laid him lifeless at his mother’s feet. The deed accomplished, Caracalla, rushed with horror on his countenance, to the praetorian camp, where he reported in broken and disordered words, his fortunate escape from attempted assassination. Geta had been the favorite of the soldiers, but complaint was useless, revenge dangerous, and they had still a reverence for the house of their "great machaira," Severus. Their discontent died away in idle murmurs, and Caracalla soon convinced them of the justice of his cause, by distributing to them in one lavish donation the accumulated treasures of his father’s reign. The real sentiments of the soldiers alone were of importance to his power or safety. Their declaration in his favor commanded the dutiful professions of the Senate, which obsequiously ratified as usual the success of villany the most lawless and abandoned.

The anguish of remorse henceforth seized upon the haunted imagination of Caracalla, which prompted him to remove from the world whatever could remind him of the fratricide, or recall the memory of Geta. Seeing the empress Julia, his mother, in a company of matrons, weeping over his untimely fate, he threatened them with instant death; the sentence was executed against Fadilla, the last remaining daughter of Marcus Antoninus, the imperial stoick, and sanguinary persecutor of the christians, under the first seal. It was computed, that under the vague appellation of the friends of Geta, above twenty thousand persons of both sexes suffered death. His guards and freedmen, the ministers of his serious business, and the companions of his looser hours, those who by his interest had been promoted to any commands in the army or provinces, with the long connected chain of their dependants, were included in the proscription; which endeavored to reach every one who had maintained the smallest correspondence with Geta, who lamented his death, or who even mentioned his name. The particular causes of calumny and suspicion were at length exhausted; and when a senator was accused of being a secret enemy of the government, Caracalla was satisfied with the general proof that he was a man of probity and virtue. From this well-grounded principle he frequently drew the most sanguinary inferences.

Such was the opening of the third seal, A.D. 212. Through the mad ferocity of one of the basest of mankind, retribution fell upon the heads of a people, who in their public pastimes clamored for inoffensive and non-resisting professors of the christian faith, to be brought out of prison to fight with savage beasts in the amphitheatres for their amusement. It is a remarkable fact, and deserves to be noted, that while this monster of wickedness was filling the families of pagans with lamentation, mourning and woe, christians found in him friendship and protection. His father Severus, we have seen, was a cruel persecutor; but in this soil of iniquity, arose an avenger, who rendered the heathen public BLACK with mourning and distress. The education of Caracalla is said to account for his favor towards them. He had known Proculus his father’s physician, who was a christian, if not a christadelphian, and maintained in the palace to his death; and he had himself been nursed by a professed christian woman. This gave him an early predilection in favor of the christians, insomuch that when he was seven years old, observing one of his playfellows to be beaten because he followed the christian religion, he could not for some time after behold with patience either his own father, or the father of the boy.

The tyranny of Tiberius, Nero, and Domitian, who resided almost constantly at Rome, or in the adjacent villas, fell principally upon the senatorial and equestrian orders. But Caracalla was the common enemy of his heathen subjects. He left the capital, and never returned to it, A.D. 213. The rest of his reign was spent in the several provinces of the empire, particularly those of the East, and every province was by turns made black by rapine and cruelty. The senators, compelled by fear to attend his capricious motions, were obliged to provide daily entertainments at an immense expense, which he abandoned with contempt to his guards; and to erect in every city, magnificent palaces and theatres, which he either disdained to visit, or ordered to be immediately thrown down. The most wealthy families were ruined by partial fines and confiscations and the great body of his subjects oppressed by ingenious and aggravated taxes. In the midst of peace, and upon the slightest provocation, he issued his commands at Alexandria in Egypt, the seat of paganized christianity, and where in his father’s reign so much blood of professing christians had been shed, for a general massacre. From a secure post in the temple of Serapes, he viewed and directed the slaughter of many thousands of citizens, as well as strangers, without distinguishing either the number or the crime of the sufferers; since, as he coolly informed the Senate, all the Alexandrians, those who had perished, and those who had escaped, were alike guilty -- guilty of slaying the disciples of the Lamb; and therefore in opening the third seal, the Lamb retributively gave them blood to drink; and made the survivors, black with lamentation and distress; so fearful a thing is it to tamper with the truth, and to persecute its friends. Sooner or later, terrible vengeance overtakes the guilty, even by the wicked, who are the Deity’s sword-bearers against all such evil-doers.

As long as the vices of Caracalla were beneficial to the armies, he was secure from the danger of rebellion. A secret conspiracy, however, provoked by his own jealousy, caused his assassination, and the election of the chief conspirator as his successor. The grateful soldiers forgot his vices, remembered only his liberality to them, and obliged the Senate to stultify itself and their superstition, by decreeing him a place among the gods. While living, Alexander the Great was the only hero which this "god" deemed worthy of his admiration; but in no one action of his life did Caracalla express the faintest resemblance to him, except in the murder of a great number of his own and of his father’s friends.

His extraordinary gifts to the army amounted annually to about two millions three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, or about 11,750,000 dollars. The prodigality of Caracalla left behind it a long train of ruin and disorder. But the policy of the house of Severus was to increase the dangerous power of the army, and to obliterate the faint image of laws and liberty that was still impressed on the public mind. In pursuing this policy, Severus and his son undermined the foundations of the empire, and hastened its decline. An important edict of Antoninus Caracalla, which communicated to all the inhabitants of the empire the name and privilege of Roman citizens, greatly contributed to this. This edict made the limits of the city Rome, and the limits of the empire, the same. His unbounded liberality, however, flowed not from the sentiments of a generous mind; it was the sordid result of avarice. Inattention, or rather, averse to the welfare of his subjects, he found himself under the necessity of gratifying the insatiate avarice which he had excited in the army. The favor of citzenship was lost in the prodigality of Caracalla, and the reluctant provincials were compelled to assume the vain title, and the real obligations of Roman citizens. Nor was the rapacious Caracalla contented with such a measure of taxation, as had appeared sufficient to his predecessors. Instead of a twentieth, he exacted a tenth, a denariad of all legacies and inheritances; and during his reign he crushed alike every part of the empire under the weight of his iron sceptre. The new citizenship brought with it only an increase of burdens. The old as well as the new taxes were, at the same time, levied in the provinces. This was an intolerable grievance, which found only a temporary remission in the reign of Alexander Severus, who reduced the tributes to a thirtieth part of the sum exacted at the time of his accession. "In the course of this history," says Gibbon, from whose work I have condensed as before, "we shall be too often summoned to explain the land-tax, the capitation, and the heavy contributions of grain, wine, oil, and meat, which were exacted from the provinces for the use of the court, the army, and the capital." Caracalla supplied the necessities of these insatiable consumers without any regard to the blackening effect produced upon the unhappy civilians, from whom the supplies were so oppressively obtained.

Caracalla was assassinated A.D. 217, after a reign of six years; and was succeeded by Macrinus, at whose instigation he was stabbed by a desperado, to whom he had refused the rank of centurion.

The reader will, perhaps, now be able to "see" the historical significance of the hieroglyphical "opening" and "voice" of this seal-period; and how, by the sanguinary and fiscal oppression of the rulers, the horse-people whom they rode, were made black with anguish and despair. The mad career of Caracalla, however, was only the opening sorrows of this third seal. He had sown tares which bore much evil fruit in the reigns of his successors. Macrinus, who had procured his assassination, was proclaimed by the praetorian guards, whom he had bribed by promises of unbounded liberality of indulgence, the head of the empire. Macrinus had now reached a height where it was difficult to stand with firmness, and impossible to fall without instant destruction. The mercenary and fickle loyalty of the soldiery, to whom, from his reforming tendencies, he soon became detestible, was his only support. But the necessity of financial reform was inevitable. The expenses of the government had to be reduced; and he might have succeeded if the numerous army assembled in the East by Caracalla, and which had made him emperor, had been immediately dispersed through the provinces. But they remained concentrated in the luxurious idleness of their quarters; where, from various causes, they soon became ripe for another revolution, by which they might recruit their exhausted treasure. To minds thus disposed, the occasion soon presented itself.

A new candidate for the honor and danger of the imperial balance-holder appeared in a pretended son of Caracalla, the high priest of the sun, at Emesa, in Syria. The soldiers accustomed to attend his ministrations, professed to recognize in his the features of Caracalla, whose memory they now adored. His emissaries distributed large sums among them with a lavish hand, which silenced every objection, and they declared the young pontiff the successor of Caracalla, by hereditary right, and their own good pleasure. Macrinus remained inactive at Antioch. At length he went forth to encounter the forces of the young pretender. But, he was defeated and fled, and a few days after slain by his own guards.

Having been elected by the military, A.D. 218, Elagabalus, the high priest of the sun and the first Asiatic emperor of the Romans, without consulting the Senate, beside the machaira, assumed the balance in assuming the tribunitian and proconsular powers of the State. It was the prerogative of the Senate to confer these by its decree -- by "a voice in the midst of the four living ones" -- upon the imperial sword-bearers; a right which had hitherto been respected by the turbulent praetorians and the imperial puppets it was their pleasure to set up. "This new and injudicious violation of the constitution," says Gibbon, "was probably dictated either by the ignorance of his Syrian courtiers or the fierce disdain of his military followers."

The timid prudence of the obsequious Senate having acquiesced in what it could not remedy, Elagabalus was duly recognized both as bearer of the balance and the sword; and the most potent, grave and reverend senators confessed with a sigh that, after having long experienced the stern tyranny of their own countrymen, Rome was at length humbled beneath the effeminate luxury of oriental despotism.

The installation of the Sun in Rome as chief over all the religions of the earth, was the great object of the zeal and vanity of Elagabalus. The Sun’s marriage with the Moon, and the display of superstitious gratitude to him for his elevation to the throne, were the only serious business of his reign. He called himself Elagabalus (though his real name was Bassianus) after the name of his god, an appellation dearer to him than all the titles of imperial greatness. He was an irrational voluptuary who abandoned himself to the grossest gratification of sense with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments. Whilst he lavished away the treasures of his people in the wildest extravagance, his own voice and that of his flatterers applauded a spirit and magnificence unknown to the tameness of his predecessors. To sport with the passions and prejudices of his subjects, and to subvert every law of nature and decency, were in the number of his most delicious amusements. No more beastly a sensualist could have been found in Sodom than this high priest of the Sun. The public scenes displayed before the Roman people attest that the inexpressible infamy of his vices and follies surpassed that of any other age or country. The corrupt and opulent nobles of Rome gratified every vice that could be collected from the mighty conflux of nations and manners. Secure of impunity, careless of censure, they lived without restraint in the patient and humble society of their slaves and parasites. Elagabalus, in his turn, viewing every rank of his subjects with the same contemptuous indifference, asserted without control his sovereign privilege of lust and luxury.

But the licentious soldiers who had raised this dissolute pretender to the throne of the balance and the sword, blushed at their ignominious choice, and turned with disgust from the monster to contemplate with pleasure the opening virtues of his cousin, Alexander Severus, whom he had been induced to invest with the title of Caesar, that his own divine occupations might be no longer interrupted by the care of the earth. In the second rank, that amiable prince soon acquired the affections of the public, but not without arousing the tyrant’s jealousy, who determined, but without success, to take away the life of his rival. Failing in this, he degraded him from the rank and honors of Caesar. This sentence was received in the Senate with silence, and in the camp of the praetorians with fury. These swore to protect Alexander, and to revenge the dishonored majesty of the throne. Elagabalus trembled, and begged for his life with tears; his prayer was granted, but the folly of the emperor brought on a new crisis, which was instantly fatal to his minions, his mother, and himself. Elagabalus was massacred by the infuriated praetorians, his mutilated corpse dragged through the streets of Rome and thrown into the Tiber. His memory was branded with eternal infamy by a decree of the Senate in the year of his death, A.D. 222, after a reign of three years, nine months, and four days.

With two such tribunes and proconsuls of the Roman Senate, or Balance-Holders, as Caracalla and Elagabalus, what but oppression and injustice could result? The choinix of wheat and the choinices of barley, must have been heavily taxed to provide the means of perpetuating for ten years such wild and reckless extravagance as history attributes to their administration. Better to grow no wheat or barley, than, having produced it, to be subject to the visits of the rapacious farmers of the revenue of such monsters. As we have remarked already, they did abandon the labors of the field, and left thousands of fertile acres waste and desert, by which, as one among other causes, preparation was made for the intense famine of the fourth seal. Could any people be white -- happy and prosperous -- under such riders? Could they be anything else than black -- overshadowed by the blackness of darkness that might be felt in all parts of the body politic.

But, for the sake of the four living ones (and concerning them whom they represent, Paul says, "All things are for their sakes," 2 Cor. iv. 15) the Lamb, who presided over these seal-judgments, had provided temporary relief in the preparation of a balance-holder, who would "not act unjustly by the oil and the wine" -- in other words, whose rigid economy in every branch of the administration would seek to neutralize the injustice under which they had previously groaned. Alexander Severus, aged seventeen, and his mother, Mammaea, were the persons under whom this happy transformation of public affairs was brought about. On the death of Elagabalus, Alexander was raised to the throne by the praetorian guards. His amiable qualities and his danger had already endeared him to the people, and the eager liberality of the Senate decreed to him in one day -- the voice in the midst of the four living ones -- the various titles and powers of the imperial dignity, all summarily symbolized by the Balance and the Sword or Dagger of the State.

The regency of Mammaea was equally for the benefit of her son and the empire. With the approbation of the Senate, she chose sixteen of the wisest and best disposed senators as a perpetual council of State, before whom every public business of moment was debated and determined. The celebrated Ulpian was at their head, and the prudent firmness of this aristocracy restored order and authority to the government. Learning and the love of justice became the only recommendation for civil offices; valor and the love of discipline the only qualifications for military employments.

The uniform tenor of the emperor’s life left not a moment for vice or folly. Since the accession of Commodus, the Roman world had experienced, during a period of forty years, the successive and various vices of four tyrants. From the death of Elagabalus, it enjoyed an auspicious calm of thirteen years. The provinces, relieved from the oppressive taxes invented by Caracalla and his pretended son, flourished in peace and prosperity, under the administration of magistrates who were convinced by experience that to deserve the love of the subjects was their best and only method of obtaining the favor of their sovereign. The price of provisions and the interest on money were reduced by the care of Alexander, whose prudent liberality, without distressing the industrious, supplied the wants and amusements of the populace. The dignity, the freedom, the authority of the Senate were restored, and every well-intentioned senator might approach the person of the emperor without a fear and without a blush.

In the civil or balance-holding administration of Alexander Severus, wisdom was enforced by power, and the people, sensible of the public felicity, repaid their benefactor with their love and gratitude. There still remained a greater, or more necessary, but a more difficult enterprise -- the reformation of the military order, whose interest and temper, confirmed by long impunity, rendered them impatient of the restraints of discipline and careless of the blessings of public tranquility. By the most gentle arts he labored to inspire the fierce multitude with a sense of duty; but his prudence was vain, his courage fatal, and the attempt toward a reformation served only to inflame the ills it was meant to cure.

The administration of Alexander Severus was an unavailing struggle to "act justly by the oil and the wine." Mutinies of the troops perpetually broke out; his officers were murdered, his authority insulted, and his life at last sacrificed to the fierce discontent of the army. Every cause prepared, and every circumstance hastened a revolution which distracted the Roman empire with a long series of intestine calamities.

Alexander was one of the most moral heathens of the ancient world. His mother, Mammaea, who was cruelly jealous and avaricious, is called by Eusebius, a bishop of the Laodicean Apostasy, "a most godly and religious woman." There are many such in our day Gentiles, who are "godly and religious" people, but as ignorant of the first principles of the truth as Mammaea and her son. While residing at Antioch, they invited that celebrated son of Jezebel, Origen, to visit them. They could have sent for one whose christianity would have been less offensive to imperial liberalism. Origen’s christianity and theirs were not very remote, save that Origen did not bow down to imaginary deities. Alexander admitted into his own chapel all the deities of his wide empire. Jesus Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, Apollonius of Tyana, &c., were placed among them. It is almost certain that his mother had biased him in favor of philosophical christianity in which she believed. He had a desire to erect a temple to Christ, and to receive him regularly among the gods! The excellent qualities of this amiable and just ruler were, doubtless, attributable to the divine principles he so imperfectly understood. These caused him to treat professors of christianity with favorable regard. As an instance of this, it is related that the right of possessing a certain piece of ground was claimed by a tavern-keeper. It had been without owner or possessor for a long time, and the christians had occupied it as a place of worship. "It is fitter," said Alexander, "that God should be served there, in any manner whatever, rather than it should be used for a tavern." He frequently said, "Do as you would be done by." He obliged a crier to repeat it when he punished any one, and was so fond of it that he caused it to be written in his palace and in the public buildings. When he was going to appoint balance-holders of provinces, he proposed their names in public, giving the people notice that if they had any crime to accuse them of they should come forward and make it known. "It would be a shame," said he, "not to do that with respect to governors, who are intrusted with men’s properties and lives, which is done by Jews and christians when they publish the names of those they mean to ordain priests." His great desire was, not only that he himself should not, but also that the representative officials of the Roman majesty in all parts of the empire, should "not act unjustly by the oil and the wine."

There was no persecution of the christadelphians, nor of philosophical christians, under the Balance-Holders of this seal -- to wit, Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus, and Alexander Severus. The calamities they experienced befell them in common with the general public. Though primitive christianity was losing ground, the Archer with his bow was still "conquering" the popular superstition. An Alexander Severus, on the throne of the world, was evidence that philosophical christianity, the metaphysics of the Alexandrian School of "Divinity," was supplanting the grosser superstition of the heathen. Though christianity in the purity of its faith and practice, was succumbing to the rising and now rapidly maturing apostasy, there were very many christadelphians or Brethren of Christ, who still contended earnestly for the faith, as "the living ones" of the third Cherub of the seal. These were the salt which preserved the whole professing community from putrefaction. Little, however, is known about them, seeing that the writers of their times were the philosophicals of the Satanic synagogue, of which, by way of derision, the pagans named Alexander the chief.

 

 


spacer
spacer
spacer

Eureka Diary -- reading plan for Eureka

spacer