John says that the name of the representative personage he saw sitting above, over, or upon, epano, the pale horse, was "Death." The form of words in which he tells us this is according to the form of the previous seals. "The rider was not, as before," says Elliot, "the representative of human functionaries and rulers, whose distinctive emblems, though well understood at the time, might now require investigation to unfold them. It is a symbol of meaning as obvious to the reader now as it could have been then to the seer; for who it meant is expressly told us. It was the personification of Death! To mark that it was the actual King of Terrors -- and not as otherwise it might possibly have been construed, the destroyer merely of political existence -- his badge, so to express it, is said to have been Hades following him, the recipient, with his opening jaws, of the victims slain by Death." But Mr. Elliott has not attempted to show why death should be personified in the fourth and not in the second seal, where the horse is fiery red, and they are engaged in slaying one another. The truth is the very reverse of Mr. Elliott’s supposition; for the rider, as before, represented, not death in the abstract, but human functionaries and men of power, so victimizing and victimized by assassination and war as to become, as it were, the sons of death, and, therefore, as a class, fitly represented by the symbolical name, "Death." John does not say that the sitter upon the pale horse was death, but that the name bestowed upon him was death -- "the name for him is Death." Neither did the rider, Death, indicate "the destroyer of mere political existence;" for the agents, as a class, and the state, still survived the fourth seal. No interpretation of a fulfilled prophecy not in harmony with authentic history can be correct; therefore, this last idea of mere political destruction must be rejected. History will show that my interpretation is the only true one, namely, that the name "Death" was bestowed upon the class of agents riding, sitting upon, or affecting the dying horse or heathen people and empire, because few of them died a natural death. In the first fifty years of the period of this seal, there were thirty-nine claiming to be emperors, and all of them died by violence. One of them fell by pestilence, and the form of the death of another is uncertain; but, with these two exceptions, nearly all died by assassination, and two or three by the sword in battle. Let such a class of rulers, then, predetermined to death as sure as they obtained the imperial office, be symbolized in a hieroglyphic, by what could they be so fitly represented as by a man with the name of "Death?" This name was his badge; so that any ruler represented by this class-man entered on the imperial office under the sentence of death, as prefigured by "the name" of this seal.