We have seen in ch. vii, that the judgments of the first four trumpets were restrained until the work of sealing the servants of the Deity should be sufficiently advanced. The tempests that were to wreck the state, and dash it in pieces upon the rocks, were not to blow until there should be a community of faithful ones developed, who should be able to read the signs of their times aright, and be able to instruct others. This is implied in their being "sealed in their foreheads". Being thus prepared, when the trumpets sounded they could call the attention of their contemporaries to the true situation of affairs; and in so doing deliver them from the superstition and blasphemy of such blind leaders as Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Cyril, and others, of the catholic church by law established. These all assumed that the superstition they professed was the true religion; and that when Antichrist appeared, he would be "some great man raised up by the devil," who would head "the apostasy," which could be no other than a falling away "from the right faith, from truth, and from good works," as presented to the dwellers upon the earth in the traditions with which they made void the word. They taught that Antichrist was to appear in a Jewish temple, and from among the Jews, and gain the empire of the world. They were all impressed with the idea that the dissolution of the Roman empire into ten kingdoms was at hand; their Antichrist would be revealed, and then destroyed by Christ, about A.D. 500, which was to be the end of the world!

The gloomy forebodings among them respecting their near future were heightened by chronological ignorance. They imagined that the world was nearly 6,000 years old. Hilarion, A.D. 402, thus wrote: "It now wants 101 years to the end of the Sixth Chiliad about the closing of which the ten kings must arise, Babylon, now reigning, fall, Antichrist arise and be destroyed by Christ’s coming, and so the saints’ sabbath millennary begin." To read the vagaries solemnly propounded by these Laodiceans, is to remind us of the times in which we live. The confusion of ideas was truly marvellous. Their speculations were as hairbrained as those of Mormons, Millerites, and clergymen at large, in the age in which we live. They had been given over to "believe a lie, that they all might be condemned who believed not the truth; but had pleasure in" their own righteousness, which was "unrighteousness." What, then, was to be done in this extremity? They could no more deliver themselves from their own blasphemies, than the natural man from his own ignorance. The remedy was at hand, if they had been sagacious enough to discern it; but, like our contemporaries, they cruelly persecuted and denounced it as heresy, and put it from them. The remedy was the EAGLE-ANGEL preaching of the truth. These preachers being "sealed in their foreheads," would be able to explain to them that the dissolution of the Western Empire was not the end of the world, but a judgment upon them as the real apostasy foretold by Paul. That they were deceivers and deceived. That the end of the world was not at hand, nor the reign of the saints either. That the trumpet-judgments of heaven were a call upon them to "repent of the works of their hands, that they should not worship daemons, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood, which can neither see, nor hear, nor walk; -- to repent of their murders, of their sorceries, of their fornication and of their thefts" (ix. 20,21). That of all these crimes they were guilty, and had been punished by heretical and pagan firebrands, as Alaric, Genseric, Attila, and other barbarian scourges; and that the terrible calamities they endured were not complete. That, as they repented not of the works of their hands; or, in the words of Jerome, though "the Roman world rushes to destruction, we bend not our neck in humiliation;" therefore, "Woe, Woe, Woe" to them, both of the east and the west, because of the judgments yet to befall them before the end should come.

While this eagle-angel proclamation was warning the people, war, pestilence, and famine, in all the reign of Justinian, were plaguing them with unexampled miseries. A hundred millions of the human race were exterminated in his reign. But this was only introductory to the coming woes." The camp of safety was with "the flying eagle." The belief and obedience of the gospel of the kingdom was then, as now, the only seal protective from the sword.