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Eureka

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

 

 

Chapter 8

Section 7 Subsection 2

Historical Exposition


 
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The following is Mr. Elliott’s sketch of the phenomena of this vision. "A pause ensues. Then presently there is heard another trumpet-blast of judgment. Now, is the visitation of the Western Third of the Mediterranean sea, and the islands and transmarine province included in it; a part hitherto unscathed and safe. Behold yon giant mountain-rock, blazing with volcanic fires, that upheaved from the southernmost point of Spain near the straits of Gades, and cast into the sea, looks like Etna in its raging! Mark how the waters of the midland sea are agitated by it! The lava pours down the mountain sides. The igneous stones and ashes of the volcano are scattered for hundreds of miles all round, on sea and mainland, coasts and islands; first on the coast of Africa, then on that of the opposite continent, from the Atlantic Straits, all along up to the head of the Adriatic. Ships appear set on fire by them, at sea and in the harbors, and light the waters with their conflagrations. Blood marks the loss of life accompanying; the same as in the former vision. Over the whole maritime scene of its devastations whatever is habitable appears desolated; whatever had life, destroyed."

To the Vandal power was providentially assigned the judicial execution of the second trumpet upon the guilty catholic population of the west. Their work began A.D. 429, by their precipitating their destroying hosts, led by GENSERIC their king, upon the rich and productive province of Africa. Gibbon styles him "the terrible Genseric; a name, which, in the destruction of the Roman empire, has deserved an equal rank with the names of Alaric and Attila." His ambition was without bounds and without scruples; and prompted him to any enterprise that promised plunder and dominion. His power was a volcanic mountain vomiting forth desolation and death upon what he styled "the guilty."

The discord of Aetius and Count Boniface, two generals of the Western empire, was the fatal and immediate cause of the eruption of this Vandal volcano, which resulted in the loss of Africa and the islands. Boniface, then in arms against the administration, invited Genseric to an alliance. The Vandal king readily accepted the invitation; and, by the assistance of the Spaniards, who, anxiously desiring to get rid of them, furnished him with ships, he transported his Vandals over the Straits of Gibraltar to the coast of Mauritania where he mustered about 50,000 effective men.

When Genseric landed in Africa, he became the deliverer of the Donatists, who were then suffering the most rigorous persecution by the catholic officials, lay and clerical. Among the latter was their zealous enemy, the so-called "Saint" Augustin, Bishop of Hippo, who died just before his city was taken, A.D. 430, and, according to Mr. Elliott, was "joined to the white-robed company before the throne!!" Genseric being an enemy to the catholic faction in power, showed himself to the Donatists as a powerful deliverer, from whom they might reasonably expect the repeal of the odious and oppressive edicts of the Roman emperors. Genseric’s vengeance descended with terrible effect upon the "wolves in sheep’s clothing," who had been so long and cruelly oppressing all who were opposed to the reigning catholic superstition. Under the reign of the Vandals, whose success they favored, the Donatists of Africa enjoyed an obscure peace of one hundred years, at the end of which they may again be traced "by the light of the imperial persecutions."

At the time of invasion, Africa was so fruitful as to deserve the name of the common granary of Rome and of mankind. On a sudden, the seven fruitful provinces from Tangier to Tripoli were overwhelmed. The Vandals where they found resistance seldom gave quarter, and the deaths of their comrades were expiated by the ruin of the cities before which they had fallen. Boniface having returned to his allegiance, obtained the command of a powerful armament of ships and land forces, with which he boldly attacked the Vandals before Hippo. But his defeat irretrievably decided the fate of Africa. Eight years after the fall of Hippo, Carthage was reduced to ignominious servitude. After permitting his troops to satiate their rage and avarice, he enjoined all persons, without fraud or delay, to deliver their gold, silver, jewels, and valuable furniture or apparel, to his officers; and the attempt to secrete any part of their patrimony was inexorably punished with torture and death, as an act of treason against the state. The nobility and senators of Carthage were condemned to perpetual banishment; and crowds of exiles, of fugitives, and of ingenuous captives, filled the provinces of the east and west.

With the capture and sack of Carthage, all resistance to the "mountain burning with fire" ceased in Africa. By the separation of this province, the internal prosperity of Rome was irretrievably destroyed. The rapacious Vandals confiscated the patrimonial estates of the emperors and cut off the regular subsidies. The distress of the Romans was soon aggravated by an unexpected attack, June 15, A.D. 455. There being nothing to tempt the rational ambition of the Vandal king in the direction of the desert, "he cast his eyes," says Gibbon, "toward the sea. He resolved to create a naval power, and his bold resolution was executed with steady and active perseverance. He animated his daring Vandals to embrace a mode of warfare which would render every maritime country accessible to their arms;" so that, "after an interval of six centuries, the fleets that issued from the port of Carthage again claimed the empire of the Mediterranean." They vomited fire upon Sicily, which "became blood" in its conquest and the sack of Palermo. The Western empire being left without a defender and lawful prince, the avarice of Genseric increased, and, with a numerous fleet of Vandals and Moors, he cast the anchors of his burning power into the sea at the mouth of the Tiber. Having disembarked, he boldly advanced to the gates of Rome. The bishop (for there was then no Pope, no Pontiff King with temporal power, and "church-states" to be ruled with a grievous yoke) -- this bishop Leo, at the head of his clergy, issued in procession to supplicate with all due orthodox humility, a restraining of the fierce and burning wrath of the heretical defender of the Donatists. The Vandal king promised to spare all non-resistants, to protect the buildings from fire, and to except the captives from torture. Nevertheless, Rome and its inhabitants were delivered to the blind passion of his soldiery. The pillage lasted fourteen days and nights. Among the spoils transported from the city by the king were the Golden Table and the Seven-Branched Golden Light-stand, brought by Titus to Rome, where they were deposited in the temple of peace. Nearly four hundred years after, these spoils of Jerusalem were shipped for Carthage, with the rich plunder of the catholic bazaars, dedicated to demons called "guardian saints," and adorned by the excessive superstition of the coreligionists of Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and company. The gold and silver, amounting to several thousand talents, with the jewels, brass, and copper, accumulated by rapine, were all removed to the fleet, which returned laden with thousands of captives, with a prosperous navigation, to Carthage -- all except one vessel bearing the relics of the capitol, which descended to the bottom of the sea.

But "the sea" had not yet sufficiently "become blood;" nor had "the third of the creatures in the sea, having souls, died;" nor had "the third of the ships" been "destroyed." To bring this about required the revival of "the kingdom of Italy’s" power of resistance (for the Western empire had been reduced to an Italian kingdom) to Genseric upon the sea. The four years reign of the judicious and enterprising Majorian afforded scope for this. Perceiving that Rome could not be safe while Carthage existed as a hostile state, he determined to create a maritime power, and by it achieve the conquest of Africa. In three years he collected an imperial navy of three hundred large galleys, with an adequate proportion of transports and smaller vessels, in the secure and capacious harbor of Carthagena in Spain. Hearing of this, and apprehensive of Majorian’s descent at his own original landing place, Genseric reduced Mauritania into a desert. Secret intelligence guided him to the anchorage of his foe, whose unguarded fleet he surprised in the bay of Carthagena. Many of the ships were taken, or sunk, or burnt, and the preparations of three years were destroyed in a single day.

For six years after the death of Majorian, the government of Italy was in the hands of the Count Ricimer alone, one of the principal commanders of the barbarians, descended from the Visigoths and Suevi. Under his rule, the kingdom of Italy was afflicted by the incessant depredations and conflagrations of the Vandalic "mountain burning with fire." In the spring of each year, Genseric sallied forth from the port of Carthage in command of the most important expeditions. When asked by his pilot what course he should steer, "Leave the determination to the winds," said he, "THEY will transport us to the guilty coast whose inhabitants have provoked the divine justice." They repeatedly visited the coasts of Spain, Liguria, Tuscany, Campania, Lucania, Bruttium, Apulia, Calabria, Venetia, Dalmatia, Epirus, Greece, and Sicily. They subdued the island of Sardinia, and spread desolation or terror from the columns of Hercules to the mouth of the Nile; and, as they always embarked a sufficient number of horses, they had no sooner landed, than they swept the dismayed country with a body of light cavalry. The fierceness of the scourge is attested by the massacre of five hundred noble citizens of Zante, whose mangled bodies he cast into the Ionian sea -- "the sea became blood; and the creatures in the sea, having souls, died."

The permission of such sanguinary severities by Providence can only be accounted for on the principle of the wicked being Yahweh’s sword for the punishment of the hypocrisy, blasphemy, superstition, and immorality of the victims. Genseric seemed to recognize that he was the executioner of "divine justice" upon the orthodox catholic fraternity that inhabited "the sea". "The fury of the Vandals," says Gibbon, "was confined to the limits of the Western empire" -- to "the third of the sea, and of the creatures, and of the ships." The Italians, now destitute of a naval force, through the haughty Ricimer were at length reduced to address the throne of Constantinople in the language of subjects; and Italy submitted, as the price and security of the alliance, to accept a master from the choice of Leo the First, the Emperor of the East, in the person of Anthemius, who entered Rome as Emperor of the West, April 12, A.D. 467. Immediately after this, "regardless of the majesty of the purple," said he, "I gave my daughter to a Goth; I sacrificed my own blood to the safety of the republic." But this did not prevent Ricimer, his daughter’s husband, from sacking Rome and putting him to death,

A.D. 472.

In the meantime, however, the alliance developed immense naval and military preparations on the part of the eastern Romans, languidly aided by the west, for carrying the war into Africa. One hundred and thirty thousand pounds weight of gold (about £5,200,000), and seven hundred thousand of silver, paid into the treasury for expenses, reduced the cities to extreme poverty. The fleet it provided, and which sailed from Constantinople to Carthage, consisted of eleven hundred and thirteen ships, and the number of soldiers and mariners -- "the creatures in the sea having souls" -- exceeded one hundred thousand men. This formidable navy was increased by a fleet under Marcellinus from the Adriatic. Consternation seized the Carthaginians; but Genseric beheld the danger with firmness, and eluded it with his veteran dexterity. Having obtained a truce of five days to regulate the terms of submission, in this short interval the wind became favorable to his designs. He manned his largest ships of war with his bravest Moors and Vandals, who towed after them many large barks filled with combustible materials. In the obscurity of the night, "as it were a mountain burning with fire," these destructive vessels were impelled against the unguarded and unsuspecting fleet of the Romans. Their close and crowded order assisted the progress of the fire, which was communicated with rapid and irresistible violence; and the noise of the wind, the crackling of the flames, and the dissonant cries of "the creatures in the sea having souls" -- the soldiers and mariners, who could neither command nor obey -- increased the horror of the tumult. While they labored to extricate themselves from the fire-ships, and to save at least a part of the navy, the galleys of Genseric assaulted them with temperate and disciplined valor; and many of the Romans, who escaped the fury of the flames, were destroyed or taken by the victorious Vandals. "More than half the fleet and army was lost," and Genseric again became "the Tyrant of the Sea." The coasts of Italy, Greece, and Asia, were again exposed to his vengeance; and, before he died, in the fulness of years and of glory, A.D. 477, he beheld the final extinction of the Trinitarian Empire of the West. And thus "the third of the creatures in the sea, having souls, died; and the third of the ships were destroyed.

 

 


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