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 16

Section 10.

The Papal Image-Worshippers

Blasphemous and Unrepentant

 


 
spacer


"And they gnawed their tongues for the pain; and blasphemed the Name of the Deity, who hath power over these plagues, and they repented not to give glory to him, And they blasphemed the Deity of the heaven because of their pains, and because of their ulcers; and they repented not of their works" - Verses 8,11.

 

The intense sufferings of the Beast's Image-worshippers under the outpouring of the wrath of the fourth and fifth vials, is forcibly expressed by the saying, "they gnawed their tongues for the pain". Illustrative of their great misery, Sir Walter Scott's account is appropriate. "The French army," says he, "was poured into some foreign country by forced marches; without any previous arrangement of stores or magazines for their maintenance; and with the purpose of maintaining them solely at the expense of the inhabitants. This species of war was carried on at the least possible expense to his (Napoleon's) treasury; but at the greatest possible expenditure of human life, and the incalculable increase of human misery". "The officers gave the soldiers authority to secure supplies by what way; called la maraude, or plunder. When marching through a thinly peopled country, or when the natives and peasants offered resistance, then the soldiers became irritated at the danger they sometimes incurred in collecting provisions. Relentless and reckless, besides indulging in every species of violence, they increased their own distresses by destroying what they could not use. Famine and sickness were not long in visiting an army which traversed by forced marches a country exhausted of provisions. These stern attendants followed the French columns as they straggled on. Without hospitals and without magazines, every straggler who could not regain his ranks fell a victim to hunger, to weather, to weariness, or the vengeance of an incensed peasantry. In this manner the French army suffered woes, which till these tremendous wars had never been the lot of troops in hostilities carried on between civilized nations".

As a specimen of the sufferings of non-combatant inhabitants of the Beast's territory on the actual scene of hostilities, the following extracts, borrowed by certain writers from official Reports, published by a committee in London, descriptive of the calamities consequent upon the campaign of Leipsic in 1813, may suffice. In a letter from the city of Leipsic, dated Nov. 1813, and addressed to the British Nation, the writers say:

"We have before our eyes many thousands of the adjacent villages and hamlets  landed proprietors, farmers, ecclesiastics, schoolmasters, and artisans of every description - who were some weeks since in circumstances more or less easy, but now without a home, stripped of their all, and with their families perishing of hunger. All around is one wide waste. The numerous villages and hamlets are almost all entirely or partially reduced to ashes".

Again; - "The destruction and distress which marked the countries through which the French army fled from the bloody fields of Leipsic were altogether indescribable. Dead bodies covered the roads. Half consumed French soldiers were found in the ruins of the villages destroyed by the flames. Whole districts were depopulated by disease. For a month after the retreat no human being, no domestic animal, no poultry, nay, not even a sparrow was to be met with: only ravens in abundance were to be seen, feeding on corpses".

And again: - "On the borders of Silesia seventy villages have been almost entirely destroyed". "In Upper Lusatia the whole tract between Bautzen and Galitz, which has been repeatedly traversed by the marches and counter-marches of the armies, is reduced to a desert".

"At Hamburg 50,000 inhabitants, or perhaps, even 70,000, have left, and in part been driven from their homes; destitute of all means, and literally starving for want of the common necessaries of life. From the hospitals and infirmaries old and weak persons were driven in herds out of the Altona gate. Some having been long unaccustomed to the air, and exposed half naked to a cold of 190F, turned mad".

Such were the "pains" and "ulcers" which tormented the inhabitants of all the countries of Papal and Protestant Europe, as they became in turn the scene of warfare. They were certainly terrific, and calculated to make the subjects of them "gnaw their tongues for the pain;" and, contemplated from a humanitarian standpoint, greatly to be deplored. But when it is remembered, that they were worshippers of an imaginary ghost of a dead woman, they called "the Virgin Mary, and Holy Mother of God;" were Protestant Blasphemers of the Deity's Name; and the representatives of those who hunted from their homes their "heretical" friends and neighbors whom they burned to death, or drove from the haunts of men, to perish in the woods by hundreds, yea, by thousands, of hunger, nakedness, and cold - when we remember this, we can but say, that they were rightly served; and respond with the voice from the Altar, "Even so, 0 Lord the almighty Deity, true and righteous are thy judgments!"

'It was the kingdom of the Beast which was darkened" - egeneto he basileia autou eskotomene. Darkened, but not destroyed; for it still exists, and awaits the manifestation of the Ancient of Days to destroy it with "the brightness of his presence" (2Thess. 2:8). The darkness which had overshadowed the Beast's kingdom was dispelled by the events of 1814. The treaty of Paris, which deprived Napoleon of the throne; and that of Vienna of 1815, which reconstituted Europe - afforded "the Holy Alliance" and its sympathizers, an opportunity of showing whether they had learned wisdom and true holiness, by the scorching experience they had passed through. But they soon showed that they had learned nothing in that direction. Wise powers would have argued from the past, that "the Deity of the heaven, who had power over these plagues", must be highly incensed, incensed in the ratio of the severity of the plagues, against Greeks, Latins, and Protestants, represented in the Holy Alliance, by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; and that it behooved them to reform from that system of error so signally condemned by the plagues they had been subjected to' But their legislation evinced that they were as great fools as ever, and as much devoted to the lies and unprofitable vanities of their ancestors, as they were before the calamities and disasters of the past twenty-five years were inaugurated by the resurrection and ascension of the two tormenting prophets, whose scorching representative they had recently dethroned.

          

"They blasphemed the Name of the Deity of the heaven". They gave expression to their blasphemy in their deeds. They committed the most blasphemous act against his Name in their power, in re-establishing upon the Seven Heads, or Mountains, "the Name of Blasphemy." They delivered the Pope from captivity; and restored to him his pontifical throne and kingdom, which had cost so much human blood and misery to darken. He had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing of his blasphemy. In his proclamation from Cezena, May 5, 1814, a little before reentering Rome, he characterized himself and his office by the papal title of "the Vicar of the Deity upon earth". The acts following this re-assertion of the old impiety were in blasphemous harmony with it. A few days after the proclamation, he crowned at Ancona, with all the sanctimoniousness of superstition, a "miraculous image of the Virgin," the duplicate of that at Rome, as the guardian and saviour of Ancona; and de-creed its festival, and connected a plenary indulgence with its worship. The Name of the Deity for salvation was superseded as of old, by the merits of the saints of the Romish calendar, and of the phantasm, styled by the worshippers of the image, "the Blessed Mary always a Virgin". Bible Societies were special objects of papal wrath. They were declared to be tares in the midst of wheat, and wolves in the guise of lambs; while the scriptures themselves circulated by them, unaccompanied by Romish explanations, were denounced by Leo XII in 1824, as poisonous pastures, and the gospel rather of the devil than of the Deity. And in 1825, he published a Bull of Jubilee, promising to exhibit Christ's cradle, as an attraction to the pilgrimage; and with authoritative instructions to the pilgrims to call upon the Virgin Mary, as the great advocate for sinners, on that day of grace and mercy.

"And they repented not of their works" - hou metanoesan, they changed not their old mode of thinking, feeling, and acting in regard to the worship and institutions of the Beast's Image. The judgments of the Deity are intended to alienate men from their iniquities, and to incline them to better things; and when they come to be executed by the saints, the world will learn righteousness (Isa. 26:9): in the absence, however, of such righteous executors of wrath, there is no hope of the world's re-pentance, but it will go on to transgress more and more, till the cup of its iniquity overflows.

We have seen in the ninth chapter of this work, that the first and second woes, executed by the Saracens and Euphrateans upon the Greek division of the Apostasy, though they were of intense severity, worked no repentance in the Latins. They beheld anism enthroned in the City of the Great Constantine; and the Trinitarian Superstition he had vindicated by the sword in conflict with the Dragon, tram-pled in the dust by the Moslem; yet in all this, they did not perceive the Deity's repudiation of Catholicism; or, if they did, they would not be instructed and corrected by it. Thus, "the rest of the men who were not killed by these plagues," the Latin Catholics of the West, "repented not of the works of their hands" (ch. 9:20,21).

From the killing of the Eastern Third by the capture of Constantinople, to the resettlement of Europe by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, three hundred and sixty-two years had elapsed; and notwithstanding the terrible plagues of the past twenty-five years, the Latins, both Romish and Protestant, showed themselves to be as unrepentant of their "works" as ever. These works and deeds are recited in ch. 9:20,21; such as idols or images of gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood, which their hands had made, as representatives of the demons, ta daimonia, the "disembodied spirits," they worshipped as guardians, intercessors, ministers of grace, and mediators between Christ and men. The deeds of "the men who had the sign of the beast in their right hand, and in their foreheads," and who served as priests of these idols, vulgarly styled "the clergy", and of which they repented not, were murders, sorceries, fornication, thefts. And the people were like their priests. They continued to uphold and sanction all these abominations with the blindest veneration and devotion, till the exhausted patience of the Deity gave place, in 1796, to the terrible outpouring of the third vial, at the hand of his servant Napoleon, who, as "his servant Nebuchadnezzar" on a former occasion, gave the worshippers of images "blood to drink", and "scorched them with great heat". But, the events of the third, fourth and fifth vials have not brought the idolators to repentance; so as to cast their idols which they have made to worship, to the moles and to the bats (Isa. 2:20); and to abandon their murders, and their sorceries, and their fornication, and their thefts. We have seen how that the restored Pontiff evinced his incurable stupidity and idolatry in "solemnly crowning" a Madonna at Ancona, for incorrigible fools to worship. Demons and their images again became the fashionable objects of adoration. They repented not from these; but, in the words of Ranke, "the restored governments of Southern Europe repented of their former insubordination to Rome. They thought they had thus unchained the tempest by which themselves had been overthrown; and beheld in the Pope their natural ally." Thus, they failed to see the truth; that, instead of this, it was their fellowship with Rome in its villanies, superstitions, and blasphemies, that brought upon them all the evil by which they had been so dreadfully scorched. In France, the infatuated and demented Bourbons, after their restoration, dedicated their kingdom most especially to the disembodied nonentity, or demon, they call the Virgin Mary, as its patroness; they introduced those thieves and murderers, the Jesuits, whose society Pope Clement XIV declared to be a public nuisance; and in his Bull dissolving it, says, that "he who endeavored to let it loose upon society would be chargeable with high treason against the common interests and happiness of his species". Of this treason the Bourbons were guilty; and by their oppression of antipapalists, showed that the murderous spirit of their ancestor Charles IX, of St. Bartholomew renown, was not yet extinct in them. But, the seed of evil doers is doomed to confusion and contempt. The indignation of the Deity descended upon their incorrigible dynasty, in 1830, and in 1848. The revolution of the former year abolished the elder branch; and the more remarkable one of the latter date, the younger branch of the Capets; to make room for the developments of the Second Napoleonic Empire, whose mission is, not like Napoleon "the Great's", to darken the kingdom of the Beast and his Image, but to create by its policy such a situation as is prefigured in ch. 16:13,14, preparatory to the thief--like coming of the great Napoleon's antitype, YAHWEH TZ'VAOTH, who will resume his work, and refuse peace to the world until the Beast is slain, and his body destroyed; and, with his False Prophet whom he upholds, is given to the burning flame, never more to insult the habitable with their accursed presence.

In Spain, also, "they repented not of their works". Ferdinand, when restored to the throne, re-established both the Jesuits, and the popish "Hell", styled the Inquisition; and "heretics" were again murdered at the burning stake. The subsequent civil wars, and continually recurring insurrections there, sufficiently indicate the indignation of heaven; and, as an earnest of what is to come, is measurably retributive of the blood of the innocent shed by the "reverend" assassins and thieves of Rome. In Sardinia the King, to whose tender mercies the Waldenses were made over by the treaty of Vienna, for no other reason than because they were Antipapists, revoked their privileges, and multiplied vexations and oppressions upon them. In after years, the king of Sardinia was defeated at Novara, and died an exile in a foreign land; and his son, Victor Emmanuel, now reigns king of Italy, a confederate of the Revolution, and a terror to the Pope.

In Austria, so terribly "scorched with fire, " they repented not. By concordat with Rome, they assumed their former relationship to the 'Name of Blasphemy" on the Seven Hills. The Austrian kingdom of Lombardo-Venetia, being adjacent to the Pope's temporal kingdom, the Austrian Government became the pillar and support of the papal throne - an alliance always fatal, and full of misfortune, to the power so connected. In Austria, the Jesuits became as active as ever in propagating popery, with all its lies and blasphemies. Thus, when the Jesuit Sor-cerers in Hungary made any proselytes from Protestantism, they made them say that "the Pope cannot err; and that he has full power to forgive or retain sins, and to cast men into hell; that all he that he has established, whether out of the Bible or not, is true; that he ought to be honored with similar reverence to that paid to Christ himself; that those who oppose his authority ought to be burned at the stake, and to perish body and soul in hell; that the reading of the scriptures is the origin of all factions and blasphemy; that each priest is greater than the Virgin Mary because she was the parent of Christ but once, but the priest creates him anew again and again". Such was the "sorcery" sanctioned by Austria in 1828. Her misfortunes had failed to make her rational and the fruit of her folly and idiocy has been reaped in the wrath that has revisited her, and the False Prophet, her ally, upon the Seven Hills, under the judgments concomitant with the outpouring of the Sixth Vial, by which she has been dried up, and her protectorate of the Pope virtually dissolved.


Lastly, in Naples and Tuscany, in short everywhere throughout Roman Antichristendom, the "lying miracles" which had ceased during French ascendancy, were renewed. Such is the testimony of the author of "Rome in the Nineteenth Century". He remarks that "not one miracle happened during the whole reign of the French. It was not until the streets were purified with lustrations of holy water, on the return of the Pontiff, that they began to operate again". When he reappeared in the city, miracles revived. "Within this little month" (April, 1817), says he, "three great miracles have happened in Rome. The last took place yesterday (April 20); when all Rome crowded to the Capitol to see an image of the Virgin open her eyes". And where is Naples now whose guardian daemon is a nonentity they style "St. Januarius?" And where is Tuscany and its kindred duchies? All swallowed up in the revolutionary kingdom of Italy; and their former demented rulers refugient exiles in foreign lands. Yet have they not eyes to see, that the Hand that smites them is Divine.
  .

 

 


spacer
spacer
spacer

Eureka Diary -- reading plan for Eureka

spacer