This rider also brought into operation “the beasts of the earth” to aid him in his destructive work.  To kill with sword or hunger shows that such work of destruction is performed solely by him who has it in his power; but to kill with beasts indicates that they perform the deadly work according to their own natures.  Nothing is clearer than the fact that wild beasts stand as a symbol of persecuting tyrannical governments; hence we are to understand that this rider was to employ also the arm of civil power to aid him in the deadly work.  How strikingly this represents the historical facts of the case!  In all truly Roman Catholic countries the civil governments were only a cipher or tool in the hands of the church, and the ecclesiastics were the real rulers of the kingdom.  But whenever any dark work of persecution was to be performed, the wild beast was let loose to accomplish the result.  When charged, however, with the bloody work, the Catholics always answer, “Oh, we never persecute—­don’t you see, it is the wild beasts that are covered with gore—­our hands are clean,” yet they themselves held the chain that bound the savage monsters.  We shall have occasion in a subsequent chapter to trace further the pathway of this dread rider as he reels onward in the career of ages, “drunken with the blood of the saints.”

This work of destruction performed by the dread rider on the pale horse is considered by many as a literal description of the persecutions of the Papacy.  While Catholics usually charge the civil powers with this bloody work, it is an undeniable fact of history that the Popes often ordered or sanctioned crusades against the Waldenses, Albigenses, and other peoples (see remarks on verses 9-11, chap. 17:6), in which the sword, starvation, and every other means of cruelty imaginable were brought into use to exterminate the so-called heresy.  And in view of the fact explained in the comments on verses 3 and 4 of this chapter, that killing is sometimes to be understood in a literal sense on account of there being nothing to analagously represent such destruction of life, it is not a violation of the laws of symbolic language thus to interpret it.  It might be consistent in this case to give it a twofold application; the agreeing facts of history regarding the Papacy strongly suggest it.  Thus, the sword could signify a literal destruction of life, as in verse 4, and also, in the present case, an ecclesiastical cutting off by the Papacy, or excommunication; and hunger could signify literal death by starvation, and also, as in verses 5 and 6, a destruction of spiritual life, etc.

Where, let me ask, in the whole compass of human writings can be found a series of events of such thrilling interest, so great in magnitude, as is contained in these eight verses?  Who but the Omnipotent could have conceived such a wonderful development of the power of iniquity and with such master-strokes of power compressed them into so small a scene of symbolic imagery?  The impress of divinity is here speaking from every line.