The fact that their commission was to torment those “men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads,” is a proof also of the wide-spread apostasies that had already taken place.  This was the time when the pale horseman was careering over the world carrying desolation everywhere by his instruments of oppression—­sword, pestilences, famine, and the wild beasts of the earth.  “The churches both in the Western and Eastern empire were in the most deplorable condition, being corrupted with the grossest ignorance and idolatry; the virgin Mary, the saints, and miserable relics of every description being worshiped in the place of Jehovah, and superstition reigning with sovereign power over all minds.”  The Saracen warriors of Mohammed were sent as a scourge upon apostate Christendom, overrunning the very territory where the gospel was first preached, and were commissioned to “torment” the false professors of Christianity.

In regard to the kind and the extent of the injury they were to inflict, it is said that “to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months:  and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.  And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”  The Saracens, as here described under the symbol of the locusts, sustained a two-fold relation, and the careful and perfect manner in which the symbols are selected to set it forth is worthy of particular notice.  In the first place, the Saracens were a political body.  As such, locusts would fitly represent them.  But they were also a religious body, and how could that fact be symbolically combined with the other?  It is done by the locusts’ being forbidden to act out their own nature in eating grass and trees, and their being commanded instead to “hurt men,” thus changing the field of their operations into the department of human life—­the department that is chosen to symbolically set forth religious events.  Thus the politico-religious system of the Saracens is accurately set forth.  This, also, is nearly as clear as a demonstration that the position already taken concerning the nature and the use of symbolic language is correct.

It was given that they should “not kill” men.  We have already shown that killing men when used symbolically signifies the destruction of the political or ecclesiastical organizations and institutions of society.  We could not consistently interpret it as literal slaughter, but as some analagous destruction.  Now, the Saracen power was, as already stated, a politico-religious system, and its warriors were an infatuated set of religious fanatics, described by historians as “carrying the sword in one hand, and the Koran in the other.”  Thus, they had it in their power to kill either religiously or politically—­destroy either the church or the empire—­but they did neither, for their mission was not to kill, but to “torment.”