The “voices, thunderings and earthquakes” resulting from the scattering of the coals,—­are the harbingers and precursors of coming calamities upon Christendom at the sounding of the trumpets.  And these may be emblematical of the contentions, strife and divisions which accompanied the rise and prevalence of the heresy of Arius and the apostacy of the emperor Julian, during the time of comparative public tranquillity from Constantine to Theodosius.  The church and the state, as one complex system, we have considered as the object of the judgments to be inflicted under the trumpets.  These had, in fact, become incorporated, if not identified, under the reign of Constantine and his imperial successors.  But assuming the correctness of the phraseology of secular historians and Christian expositors, when in a popular sense they speak of the Roman empire as the object of penal inflictions; we by no means agree with the latter class of writers, when they limit the empire to the geographical boundaries as it existed at the time of this prediction.  This mistake, if not detected here, will materially affect and control our views of the whole subsequent part of the Apocalypse.  Who would not discover the impropriety and absurdity of treating of events now transpiring within the empire of the United States, as if falling out within the limits of the original thirteen as they existed in 1776?  But the Roman empire yet exists, and we have sufficient evidence that it will continue till the time of the sounding of the seventh trumpet, (ch. xi. 15.) Political bias has prevailed with one class of expositors to exempt the British empire from the stroke of God’s wrath, symbolized by both the trumpets and vials.  Others, from similar predilections, would exempt the United States and British Provinces from these plagues.  Whilst a third class, giving fall scope to the hallucinations of mere imagination, aver their conviction that republican America is the special and doomed object of all these plagues!—­Hence, the necessity of caution, sobriety, reverence for divine authority, reliance on the teaching of the Holy Spirit, whom the Saviour has promised to his humble disciples to “guide them into all truth, and to show them things to come.” (John xvi. 13.) That the student of prophecy,—­especially of the Apocalypse, may realize the fulfilment of this promise, it is indispensably necessary that he be absolutely untrammeled by all antichristian politics.  Such cases are very rare, (ch. xiii. 3.)

During the reign of Constantine, that monarch had transferred the capital of the empire from the “city of seven hills” to another locality and founded another metropolis, which as the future seat of imperial rule, and to immortalize himself, he called after his own name, Constantinople.  This ambitious enterprise itself virtually divided the empire, preparing the way for its total dismemberment by the trumpets.  And now the “seven angels prepared themselves