"AND the fifth Angel poured out his Vial on the throne of the Beast: and his kingdom was darkened.”—Apoc. 16:10.

We have here predicted the outpouring of a Vial of judgment on the Beast’s throne and kingdom, consecutive on that of the former Vial.

Now as to the locality on which this Vial was to be poured out, there cannot, I think, be a doubt. The throne, or seat, of the Beast was the same as that of the seven-headed Dragon, representing the Roman Pagan power before him: for it is said, “The Dragon gave to him (the Beast) his throne and power, &c.” It was the throne of the seven hills, the See of ROME.—And precisely in accordance with the prediction of the text, thus interpreted, we find that immediately after the battle of Wagram in 1809, and re-subjection of Austria,—the closing historic fact noted in my exposition of the fourth Vial,—there were issued by Napoleon the two celebrated Decrees of Schönbrunn and Vienna, (Decrees to which I shall again advert ere concluding this Chapter,) whereby the Pope’s temporal authority over the Roman State was abolished, and ROME itself incorporated with France, as the second city of its empire.

But this in truth was only the consummation of insults and injuries, heaped by the French on the Papal power from almost the very commencement of their Revolution. I have had occasion to glance at this fact, and cursorily to illustrate it, more than once in the general historical sketches given in my Chapter iii preceding. But it becomes a necessary part of my duty to set it forth more distinctly and fully in the present Chapter. For the solution of the great question of the termination of the 1260 years of prophecy is connected with it. If, as I have supposed in common with many other interpreters, the 1260 predicted year-days of Papal supremacy began primarily, though imperfectly, with the quaternion of years from 529 to 533, that witnessed the promulgation of the Popedom-exalting Justinian Code, and commencing adhesion of the ten Romano-Gothic kingdoms and kings to the Pope, as spiritual head of Christendom, then ought the quaternion of years, 1260 years after,—that is, from 1789 to 1793, the opening æra of the Revolution,—to be marked, as a primary though imperfect end to the 1260 years, by some great blow at the Papal supremacy;—then Daniel’s prophecy about the “taking away of dominion from it, to consume and to destroy it unto the end,” to have had coincidently a commencement of accomplishment.4—Let us note then what history reports on this point; and mark the earlier spoiling of the Pope’s Ecclesiastical Civitas, or the Romish Church, ere we revert to the subsequent subversion of his throne.

Now significant symptoms had not been wanting for full half a century before the French Revolution, which showed the attachment of many of the Western kings to have more than grown cold towards the Pope, and a preparation of mind to have risen up within them, if not for the overthrow of his domination, yet for some spoliation of the Church his associate. But as yet there was no mortal blow struck by any of them against Papal supremacy. This was reserved to the epoch of the Revolution; and to that country which under Clovis, 1300 years before, had first of the Western Kingdoms attached itself to Rome, and of which the king thenceforward in consequence had borne the title of Eldest Son of the Church.

The blow was there and then instantaneous. Scarce was the National Assembly constituted in the summer of 1789, when it entered on its course of spoliation. The Clergy, who formed one of the Estates, had so little anticipated this, that, on the conflict between the Nobles and the Tiers Etat, they in large numbers joined the latter; and thus materially helped to turn the scale, and precipitate the Revolution. But, regardless of the help so given it, one of the first measures of the Assembly was to abolish tithes, establishing an insufficient rent-charge on the State. in lieu of them; a second at one fell swoop to sever from the Church, and appropriate as national property, all ecclesiastical lands throughout the kingdom:—lands, let it be observed, which had been regarded ever before as not French property only, but that too of the Catholic or Roman Church; and as needing therefore the Pope’s sanction to its alienation. Then followed the suppression of all monastic houses in the kingdom, to the number of 4000: and, in regard of the Clergy, already made pensioners of the State, the substitution of popular election for institution after the Papal Concordat; and the requirement from each of them, on pain of forfeiture of the pension, of a solemn abjuration of all allegiance to the Pope. And then in 1793, the last year of the four, a Decree was issued for the abolition of the Christian (or rather Romish) religion in France: whereupon the Churches were many of them razed to the ground; others left in partial ruin; and of the rest, now shut against priests and worshippers, the most sacred places defiled, (the visible memorial of which desecration remained long after,) the treasures rifled, and the bells broken, and cast into cannon.—So was the whole French ecclesiastical establishment then destroyed. As to the French clergy themselves, 24,000 were massacred;2 and this, as before stated, with every the most horrid atrocity. The rest, for the most part utterly beggared, found refuge from the popular fury only by flight into other and chiefly Protestant lands; bearing about with them everywhere visible evidence that the predicted outpouring of judgment had begun on the mystic Babylon, and darkness gathered over the Papal kingdom.

Begun in France, the spoliation of the harlot-Church, and of its Papal patron and head, spread quickly into the other countries of Christendom. A propagandist spirit, in respect of this as in respect of its other principles, was one of the essential characteristics of the Revolution; and the tempests of war gave it wings. Its first translation was into Belgium and the Rhenish provinces of Germany; the latter “the chief seat,” as Ranke terms it, “of the ecclesiastical form of government.” Thither it brought with it ecclesiastical changes analogous to those in France.—In the years 1796, 1797, French dominion being established by Buonaparte’s victories in Northern Italy, it bore with it thither the similar accompaniment, as of French democratism and infidelity, so too of French anti-papalism.—And then, Rome itself being laid open to Buonaparte, and the French armies urging their march onward to the Papal Capital, the Pope only saved himself and it by the formal cession in the Treaty of Tolentino of the Legations of Ferrara, Bologna, and Romagna, (Peter’s Patrimony,) together with the city of Ancona; the payment of above £1,500,000 sterling,—a sum multiplied three-fold by exactions and oppression;3—and the surrender of military stores, and of a hundred of the finest paintings and statues in the Vatican. The French ambassador wrote from Rome to Buonaparte; “The payment of 30 millions [of francs], stipulated by the Treaty of Tolentino, has totally exhausted this old carcase: we are making it consume by a slow fire.”5—The aged Pope himself, now left mere nominal master of some few remaining shreds of the Patrimony of Peter, experienced soon after in person the bitterness of the prevailing anti-papal spirit. On pretence of an insult to the French Ambassador there, a French corps d’armée under Berthier, having in February 1798 crost the Apennines from Ancona, and entered Rome, the tricolour flag was displayed from the Capitol, amidst the shouts of the populace, the Pope’s temporal reign declared at an end, and the Roman Republic proclaimed, in strict alliance and fraternization with the French. Then, in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican, the ante-hall to which has a fresco painted by Papal order commemorative of the Protestant massacre on St. Bartholomew’s day, (might not the scene have served as a memento of God’s retributive justice?) there, while seated on his throne, and receiving the gratulations of his cardinals on the anniversary of his election to the Popedom,2 he was arrested by the French military, the ring of his marriage with the Church Catholic torn from his finger, his palace rifled, and himself carried prisoner into France, only to die there in exile shortly after.4—The Vial had thus touched the throne of the Beast, just in Apocalyptic order, after the first and earlier sprinkling of each of the four preceding Vials: and the confiscation of all territorial possessions of the Church and monasteries, and the pillage of the Pope’s library, museum, furniture, jewels, and even sacerdotal robes, told before the world of its outpouring. Nor, though the temporary success of the allies under Suwarrow made feasible the election of another Pope, and temporarily repaired the ruin of the Papal throne,6 was it anything more than an intermission from further evils yet to come.

For the hopes of an end to these persecutions of Rome and its harlot-Church, excited by Buonaparte’s restoration of the Romish religion in France on his assumption of the first Consulship, (a mere political step, as I have already stated,) quickly proved delusive. The Romish religion was recognised by him only in common, and on an equal footing, with other forms of Christianity.2 In Rhenish Germany, now a part of the mighty French Empire, temporal Princes, alike Protestant and Catholic, were appointed to the old Romish bishoprics and ecclesiastical principalities; in utter contempt of the ancient canon law, by which heresy involved the actual forfeiture of all power, title, and property: and in the very provisions of the French Concordat, made this year, 1801, with the Pope, there was a total abnegation of all Papal supremacy, and even Papal influence, in the ecclesiastical state of France.—In 1803 the Concordat made by Buonaparte with the Pope for the kingdom of Italy exhibited no other provisions than those for France.—In the autumn of 1804 the Pope, summoned to Paris as a vassal to crown Napoleon Emperor, or rather to give consecration to his crowning, obeyed, in the rekindled hope of the restoration of the Papal patrimony: but in vain. Nor was the Emperor’s coronation next year at Milan, as King of Italy, more fruitful to the Romish harlot-Church. “The designs of Napoleon,” says Ranke, “were now revealed … The Constituent [or National] Assembly had endeavoured to emancipate itself entirely from the Pope. The Directory wished to annihilate his authority. Buonaparte’s notion was to retain him, but in a state of absolute subjection; to make him a tool of his own boundless ambition.”—After a while indeed he was permitted to return to Rome. But, on his resistance to the oppressor’s views, there followed within four short years after, i.e. in 1809, the full outpouring of the Vial on his throne, or see, in those anti-papal Decrees of Napoleon from Schönbrunn and Vienna to which I made allusion at the beginning of this Chapter: Decrees to which,—as both Naples had now been formed into a dependant kingdom under Murat, and Spain into another dependant kingdom under Joseph Buonaparte, and Austria, after the victory of Wagram, forced into a political and matrimonial alliance with the French Emperor,—all the ten kingdoms of Western Christendom (England alone excepted, the tenth of the city, already long since broken off from the Popedom) might have appeared before the world assenting and consenting parties. I say with all these as apparently consenting, if not co-operating parties,—viz. Louis King of Holland, Jerome of Westphalia, the Princes of the confederation of the Rhine, (including Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and the Swiss Cantons,) the Austrian Emperor, the King of Italy, (a kingdom comprehending Savoy, Lombardy, and Tuscany,) the King of Naples too, and King of Spain and Portugal,—Napoleon issued from Schönbrunn and Vienna his Decrees for the final humbling and spoliation of the Romish Church and Pope:5 Decrees of which the purport was the revocation of Charlemagne’s donations to the Holy See, the annexation of the duchies of Urbino, Ancona, Macerata, and Camarino for ever to the kingdom of Italy, the total and final abolition of the Pope’s temporal authority, and incorporation of Rome as its second city with the French Empire:—a committee of administration having been appointed for the Roman civil government; and a salary settled on the Pope,2 as a mere pensionary of the State, in his spiritual character. The Pope vented the bitterness of his soul in the fulmination of an excommunication of the French Emperor and his adherents, expressed after the old model, and with the old haughty Papal pretensions. But it was only to serve as a memorial, by its detail of wrongs, of the fulfilment of the predicted outpouring of judgment on the Papal throne, and darkening of his kingdom: and by its perfect impotency of effect, and the ridicule it met with, of the fact of the days of Papal supremacy, such as of old, being ended. A little after, as if sensible of the hopelessness of the Papal fall, and in forced resignation to his fate, being carried off prisoner by the French, first to Savona,6 then to Fontainebleau, he signed a new Concordat, of which the very preliminary condition was his separation for ever from Rome. So did he set his own seal to the fact of the outpouring of this Vial on the Papal throne having been consummated.—It was Napoleon’s policy and intention to fix him and the Papal See in the Archiepiscopal Palace at Paris;—the spiritual head of the Catholic Church, under his own eye and restraint,2 in the new capital of Catholicism. And indeed all tended to that result: which however could scarcely be, because inspired prophecy connected the Popedom and Rome essentially together, until Rome’s final and terrible destruction, not by man but God. Accordingly the sudden and wonderful overthrow of Napoleon’s power occurred to prevent it; an overthrow more sudden than even its rise. But even then, and when so strangely, as De Pradt says, “Catholicity having deserted him, four heretical kings bore the Pope back to Rome,”4 still he sate not on his throne as once before. His power was crippled; his seat unstable; the riches of his Church rifled; and a mighty precedent and principle of action established against him:—a precedent and principle which could scarce fail of bearing similarly bitter fruit afterwards; and so of prolonging, or renewing, the consuming judgment on the Beast predicted in Daniel, and darkening of his kingdom, predicted in the Apocalypse.

And so in fact it happened. For, as to the subsequent attempted re-establishment of Papal superstition and Papal supremacy by the Bourbons, Ferdinand, Miguel, and the Pope, in France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, I must remind the reader that the revolutions which occurred in the three former countries weakened not a little the ill-cemented reconstructions:—the result down to the reign of Louis Philippe, 1830–1848, being that in France the Romish Church still remianed impoverished, and legally only on a footing of equality with other religions, very much, so far, as under Napoleon: that in Portugal it remained spoiled of its ecclesiastical domains, by the decrees of the secular power in 1835: and that in Spain it suffered a similar confiscation of much of the immense church-property of that “most catholic” of countries; a confiscation completed under the rule of Queen Christina and the Regent Espartero. Which last-mentioned act of spoliation is the subject of a Papal Apostolic Letter, published not long after, “ordaining public prayers on account of the unhappy state of religion in Spain, together with a plenary indulgence in the form of a jubilee:”—a memorial in these its expressions alike of the continued harlotry of the Romish Church, and of the continued darkening of the splendours of its once dominant and proud kingdom.4 And though in Italy it has hitherto kept the domains re-assigned to it at the Peace of Paris, yet significant symptoms have not been wanting to show that there too the democratic anti-Papal spirit, infused under the French domination, is not extinct; and that it only awaits its opportunity to take part in the renewal of its assaults on Rome.2—At the same time it must ever be remembered, in looking both to present and to future, that the Apocalyptic prophecy in a subsequent notice in this Chapter intimates a revival of energy in the Papal Beast ere the expiration of the æra of the 6th Vial,—a prediction of which we shall have soon to show the remarkable accomplishment. Moreover in Apoc. 18 there is implied some kindly feeling towards Rome on the part of the Western kings, at the epoch of its great and final destruction. But in all this paragraph I have been anticipating.3

Thus have I shown the fulfilment of the Apocalyptic prophecy of the outpouring of a vial of wrath on the throne of the Papal Beast, and of its kingdom being darkened, as the fifth act in the judgments of the seventh Trumpet. And hence, as will be obvious, the fitness of the epoch of the French Revolution’s outbreak to constitute a primary, though imperfect, terminating epoch to the 1260 predicted year-days of Papal domination and supremacy.—Let me, in concluding the present Chapter, add two brief remarks in further illustration of its fitness. The first is, that the then establishment by the Revolutionary laws, and afterwards by the Napoleonic Code, of equal toleration to Protestants as to Roman Catholics, (the former a proscribed class up to that epoch in the continental kingdoms on the territory of the old Roman Western Empire,) seems to point it out as the time when the two symbolic witnesses may be considered also to have begun partially to put off their sackcloth. The second is that the continuance in force even until then, in the several countries of Papal Christendom, of the old Popedom-favouring Code of Justinian, a Code first promulgated, as we have seen, in the years 529–533, and its then sudden and rapid supersession by new anti-Papal Codes that originated from, and expressed the spirit of, the French Revolution of A.D. 1789–1793, are facts that furnish a very notable mark of contrast between the characters, juridically and constitutionally considered, of those epochs of primary commencement and primary ending, respectively, (according to my view of the matter,) to the 1260 years.


Elliott, E. B. (1862). Horæ Apocalypticæ; or, A Commentary on the Apocalypse, Critical and Historical (Fifth Edition, Vol. 3, pp. 395–410). Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday.