"And the third Angel poured out his Vial on the rivers and fountains of the waters: and they became blood. And I heard the Angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, which art and which wast holy, because thou hast judged thus: for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets; and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard the altar saying, Even so, Lord God Almighty; true and righteous are thy judgments.”

The parallel judgment of the third Trumpet on the old Western Roman Empire is thus expressed. “And the third Angel sounded: and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp; and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters: and the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter.” And we saw reason to interpret the predicted judgment of the Hun Attila, with his desolating power, fixing himself first on the middle Danube, one of the two frontier rivers of the Western third of the Roman earth: then afterwards falling on the Rhine, and then on the Alpine streams that feed the Po; and, in all the three cases, causing the bitterness of distress, famine, pestilence, and death, to those who drank of the waters; that is, to the inhabitants of the Roman Provinces watered by those streams: the most marked characteristic of this Trumpet being those two frontier rivers, and the valley of the Po, figured as the local scenes and subjects of the judgment.—In the present instance, since the local scene of judgment is similarly “the rivers (not the one third, for reasons already given) and the fountains of the waters,” we seem bound by the law of parallelism to interpret the former of the two great frontier rivers of Papal Christendom, the Rhine and Upper Danube; the latter of the Po and its Alpine tributaries. And, taking into consideration the sequence of this third Vial on that which precedes it, and supposing our historical interpretation of that former Vial correct, the inference follows, that after the commencement of the judgment of blood on the maritime power and maritime colonies of France and other European kingdoms, a judgment of war and bloodshed would begin to be poured out on the countries watered by the Rhine and the Danube, and on the sub-Alpine provinces also of Piedmont and Lombardy. Nor, on consulting the chronicle of the French revolutionary wars, shall we fail of discerning the fulfilment of the prediction: and this as distinctly and remarkably as of the prefiguration of the former Vial.

It was in April, 1792, that war was declared by the French National Assembly against the German Emperor; in the September following against the King of Sardinia: and, ere the close of that year, it resulted that both the Rhine began to be notable as one fateful scene of the outpouring of this Vial of blood; and that advance was made by the French towards a second scene destined to suffer under it, the Alpine streams of Piedmont and Lombardy. We read in the annals of that year of the French and Austrian armies conflicting at Mentz, and Worms, and Spires, all situated on the middle Rhine, the very towns that Attila long before desolated; of other armies conflicting in the Austrian Netherlands watered by the Meuse, the last tributary of the lower Rhine; and also of a third French army advancing into Savoy, as far as the foot of the Piedmontese Alpine frontier:—the infection of the Republican democratic spirit having everywhere,—from Holland in the North to Sardinia and Italy in the South,—prepared for, and facilitated, the progress of French invasion. In 1793 and 1794 the scenes of war and bloodshed were still the same. The French army of the Meuse, at first unsuccessful, soon recovered its ground; and, driving the allies out of Flanders, advanced into Holland: uniting it from early in January, 1795, with France; and constituting it, like the latter, as a democracy. In like manner the army of the middle Rhine, at first driven back across the river, returned and repulsed the allies in 1794 beyond it, after battles of tremendous bloodshed. In 1795, again, the carnage was renewed, with various success, on the middle Rhine and its tributaries; from Luxemburg to Mayence and Manheim: and yet again in 1796.—On quitting its valley, the armies of Jourdan and Moreau advanced from Dusseldorf and Treves towards Nuremberg and Ingolstadt on the Danube, as a common centre; victorious at first in many a bloody battle, then at length driven back to the Rhine by the Austrian Archduke Charles; a first commencement to the effusion of the Vial on the Danube.—Yet more the Alpine springs of water were even now to experience its bitterness. The year that we speak of is ever memorable in history, as that of the first Italian campaign of Buonaparte against the allied Sardinians and Austrians. Its course is to be traced from Alpine river to river, along the whole of the North of Italy, from Coni on the Stura to Venice. In the progress of the contest, every river was made a position and battle-field:—during the command of the Austrian general Beaulieu, the Bormida, the Tanaro, the upper Po, the Adda with its bridge of Lodi, and Mincio flowing through the Lake of Garda to the Mantuan fortress; then, the veteran Wurmser having superseded Beaulieu, the Adige and the Brenta; then, on Alvinzi assuming the command, the Adige and Mincio again, at Areola and Rivoli; then, after the Archduke Charles had advanced to the succour of his countrymen, the Tagliamento and Alpine streams of Carinthia. Who can estimate the carnage? The Alpine fountains of water were indeed turned into blood.—At length in 1797, after Venice itself, at the mouth of the Brenta, had felt the sprinkling of the Vial, and shuddered under that terrible menace of the conqueror, “I will prove an Attila to Venice,”—after the Archduke had been again routed in the Carinthian Alpine defiles, and in central Germany too the Austrians had been about the same time defeated, and driven by Moreau and Hoche from Coblentz and Strasburg on the Rhine to Franckfort,—resistance was suspended, and submission made by Austria. And so the treaty of Campo Formio was concluded; by which the whole Valley of the Rhine, the one local scene of this Apocalyptic Vial,—from its source in Switzerland to its mouth in Holland,2—together with the Austrian Netherlands and Palatinate on one side of its central stream, and Wurtemberg, Bavaria, Baden, Westphalia on the other, now united as the Confederation of the Rhine, was all ceded or virtually subjected to France; and also Piedmont and Lombardy, the country noted as another local scene of this Vial, being that of the Alpine fountains of waters.

But the Vial had not yet exhausted itself. In the year 1799, on war recommencing, the fountains of waters became the scene of the celebrated Italian campaign of Suwarrow: and they were again, stream after stream, turned into blood; as the French were repulsed along the whole line of their former victorious progress, from Verona and Mantua to the Maritime Alps and Western sources of the Po. And again, in 1800, they were made the scene of Buonaparte’s second Italian campaign; a campaign memorable by the passage of the St. Bernard, and decisive and terrible battle of Marengo.—Moreover the Danube, the other great frontier river of the old Roman world and Papal Christendom, had now to feel yet more fully than before the outpouring of the Vial. The war was directed by Moreau to Ulm, the first great fortress on the Upper Danube; and thence, still by the line of the Danube, to Ingolstadt;—until at length, in the winter following, the victory of Hohenlinden on the Iser, one of its tributaries, having decided the German campaign, peace was again sued for by Austria, on Moreau’s advancing down the Danube towards Vienna, and for three years re-established.—Nor was it broken by the war of the third German coalition in 1805, except to bring down the residue of the Vial of wrath on the same fated river and the countries watered by it. The campaign of Napoleon is traced along the Danube, from Ulm and Ingolstadt down to Vienna, and the old adjacent camp of Attila. And, the German Emperor having being forced to retire northward from his capital, the battle of Austerlitz, a town on one of the northern tributaries of the same great German river, ended the war, and broke the power of Austria.

So had the Apocalyptic Vial now been felt in the whole range of scene allotted it:—as on the Rhine and Alpine fountains of water, so also on the line of the Danube. Indeed it had so made itself to be felt, as to warrant the bold assertion, that in the whole history of European wars,—from the first rise of the ten Papal kingdoms in the sixth century even to the present time,—there is not recorded any one war in which these three valleys of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Po, had been the ensanguined scenes of anything like such carnage; or, to use the figure of the Apocalyptic prophecy, been so turned into blood.

But what the reason for judgments so terrible? Amidst many national sins, which doubtless concurred to evoke them, there was one thus declared to St. John in the verses following: “And I heard the Angel of the waters say; Thou art righteous, which art and wast, the Holy One, because thou hast judged thus: for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard the altar say; Even so, Lord God Almighty; true and just are thy judgments.”—It does not need that we here enter on the question suggested by this mention of “the Angel of the waters,” whether there be attached in God’s providential government particular angelic agencies to particular countries and localities. Direct Scripture proof seems wanting on the point. And certainly we shall not be warranted in inferring it from the figures of a symbolic vision, like that before us. On the main point, however, set forth in the prophetic intimation, we cannot mistake; viz. on the fact of the judgment of the third Vial being a righteous retribution from God on the countries and nations judged, for murders previously committed by them on his saints and prophets. And the applicability of this reason for judgment on the nations that I have supposed intended in the prophecy,—the Piedmontese and Austrians and French,—is notorious. The cruelties of the French against the associated Waldenses and Albigenses before the Reformation, and the Hugonots and Calvinists after it,—of the Piedmontese and their ruling Princes of Savoy against the Waldenses of Piedmont in every century from the 13th to the end of the 18th, and of the House of Austria against both the Waldenses, the Hussites, and afterwards the Lutherans, in Lombardy, Bohemia, Moravia, the Netherlands, and other of its provinces, have been already briefly sketched in this Commentary. Indeed in the valleys of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Po, there are but few of the localities famed as scenes of carnage and bloodshed in these wars of the Revolution, which may not have other and holier recollections associated with them, in the mind of the Christian traveller, as scenes of the martyrdom or the sufferings of witnesses for the Lord Jesus. Which being the case, and the apparently retributive character of these German wars of the Revolution such that the secular historian cannot refrain from remarking it, we may surely with reason regard these cruelties acted out against Christ’s saints in centuries preceding, as (in part at least) the cause of the retribution, agreeably with God’s frequent method of deferring judgment for sin to a later generation; and consequently the coincidence between the prophecy and the history, in this respect, as well as others, complete.

Let me just remark, ere concluding my exposition of this Vial, on the appropriateness of those appellatives of God used by the Angel of the waters, “Thou that art and wast, the Holy One.” As the eternal One, God could not forget, though He might seem to have forgotten, the cries from the scenes of martyrdom that rose up before Him. As the Holy One, his judgment against the impenitent perpetrators of the murders of his saints could not but issue.—Also, with regard to the answering voice from the altar, let me suggest two not unimportant points indicated by it: first, that in the Apocalyptic imagery the great sacrificial altar remained still, as at the beginning, on the scene before St. John: secondly, that the prophets and saints referred to by the voice, as murdered by the people and princes of Rome Papal judged under this Vial, were thereby recognised as fellow-martyrs, associated in spirit as in place, with the souls previously gathered under the same altar from the persecutions of Rome Pagan, and depicted in the fifth Seal; indeed as the very brethren there and then prophesied of, as confessors afterwards to come, that were to fill up the number of martyrs before the time of final vengeance.—Besides which, it furnishes a connecting link between that early notice of Christ’s martyred confessors in their intermediate state of hopeful waiting after death, and the concluding notice in Apoc. 20:4 of their reward in the millennial enthronization with Jesus Christ. And perhaps too it might indicate, conjunctively with other tokens, that the time of that desired consummation was not so very far off. For, judging from the analogy of the voice in the fifth Seal, this second voice from the altar might be conjectured not to issue till the second series of martyrs was completed, or near completion: after which, the reward could not long tarry.


Elliott, E. B. (1862). Horæ Apocalypticæ; or, A Commentary on the Apocalypse, Critical and Historical (Fifth Edition, Vol. 3, pp. 381–389). Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday.