ttle.

10. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were
stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five
months.

11. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the
bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but
in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

The symbols of this trumpet are of a very peculiar character and
peculiarly combined. They are not drawn entirely from the natural world,
showing that we are not to look for their fulfilment in political events
alone; neither are they drawn from human life in any such way as to
indicate events in the religious history of the church. The leading
characters in it, however, are living, active agents of such a
destructive nature as to entitle them to the designation of a woe.

The first object presented in the vision is a "star" fallen to the
earth. Our translation conveys the idea that this star was in the act of
falling; but in the original it is different, being there represented as
having fallen, its dejection from heaven to earth being complete. The
only place that it appeared in view was on the earth, and there it is
described as fallen. A star is a symbol either of a civil ruler or of a
religious teacher, the symbols in connection deciding whether it is set
in the political or the ecclesiastical firmament. But this was not such
a star as He who walketh in the midst of the golden candle-sticks
holdeth in his right hand, but it was a _fallen_ star, indicating that
it was the propagator of a false faith.

To this star was given a key. In the Gospels the same figure is
employed, where the ministers of Christ are represented as possessing
the keys of the kingdom of heaven, showing that they acted in his name
and by his authority. How appropriate, then, is this symbol as applied
to a false teacher, who possesses, not the keys of the kingdom of
heaven, but, instead, "the key of the bottomless pit"! Thus, under the
symbol of the star and the key, we have the teacher and his authority
set forth. Armed with this authority, this false teacher "opened the
bottomless pit; and there rose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a
great furnace; and the sun and air were darkened by reason of the smoke
of the pit." In the Scriptures Jesus is represented as the Sun of
righteousness, while "the light of the _glorious gospel_ of Christ"
illuminates the world. But here we have something of the opposite
charac