gy represents religious
events.

[Footnote 6: "In earlier times the name of Saraceni was applied by
Greeks and Romans to the troublesome Nomad Arabs of the Syro-Arabian
desert."--_Encyclopaedia Britannica_. In the Middle Ages, however,
Europeans began to call all their Moslem enemies Saracens. It is in the
limited sense that it is here applied, designating the first followers
of Mohammed before the rise of the Ottoman empire.]

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