o have lost their lives. The time that we are
endeavoring to establish, then, must be later than the seventeenth
century. Louis died in 1714. Persecutions continued from time to time in
France, with considerable severity, until about the middle of the
century. "Soon after this ... the flowing of heretic blood ceased,
though an effort was made in 1765 by the Popish clergy to resist the
tendency to toleration by a remonstrance to the king." History of
Romanism, p. 608. A few individual cases of persecution may have
occurred later in other countries; but in the main we are safe in
pointing to about the middle of the eighteenth century for the general
cessation of these religious _murders_. We will now consider the nature
of the first plague.

The pouring out of this vial produced the most painful malignant ulcers
upon the human body. Such ulcers are evidently not political calamities;
for the symbol is drawn, not from nature, but from human life. Still, it
is not drawn from a human being as a whole (in which case religious
events would be symbolized), but only from his body. What, then, is the
analagous object of which the human body may stand as a proper
representative? Evidently, the mind. We would naturally pass from the
bodily to the mental; and what painful ulcers are to the one, marring
its beauty and filling it with burning anguish, such are blasphemous
opinions and malignant principles to the other.

Considering the time for this plague pointed out above, the student of
Revelation who is acquainted with the history of the past will scarcely
fail to discern at once, in the striking points of this symbol, those
horrible principles of infidelity, atheism, and licentiousness, which
were spread so extensively over Europe during the latter half of the
eighteenth century, and which were the most efficient causes in bringing
about the fearful convulsions which followed in the French Revolution.
That all may understand this matter in its proper light, however, it
will be necessary to state some of the facts respecting this "noisome
and grievous sore" that fell at that time upon the inhabitants of
Europe. In writing upon the causes that led up to the French Revolution,
Mr. Wickes gathered the following facts of history mainly from the
Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge, under the articles headed
_Philosophists_ and _Illuminati_. I will quote his own language, as it
is very pointed.

"Philosophists was a name given to se