her two-thirds.

The green grass of the earth, the trees, &c., are distinguished from
"those men which have _not_ the seal of God in their foreheads" (9:4), and
must therefore symbolize the people of God in the third part of the
empire. As all the green grass is burnt up, while only one-third of the
trees suffer, the latter cannot include one-third of all the trees in the
empire, but only one-third in the parts affected,--the grass indicating the
more weakly, and the trees the more hardy classes of Christians.

The infidel historian, Gibbon, has given the events which fitly correspond
with the symbolization of these trumpets. After the death of Theodosius,
in January, A. D. 395, Alaric, the bold leader of the Gothic nation, took
arms against the empire. The terrible effects of this invasion, are thus
described:--

"The barbarian auxiliaries erected their independent standard; and boldly
avowed hostile designs, which they had long cherished in their ferocious
minds. Their countrymen, who had been condemned, by the conditions of the
last treaty, to a life of tranquillity and labor, deserted their farms at
the first sound of the trumpet, and eagerly assumed the weapons which they
had reluctantly laid down. The barriers of the Danube were thrown open;
the savage warriors of Scythia issued from their forest; and the uncommon
severity of the winter, allowed the poet to remark, that 'they rolled
their ponderous wagons over the broad and icy back of the indignant
river.' The unhappy nations of the provinces to the south of the Danube,
submitted to the calamities, which, in the course of twenty years, were
almost grown familiar to their imagination; and the various troops of
barbarians, who gloried in the Gothic name, were irregularly spread from
the woody shores of Dalmatia, to the walls of Constantinople. The Goths
were directed by the bold and artful genius of Alaric. In the midst of a
divided court, and a discontented people, the emperor, Arcadius, was
terrified by the aspect of the Gothic arms. Alaric disdained to trample
any longer on the prostrate and ruined countries of Thrace and Dacia, and
he resolved to seek a plentiful harvest of fame and riches in a province
which had hitherto escaped the ravages of war.

"Alaric traversed, without resistance, the plains of Macedonia and
Thessaly. The troops which had been posted to defend the Straits of
Thermopylae, retired, as they were directed, without attempting to disturb
t