CHAPTER II. MORAL CONDITION OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

THE trumpet is the symbol of war; as it is written: “Thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.” Jeremiah 4:19. “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” 1 Corinthians 14:8. “They have blown the trumpet, even to make all ready; but none goeth to the battle.” Ezekiel 7:14. “Blow ye the trumpet in Zion. and sound an alarm in my holy mountain.” Joel 2:1.GNT 13.1

We have found that the Seven Trumpets prophesy the consequences of the making of the Papacy, which grew out of the great apostasy from Christianity. The Papacy was made in the Roman Empire by the union of the apostate Church with that republic which had degenerated into an imperial despotism; and the result to the Roman Empire. of the making of the Papacy, was the utter ruin of that empire. This ruin was accomplished by the mighty armies of the peoples of the north, which, in a succession of mighty tides, overflowed the western empire of Rome, in the time covered by the first four of the Seven Trumpets.GNT 13.2

At that time, and for five hundred years before, the Roman Empire, as a whole, had “filled the world.” “Coming last among what are called the great monarchies of prophecy, it was the only one which realized in perfection the idea of a monarchia, being (except for Parthia and the great fable of India beyond it) strictly coincident with the civilized world. Civilization and this empire were commensurate; they were interchangeable ideas and coextensive.”—De Quincey. And when that empire perished, to those unenlightened by the word of God it really seemed, in the violence of the times, that the world was at its end.GNT 13.3

No man can imagine the terror of that time. Of the fall of that empire it has been said that “never had the existence of a nation been more completely overthrown; never had individuals had more evils to endure and more dangers to apprehend. Whence came it that the population were dumb and dead? How is it that so many sacked towns, so many ruined positions, so many blasted careers, so many ejected proprietors, have left so few traces, I do not say of their active existence, but only of their sufferings?”—Guizot.GNT 14.1

Although it was not the end of the world, yet like the fall of Babylon of old, the fall of Rome is full of lessons that indicate exactly the things that will be at the end of the world. For that, with all its terrors, was the consequence of the evils heaped upon society by the making and the working of the Papacy. And when the world shall really end, that, with the terrors that accompany it, will be but the consequence of the evil that is heaped upon the society of the world at this time by the making and the working of the Image of the Papacy. Revelation 13:1-8, 11-17; 14:9-19; 19:11-21. And as the Beast itself is the standard of comparison in all things respecting the making and the working of the Image of the Beast so the state of society and the affairs of the empire and nations of that time of the Beast are a faithful standard of comparison by which to read correctly the course and condition of the nations in these times of the Image of the Beast.GNT 14.2

A brief sketch of the condition of society at that time will therefore be of double value just here: The same corruptions that had characterized the former Rome were reproduced in the Rome of the fifth century. “The primitive rigor of discipline and manners was utterly neglected and forgotten by the ecclesiastics of Rome. The most exorbitant luxury, with all the vices attending it, was introduced among them, and the most scandalous and unchristian arts of acquiring wealth universally practiced. They seemed to have rivaled in riotous living the greatest epicures of pagan Rome when luxury was there at the highest pitch. For Jerome, who was an eyewitness of what he writ, reproaches the Roman clergy with the same excesses which the poet Juvenal so severely censured in the Roman nobility under the reign of Domitian.”—Bower.GNT 15.1

“Everything was determined by auguries and auspices; the wild orgies of the Bacchanalians, with all their obscene songs and revelry, were not wanting.”—GNT 15.2

Merivale. “And now the criminal and frivolous pleasures of a decrepit civilization left no thought for the absorbing duties of the day nor the fearful trials of the morrow. Unbridled lust and unblushing indecency admitted no sanctity in the marriage tie. The rich and powerful established harems, in the recesses of which their wives lingered, forgotten, neglected, and despised. The banquet, theater, and the circus exhausted what little strength and energy were left by domestic excesses. The poor aped the vices of the rich, and hideous depravity reigned supreme, and invited the vengeance of heaven.”—Lea.GNT 16.1

The pagan superstitions, the pagan delusions, and the pagan vices, which had been brought into the Church by the apostasy, and clothed with a form of godliness, had wrought such corruption that the society of which it was a part could no longer exist. From it no more good could possibly come, and it must be swept away. “The uncontrollable progress of avarice, prodigality, voluptuousness, theater-going, intemperance, lewdness; in short, of all the heathen vices, which Christianity had come to eradicate, still carried the Roman Empire and people with rapid strides toward dissolution, and gave it at last into the hands of the rude, but simple and morally vigorous, barbarians.”—Schaff.GNT 16.2

It was impossible that it should be otherwise. By apostasy that gospel had lost its purity and its power in the multitudes who professed it. It was now used only as a cloak to cover the same old pagan wickedness. This form of godliness, practiced not only without the power but in defiance of it, permeated the great masses of the people, and the empire had thereby become a festering mass of corruption. When thus the only means which it was possible for the Lord himself to employ to purify the people, had been taken and made only the cloak under which to increase unto more ungodliness, there was no other remedy; destruction must come. And it did come, by a host, wild and savage, it is true, but whose social habits were so far above those of the people which they destroyed, that, savage as they were, they were caused fairly to blush at the shameful corruptions which they found in this so-called Christian society of Rome.GNT 16.3

A writer who lived at the time of the barbarian invasions, and who wrote as a Christian, exclaims: “The Church, which ought everywhere to propitiate God, what does she but provoke Him to anger? How many may one meet, even in the Church, who are not still drunkards, or debauchees, or adulterers, or fornicators, or robbers, or murderers, or the like, or all these at once, without end? It is even a sort of holiness among Christian people to be less vicious. From the public worship of God, and almost during it, they pass to deeds of shame. Scarce a rich man but would commit murder and fornication. We have lost the whole power of Christianity, and offend God the more, that we sin as Christians. We are worse than the barbarians and heathen. If the Saxon is wild, the Frank faithless, the Goth inhuman, the Alanian drunken, the Hun licentious, they are, by reason of their ignorance, far less punishable than we, who, knowing the commandments of God, commit all these crimes.GNT 17.1

“You, Romans, Christians, and Catholics, are defrauding your brethren, are grinding the faces of the poor, are frittering away your lives over the impure and heathenish spectacles of the amphitheater, you are wallowing in licentiousness and inebriety. The barbarians, meanwhile, heathen or heretics though they may be, and however fierce toward us, are just and fair in their dealings with one another. The men of the same clan, and following the same king, love one another with true affection. The impurities of the theater are unknown among them. Many of their tribes are free from the taint of drunkenness, and among all, except the Alans and the Huns, chastity is the rule.GNT 18.1

“Not one of these tribes is altogether vicious. If they have their vices, they have also their virtues, clear, sharp, and well defined. Whereas you, my beloved fellow provincials, I regret to say, with the exception of a few holy men among you, are altogether bad. Your lives from the cradle to the grave are a tissue of rottenness and corruption, and all this notwithstanding that you have the sacred Scriptures in your hands.GNT 18.2

“In what other race of men would you find such evils as these which are practiced among the Romans? Where else is there such injustice as ours? The Franks know nothing of this villainy. The Huns are clear of crimes like these. None of these exactions are practiced among the Vandals, none among the Goths. So far are the barbarian Goths from tolerating frauds like these, that not even the Romans who live under the Gothic rule are called upon to endure them, and hence the one wish of all the Romans in those parts is that it may never be necessary for them to pass under the Roman jurisdiction. With one consenting voice the lower orders of Romans put up the prayer that they may be permitted to spend their life, such as it is, alongside of the barbarians. And then we marvel that our arms should not triumph over the arms of the Goths, when our own countrymen would rather be with them than with us.”—Salvian.GNT 18.3

These events of the Seven Trumpets are important in another sense also: that is, that the peoples by whom was wrought “the divine judgment of destruction upon this nominally Christian, but essentially heathen, world,” of Western Rome especially, are, in their descent, the great nations of to-day; and are to-day the living subjects of the prophecies relating to our times.GNT 19.1

It is the first four of the Seven Trumpets which relate to the fall of Western Rome. Yet these four trumpets are not themselves an account of the planting of the peoples who have become the great nations of to-day: they are of themselves prophetic descriptions of the most terrible of the mighty invasions and notable events by which the utter ruin of Western Rome was wrought; and by which the way was opened for the planting of the new peoples which have grown into the great nations of to-day. Indeed, these four Trumpets relate to Alaric, Genseric, Attila, and Odoacer, as the leaders that they were, as Daniel 8:5-8, 21 relates to Alexander the Great, rather than to nations as such; even as the standard history of those times and those events has singled out the names of Alaric, and Genseric, and Attila, as deserving of “equal rank in the destruction of the Roman Empire.”—“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Chap. XXXIII, par.5.GNT 19.2