"When he broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth animal shout, 'Come.' Immediately another horse appeared, deathly pale, and its rider was called Plague, and Hades followed at his heels. They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill by the sword, by famine, by plague and wild beasts."          -Revelation 6: 7-8    The breaking of the fourth seal brings us to 246 AD. As we have observed with the opening of the seals thus far, their release indicated social disintegration and chaos. This is what A History of Rome, by H. H. Scullard had to say about it. Plague and Hell    "The fifty years that followed the death of Severus Alexander (235 AD) constitute a dark age in a double sense. They were a period of disaster and crisis for the Roman Empire, and the record which they left of themselves is scanty and broken."    During the fifty year period mentioned above, the third century was a time during which emperor after emperor was done away with by deceit, trickery, and assassination. On the lowest estimate, eighteen emperors were set up and knocked down. This is how Scullard described it:    "But the habit of treason had now fastened like a cancer upon the Roman army."    But it was not only the emperors who were affected, for the entire Empire was falling under the sway of the fourth seal.    "The economic retrogression of the later Roman Empire was a product of the continuous civil wars and foreign invasions of the mid-third century. The effect of these disturbances was all the more disastrous, because they were no longer transient episodes, but became as it were a normal condition of Roman politics. The most harmful consequence of the political convulsions lay not so much in the immediate attendant loss, as in a pervasive sense of insecurity, which fastened on the population of the Roman Empire about A.D. 250 and was never again dispelled."    During this time, even the plagues that were evoked by Revelation came to pass. The Fourth Seal Mu Piscium: 246 AD    "Nature too intervened: for nearly twenty years from the time of Gallus, a plague raged in different parts of the Empire. By 262 it reached Italy and Africa. The plague is alleged to have carried off 5000 victims a day in Rome."    And all over the Empire, the borders were being penetrated such as they had never been before.    "The complete disorganisation of the Roman frontier defences could no longer escape the covetous eyes of the border peoples. On the European continent the trickle of marauders which had never ceased since the days of Severus Alexander now swelled to a flood,... The line of the Danube was carried at either end by Goths and Alamanni. On the lower Rhine,... the Franks broke into European history with devastating force... another newly formed tribe, the Saxons... first ventured into the English Channel with their pirate cutters. On the Euphrates front Shapur took his opportunity in Rome's self-inflicted difficulty. Whether these attacks of different fronts were concerted or not... the Roman defences were everywhere caught at a disadvantage. Next week: The Fifth Seal

Translate to: Français | Deutsch | Italiano | Português | Español

---

If you're on a Mac,  and you're NOT using Netscape, 
you're missing the special font,  by way of TrueDoc Dynamic Fonts,  as seen in this CLIP:

So if you like the font, and you've got the time, download