Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

“ The four horsemen of the apocalypse rode abroad in the world, taking their toll among the fairest and best of the children of men, only because their was no bridle, no League of Nations to restrain their wild and destructive force. ”

“ Their bodies seemed made of stone. Fatigue had brought them to a condition bordering on catalepsy so, unable to move, they were seeing dimly the rest of the army passing on as a fantastic file—battalions, more battalions, batteries, troops of horses. Then the silence, the night, the sleep on the stones and dust, shaken by most terrible nightmare. At daybreak they were awakened by bodies of horsemen exploring the ground, rounding up the remnants of the retreat. Ay, it was impossible to move! The dragoons, revolver in hand, had to resort to threats in order to rouse them! ”

“ His disordered mind believed that it saw the Beast, the Nemesis of humanity. And how much longer would the evil be allowed to go unpunished?...
There was no justice; the world was ruled by blind chance;—all lies, mere words of consolation in order that mankind might exist unterrified by the hopeless abandon in which it lived! ”

“ The Russian seemed to be reading those that were flaming on the heads of the monster—blasphemies against humanity, against justice, against all that makes life sweet and bearable. “Might is superior to Right!” . . . “The weak should not exist.” . . . “Be harsh in order to be great.” . . . And the Beast in all its hideousness was attempting to govern the world and make mankind render him homage!
“But the four horsemen?” persisted Desnoyers. ”

“ War's toll.
"My last son."
"You are to blame! If we had followed my father's teachings—we would not have left the Argentine, and our sons would have been alive today!"
The aimless path fades with life's span. Nations mourn, while memory glorifies the brave.
"You knew my son?"
"I knew them all!"
"Peace has come—but the Four Horsemen will still ravage humanity—stirring unrest in the world—until all hatred is dead and only love reigns in the heart if mankind."
THE END
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929. ”

“ The fire of the hidden battery passed the length of the avenue, carrying off the living, destroying for a second time the dead, killing horses, breaking the wheels of vehicles and making the gun carriages fly through the air with the flames of a volcano in whose red and bluish depths black bodies were leaping. He saw hundreds of fallen men; he saw disembowelled horses trampling on their entrails. ”

“ These organisms, struggling so tenaciously to regain their hold on life, bringing their reviving energies out into the sunlight, represented but the most minute part of the number mowed down by the scythe of Death. Back of them were thousands and thousands of comrades groaning on hospital beds from which they would probably never rise. Thousands and thousands were hidden forever in the bosom of the Earth moistened by their death agony—fatal land which, upon receiving a hail of projectiles, brought forth a harvest of bristling crosses! ”

“ He had been reading with considerable alarm of the frequency with which well-known persons, politicians, artists and writers, were dying in Paris. War was not doing all its killing at the front; its shocks were falling like arrows over the land, causing the fall of the weak, the crushed and the exhausted who, in normal times, would probably have lived to a far greater age. ”

“ They might exact of them complete sacrifice of life—but to order them to march day and night, forever fleeing before the enemy when they did not consider themselves vanquished, when they were animated by that ferocious wrath which is the mother of heroism! ”

“ We are going to fight for the future; we are going to die in order that our grandchildren may not have to endure a similar calamity. If the enemy triumphs, the war-habit will triumph, and conquest will be the only means of growth. ”

“ In the fearful imagery of the Apocalypse the terrors are deepened by there falling "from heaven a great star burning as a torch," and by the stars of heaven falling "unto the earth as a fig-tree casteth her unripe figs when she is shaken of a great wind." ”

“ The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. His Oriental countenance was contracted with hatred as if smelling out his victims. While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases—those of private life as well as those which envenom the wounded soldier on the battlefield. ”

“ These recently cured men continually brought to her mind those poor beasts. Some had been wounded three times since the beginning of the war, and were returning surgically patched together and re-galvanized to take another chance in the lottery of Fate, always in the expectation of the supreme blow.... ”

“ Running across the fields with the haste of desperation were shrieking women and children. The animals had escaped from the stables, and driven forth by the flames were racing wildly across the country. ”

“ In Which Appear the Four Horsemen The two friends now lived a feverish life, considerably accelerated by the rapidity with which events succeeded each other. Every hour brought forth an astonishing bit of news—generally false—which changed opinions very suddenly. As soon as the danger of war seemed arrested, the report would spread that mobilization was going to be ordered within a few minutes. ”

“ Combat is but one incident in the struggle. Equally necessary are the hardship and self-denial in the form of interminable marches, extremes of temperature, nights in the open air, shoveling earth, digging trenches, loading carts, suffering hunger.... ”

“ And then, with that superstition which danger awakens, he began to fear that his sister-in-law might cause some grave disaster to his son. Divinity, fatigued with so many contradictory prayers was going to turn His back and not listen to any of them. Why did not this fatal woman take herself off?... ”

“ The Apocalypse is the ‘thundering reverberation’ of the Apostle’s mighty spirit, smitten into wrathful dissonance amid its heavenly music by the plectrum of the Neronian persecution. All the horrors of that frightful age of storms, and eruptions, and earthquakes, and falling meteors, and famine, and pestilence, and threatenings of Parthian invasion and imminent massacres of civil war, threw gigantic and blood-red shadows across the Apostle’s page. ”

“ The faces had a desperate expression, with layers of dust and sweat in all their grooves and openings, with beards of recent growth, sharp as spikes, with an air of great weariness showing the longing to drop down somewhere forever, killing or dying, but without going a step further. ”

“ From rifts and rents in nature's worn disguise,
The sackcloth vesture that God's splendour drapes
Crumbles to ashes, and before our eyes
The earth takes fire with beauty and its shapes
Glow in apocalypse that gains the skies. ”

“ The people knew not What manner of man was passing by their doors, Until he passed no more; but in his vision He saw the torments and beatitudes Of souls condemned or pardoned, and hath left Behind him this sublime Apocalypse. ”

“ Ah! we may fret in our impatience, and wonder at the fatality which seems to pursue us. It is no mischief-loving Puck, no evil-minded genie, but a good angel, who thus thwarts us. This is no time to dream and cherish illusions which can but deceive. It is no time for repose. To detach ourselves from all these things which would make this world a satisfaction to us is the labor we must all perform, more or less generously and heroically, if we would one day enjoy the reality of the one dream that never fades—the vision of the Apocalypse ”

“ And when the thousand years are completed, Satan will be loosed out of his prison, and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them to battle: the number of whom is like the sand of the sea. And they ascended on the breadth of the earth, and encompassed the camp of the saints, and the beloved city: and fire descended from God out of heaven, and devoured them. ”

“ This was a fundamental weakness of the Apocalyptic point of view, which found the proper design of the world in its speedy ending and not in its longer continuance, a mistake that unfortunately has been perpetuated in Christian thought as though it were fundamental to it, whereas the victory and the End may well be as far apart as the creation from the victory. The Apocalypse sounds the note of the End without hesitancy or discussion. ”

“ I often wonder whose was the mind that conceived the visions of the Apocalypse; [Pg 124] if we can trust tradition, it was a confined and exiled Christian in a lonely island, whose spirit reached out beyond the little crags and the beating seas of his prison, and in the seeming silent heaven detected the gathering of monsters, the war of relentless forces—and beyond it all the radiant energies of saints, glad to be together and unanimous, in a place where light and beauty at last could reign triumphant. ”

“ Lord have thrown much light on the nature and laws of symbols, by unfolding the principles in accordance with which they are used. The evolving of these has removed from many passages the obscurity which had before caused them to be regarded as enigmatical. There are, doubtless, many portions of the Apocalypse, the meaning of which is as yet only dimly perceived, and which will be more clearly unfolded by the transpiring of future events ”

“ The same hour, is the time of the slaughter of the witnesses. Its epoch was to be marked by a great political revolution, which, in the Apocalypse, is symbolized by an earthquake. In the year in which Christianity was suppressed by France, they beheaded their king, abolished the monarchy, and entirely revolutionized the government. In the reign of terror following, the best blood of the nation was shed like water, and no man of influence could consider his life secure. ”

“ The book of the Apocalypse is unlike any other book of the New Testament—and is full of consolation and instruction to all who read its inspired and prophetic words. It lifts the soul up to the beauty and grandeur of Heaven—shows us in all their glory the joys and triumphs of those who were once like ourselves—but who are now changed and happy with those "who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." ”

“ And there was no kind of message so well suited to meet such a crisis as the form of Apocalyptic, which grew out of similar conditions, and had a tone and temper peculiarly adapted to infuse a triumphant hope in the midst of growing religious despair.49 But let us not fail to perceive that though the Apocalypse was specially designed to meet a great crisis in the life of the early church, its effectiveness does not end there. ”

“ Learned men, however, are not devoid of fancy. Of this fact those who are historically designated Millenarians have given many illustrations from the primitive ages down to our own time. The Doctor's rendering of the name of this book discloses the predominant idea conceived in his imagination and cherished there, that Christ is to appear upon earth in glorified humanity at the beginning of the millennium, and that the Apocalypse is intended chiefly to apprize the church and the world of this momentous event. ”

“ It is then of this kingdom militant, in which conflict with the enemy is still maintained, and war carried on with warring lusts, or government laid upon them as they yield, until we come to that most peaceful kingdom in which we shall reign without an enemy, and it is of this first resurrection in the present life, that the Apocalypse speaks in the words just quoted. ”

“ Nevertheless, even then I was greatly, though vaguely, impressed by the mysterious imagery, the cloudy grandeurs, of the Apocalypse. Deeply uncomprehended, it was, of course, the pageantry of an appalling dream; insurgent darkness, with wild lights flashing through it; terrible phantasms, insupportably revealed against profound light, and in a moment no more; on the earth hurryings to and fro, like insects of the earth at a sudden candle ”

“ The next events in consecutive order, would be the resurrection of the righteous dead, the change of the living, their ascension to meet the Lord in the air, and the infliction of the wrath of God on the wicked.
After the wicked seek to escape from God's presence, the righteous are still unchanged upon the earth. But before the wrath of God is poured upon his enemies, the winds of heaven are to be holden while the angel of the living God seals his servants in their foreheads. ”

“ These [pg 120] have power to shut heaven, that it may not rain in the days of their prophecy: and they have power over the waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with every plague, as often as they wish. And when they shall have finished their testimony, the wild beast that ascendeth out of the abyss will make war with them, and will overcome them, and kill them. And their dead body will lie on the wide street of the great city, which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. ”

“ The answer lies around, written in all colours and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-coloured visions flit round our sense ”

“ And the light of the lamp shall shine no more at all in thee: and the voice of the bridegroom and the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee. For thy merchants were the great men of the earth: for all nations have been deceived by thy enchantments.
18:24. And in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints and of all that were slain upon the earth.
Apocalypse Chapter 19
The saints glorify God for his judgments on the great harlot. Christ's victory over the beast and the kings of the earth. ”