[Shall] see their dead [bodies] BODY.—“As if though silenced in death they continued witnesses still.” (Cook.) Take note of the horrible effect upon France of their effort to exterminate the Scriptures. “The more deeply the French Revolution is considered, the more manifest is its preeminence above all the strange and terrible things that have come to pass on this earth. Every ancient institution and every time honored custom disappeared in a moment. The whole social and political system went down before the first stroke. Monarchy, nobility and [pg 176] church were swept away almost without resistance. The good things of this world,—birth, rank, wealth, fine clothes and elegant manners,—became worldly perils, and worldly disadvantages. The people waged a war of such extermination with everything established, as to abolish the common forms of address and salutation, and the common mode of reckoning time, abhorred ‘you’ as a sin, and shrank from ‘monsieur’ as an abomination, turned the weeks into decades, and would know the old months no more. The demolished halls of the aristocracy, the rifled sepulchres of royalty, the decapitated king and queen, the little dauphin so sadly done to death, the beggared princes, the slaughtered priests and nobles, the sovereign guillotine, the republican marriages, the Meudon tannery, the couples tied together and thrown into the Loire, and the gloves made of men's and women's skins: these things are most horrible.” (T. H. Gill, The Papal Drama.)—D. 537.
Three days and an half.—See Rev. 11:11.
And [shall not] suffer NOT their dead bodies to be put in [graves] A GRAVE.—On the contrary, this very attempt “served to arouse Christians everywhere to put forth new exertions in behalf of the Bible.”—Smith.
11:10. And they that dwell upon the earth.—The people of France, then infidels, without any hopes except for the present poor earth-life.
[Shall] rejoice over them, and make merry.—Literally fulfilled when the Assembly proscribed the Scriptures.
And [shall] send gifts one to another.—Literally fulfilled, the gifts being expressions of joy over the sudden “liberty,” “a custom usual in times of festivity.”—Neh. 8:10, 12; Esth. 9:19, 22.—Cook.
Because these Two Prophets tormented.—By continuing to proclaim the coming Reign of Christ and His Church.
Them that dwelt on the earth.—The classes whose hopes and destinies are earthly.
11:11. And after three days and an half.—Three years and one half.
The Spirit of life from God entered into Them.—In a symbolic sense They were “raised from the dead.”—Ezek. 37:5, 9, 10, 14.