And he cried with a loud voice.—Fearlessly and plainly declaring the Truth.
Saying to all the fowls.—Birds, Greek.—Matt. 24:28.
That fly in the midst of heaven.—First to the “eagles,” the far-sighted ones, the Little Flock, and then, by extension, to all who live, mentally, on any plane above the grossly material.
Come [and gather yourselves] BE GATHERED together unto the GREAT supper of [the great] God.—We should look for applications appropriate to the symbolical book we are studying, even though it develop later, as it will, that these passages will have a literal and terrible fulfilment in a deluge of actual bloodshed, of which the European War is but a preliminary.
19:18. That ye may eat the flesh of kings.—Five of these kings or rulers are enumerated in Rev. 6:4. Doubtless the reader has eaten them, in the symbolical sense. They are there to be eaten.
And the flesh of captains.—Lesser commanders, enumerated in Rev. 8:7-12. No doubt the reader has eaten these also.
And the flesh of mighty men.—Warriors. These warriors are referred to in Rev. 9:7, 9, although there mentioned under the name of locusts. If the reader has not eaten (appropriated, absorbed, digested) the account, the task should be undertaken at once, or something will be missed.
That the Lord made no mistake in selecting the Locust as a symbol of the Methodist system of blindly following leaders is clear from the following extract from the works of a traveller: “While sojourning in Syria I was told that the whole country round Mt. Lebanon was dismayed one year by the news that a vast army of marching locusts was coming from the eastern desert. The governor of the district ordered a regiment of soldiers to aid the people to construct a great rampart of heath bushes to be set on fire as the locusts came up to it, hoping thus to save the gardens of Beyrout. These locusts always hopped straight ahead, deviating neither to the right nor left, and on coming to a house went up its stone walls, over it and down it, as if it were a level place, and in such inconceivable numbers that an American resident described the noise of the great host passing over the roof as like to that of a tremendous hailstorm. At every green leaf on the way each took a bite, and then went on for the next one to take his bite, until in an incredibly short time not a green thing could be seen. When they reached the prepared heaps of heath, and these were set on fire, the locusts marched on without pausing, until in a brief time they put the bonfires completely out. As the sea was not far off everybody hoped that they would take to [pg 297] surf bathing. And so they did. Just as certain injurious political crowds among us can always be always depended upon to march up to the polls and vote the straight ticket, when the vanguard reached the waves, like all good true locusts, in they hopped, followed by all the rest, till the billows seemed to roll only grasshoppers; nor did the scene end until the last of the rear guard had skipped over the heaps of his dead comrades to make his last jump into the blue waters of the Mediterranean.”—Jer. 51:64.
And the flesh of horses.—Did you not see the horses in Rev. 9:17, 18, and did you not eat them, fire, jacinth, brimstone and all?
And of them that sit on them.—Did we not find two hundred millions of these horsemen, and did you not eat them?—See Rev. 9:16.