tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do
hurt.

Vs. 13-19.--At the sounding of the sixth trumpet, a "voice comes from
the four horns of the golden altar," the immediate presence of the
Almighty. This indicates punishment to be inflicted upon men for
corrupting the gospel, similar to the judgment of fire from the "golden
censer," (ch. viii. 5.) The effects of the first woe may be supposed to
reach from the early part of the seventh century to the latter part of
the thirteenth,--the period of Arabian locusts. During the latter part
of this time, the Turks were held in check by the Crusaders, who strove
to wrest the Holy Land from the infidels. The "four angels" are the four
Turkish Sultanies. The river Euphrates is to be taken in this place
literally, as designating the geographical locality of these combined
powers, which were the instruments employed by the enthroned Mediator,
to demolish the remaining part of the Roman empire,--"the third part of
men." The time occupied in this barbarous work of slaughter is "an hour,
a day, a month and a year," about equal to 391 years; or from the year
1281 to 1672. The Western empire had been overthrown by the first four
trumpets, the Eastern nearly ruined under the fifth; and under the sixth
it was finally subverted. The numbers which the Turks brought into the
field are here said to be "two hundred thousand thousand,"--a definite
for an indefinite number as usual, a vast army. And historians tell us
that they were, in fact, from four to seven hundred thousand, and a
large proportion of them cavalry.

From the year 1672, one of their own historians dates the "Decay of the
Othman empire!" Since that date, the Turkish power is well known to have
been straitened by the Russian empire.