avenging judgments: for these awful symbols, taken from fearful
convulsions in nature, are usually indicative of the tremendous
judgments of God.




CHAPTER XII.


1. And there appeared a great wonder in heaven: a woman clothed with the
sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve
stars;

2. And she, being with child, cried, travailing in birth, and pained to
be delivered.

Vs. 1, 2.--The Apocalypse, besides the _three_ parts into which it is
divided by its divine Author, (noticed in ch. i. 19,) is also
susceptible of division into _two_ parts. With the eleventh chapter
terminates the _abridged_ prospective history of the church and of the
world, emblematically represented under the seals and trumpets. The
seventh seal, when opened, disclosed all the contents of the sealed
book, and also introduced the seven trumpets. But we have followed the
series of the trumpets in order, to the end of the world,--interrupted
only by the isolated history of the "little book; which, treating of
events which were matter of history under the first two woe-trumpets,
_could not be sealed_. Now at the twelfth chapter, without regard to the
seventh, or any other of the trumpets in particular, we are furnished
with a second and enlarged edition, as it were, of the most important