enduring the same fate. All fellowservants are brethren, but not all brethren reach the level of fellowservants. 

The expression “killed²⁷ as they were” is a further confirmation that time must still elapse before those formerly slain under prior seals would receive their resurrection change. It is also an indication that the fifth seal will countenance rigors similar to those of the fourth. 

The Sixth Seal (A.D. 1789–1878) 

Verse 12: 

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; . . . 

The “earthquake” is not a mere earth tremor or trembling, either great or small; it refers instead to a violent eruption of the lower strata of society long chafing under centuries of repression and misrule, resulting in the temporary overthrow of the established norm of law and order and its replacement with a ten-year reign of terror. This earthquake, which introduces the sixth seal, is the French Revolution (1789–1799). (A sharp distinction and separation should be noted between the earthquake of the sixth seal and the still greater earthquake to come at the consummation of the Gospel Age—Rev. 16:18.) The fall of the Bastille was the tocsin announcing this upheaval in France. Conditions leading up to this climactic event are treated by John Abbott in his book The French Revolution,²⁸ which is excerpted below. 

The Bastille 

“The monarchy was now so absolute that the king, without any regard to law, had the persons and the property of all his subjects entirely at his disposal. He could confiscate any man’s estate. He could assign any man to a dungeon for life without trial and even without accusation. To his petted and profligate favorites he was accustomed to give sealed writs, lettres de cachet, whose blanks they could fill up with any name they pleased. With one of these writs the courtiers could drag any man who displeased them to one of the dungeons of the Bastille, where no light of the sun would ever gladden his eyes again. Of these sealed writs we shall speak hereafter. They were the most appalling instruments of torture despotism ever wielded.

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27. “And it may safely be said that human and Satanic ingenuity were taxed to their utmost to invent new and horrible tortures, for both the political and religious opponents of Antichrist; the latter—heretics—being pursued with tenfold fury. Besides the common forms of persecution and death, such as racking, burning, drowning, stabbing, starving, and shooting with arrows and guns, fiendish hearts meditated how the most delicate and sensitive parts of the body, capable of the most excruciating pain, could be affected; molten lead was poured into ears; tongues were cut out and lead poured into the mouths; wheels were arranged with knife blades attached so that the victim could be slowly chopped to pieces; claws and pinchers were made red hot and used upon sensitive parts of the body; eyes were gouged out; finger nails were pulled off with red hot irons; holes, by which the victim was tied up, were bored through the heels; some were forced to jump from eminences onto long spikes fixed below, where, quivering with pain, they slowly died. The mouths of some were filled with gunpowder, which, when fired, blew their heads to pieces; others were hammered to pieces on anvils; others, attached to bellows, had air pumped into them until they burst; others were choked to death with mangled pieces of their own bodies; others with urine, excrement, etc., etc.” (The Time Is at Hand, Studies in the Scriptures, 1959 ed. [East Rutherford, N.J.: Dawn Bible Students Association, 1889], Ser. 2, pp. 346–347.                                                                 

To those desiring a fuller account of these awful times and scenes, the following are commended: Macauley’s History of England, Motley’s Dutch Republic, D’Aubigne’s History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, White’s Eighteen Christian Centuries, Elliot on Romanism, and Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

28. John S. C. Abbott, The French Revolution (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), Vol. 1, pp. 53–57.