The Revelation of Jesus Christ - The Herald

the last judgment; and might thus anticipate, as the early Christians did [erroneously], that
it would follow speedily on the breaking up of the Pagan Roman Empire."
Mr. Lord, commenting on these words, says:
"That the dejection of Satan and his angels was to be a woe to the earth and the sea,
indicates that the decline of the Pagan party into a minority, was to exasperate its priests
and rulers, and lead them to more violent methods to overwhelm their antagonists and
reinstate themselves in authority."
And this is indeed what history records as following this victory.
"The predictions of a woe to the land and the sea from the overthrow of the idolatrous
party had a signal fulfillment in the exasperation and violence of the Pagan chiefs toward
their subjects generally, as well as the Church, from the defeat of Maxentius to the final fall
of Paganism. Maximin, the emperor of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, suspended the
persecution on the fall of Maxentius, and the grant of toleration to the Church by
Constantine and Licinius, but soon renewed it with far greater violence, and an avowed
purpose of exterminating the Church from his dominions. Persons of distinction were
appointed to the Pagan priesthood in all the cities, the rites renewed with pomp and zeal,
and the magistrates and people given to understand that they could do nothing more
acceptable to the prince, than to assail and slaughter the Christians. They accordingly
plotted against them in extraordinary ways, suborning the most profligate accusers, and
traducing them by the most infamous imputations, by which all the magistrates of all the
provinces were induced to assail and persecute them with greater fury than at any former
period.
"Licinius, who succeeded him in the empire of the East, in 319, renewed the war on them,
and continued it with the utmost virulence till his fall in 323. He began by encouraging
false accusations against the bishops; then enacted arbitrary laws prohibiting them from
assembling in synods, entering each other's churches, or communicating with one another,
in order that he might generate pretexts for putting them to death. He banished all who
held the Christian faith from the palace, and from his retinue, and drove them into exile;
and threatened death to all who should thereafter profess Christianity. . . . At length he
proceeded to open and direct war on the ministers and members of the churches,
subjecting them to the most horrible tortures, slaughtering them, in great numbers, and
endeavoring to exterminate them from his dominions. Multitudes fled from the cities to
the country, to deserts, and to mountains. Some escaped to the Western Empire, and the
whole would have soon shrunk from sight or been devoured, had not Constantine
interposed and extricated them from his power."
Thomas Newton, in his Dissertations on the Prophecies, has thus quoted from a letter
addressed to Eusebius by Constantine concerning this event of Church history that
fulfilled this prophecy: