poor flee in terror. No earthly foe caused their panic. Reverend Elliott said the sixth unsealing was the political revolution caused by Constantine's adoption of Christianity as state religion (the Milan decree of 313). He accepted that the language used in Revelation sounded like a reference to the Great Day of Yahweh rather than an earthly political change. But, he said, this could not be so, else the story must end at that point. This was a glimpse of the real end yet to come. In Elliott's scheme, the sealing of the righteous remnant and the worship with palms were included as part of this sixth unsealing. The 144,000 Servants of God These were the Christians (Jewish or otherwise) marked with a seal by Christ so that their sufferings and martyrdom would not go in vain. Not everyone who claimed to be a Christian would be recognised as such by Christ the Lamb. Constantine's sponsorship of Christianity created a new breed of career Christian. The true faith of "the vicarious and propitiatory atonement of the Son of God" was replaced by ritualism, by Platonist allegory and by superstitious practices "as if the sacraments when duly accepted from the priest's hand were potent drugs, or chemical antidotes, infallibly dispersing the poison inherited from Adam!" When Edward Elliott revisited the topic, in connection with Revelation 14:3, it was to emphasise that, even under the Protestant dispensation, only an elect remnant understood free grace and could "learn the new song". He traced their history through Philipp Jakob Spener, Richard Hooker, Richard Baxter, George Whitefield and John Wesley. One Third destroyed In Reverend Elliott's view, anyone who tried to interpret the prophecies as wholly literal, or wholly symbolic, would be disappointed. The secret was to relate the symbols to the historic reality. In the case of the first four trumpets, that reality was the Gothic invasions. In symbolic terms one-third of the land, trees, sea and rivers would be destroyed. The third in question he identified as Britain, Gaul, Spain, Italy and North Africa as this was one part of the threefold split of the Empire between Constantine, Lucinius and Maximin. The four invasions he listed as:- Goths under Alaric and Rhadagaius - to 410CE Vandals under Genseric - to 439 Huns under Attila - to 453 Heruli under Odoacer - to 493 This scheme was criticised. The details of the disasters prophesied did