part at least, by the manner in which the wisdom of God has been pleased to group together the events of prophecy—­a grouping which is always appropriate, but might have been different had the plan of representation so required.  The final judgments which precede the millennium, for example, which in chaps. 15 and 16 are set forth under the figure of seven vials full of the wrath of God, might have been, by another mode of distribution, represented under the number two.  Many think they are thus represented in chap. 14:14-20.  Another prophetic number, occurring in Daniel and the Apocalypse, always as a designation of time, is the half of seven.  Thus we have “a time, and times, and half a time,” that is, three years and a half (chap. 12:14); or in months, “forty and two months” (chaps. 11:2; 13:5); or in days, “a thousand two hundred and threescore days” (chaps. 11:3; 12:6).  Compare Daniel 7:25.  Again, answering to these three years and a half, we have the three days and a half during which the two witnesses lie dead.  Chap. 11:9, 11.  The number six, moreover, from its peculiar relation to seven, represents the preparation for the consummation of God’s plans.  Hence the sixth seal (chap. 6:12-17), the sixth trumpet (chap. 9:14-21), and the sixth vial (chap. 16:12-16) are each preeminent in the series to which they belong.  They usher in the awful judgments of Heaven which destroy the wicked.  Here, perhaps, we have the key to the symbolic import of the number of the beast, 666.  While it represents, according to the principles of Greek numeration, the number of a man, it seems to indicate that upon him fall all the judgments of the sixth seal, the sixth trumpet, and the sixth vial.

Four is the natural symbol for universality.  Thus we have the four living creatures round about the throne (chap. 4:6), perhaps as symbols of the agencies by which God administers his universal providential government (chaps. 6:1, 3, 5, 7; 15:7); the four angels standing on the four corners of the earth and holding the four winds (chap. 7:1); and the four angels bound in the river Euphrates (chap. 9:14).  So also in the fourfold enumeration, “kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation,” or its equivalent.  Chaps. 5:9; 10:11; 11:9; 14:6; 17:15. A third and a fourth part, on the contrary, represent what is partial.  Chaps. 6:8; 8:12; 9:18.

Twelve is the well-known signature of God’s people.  Compare the twelve tribes of the Old Testament and the twelve apostles of the New; the woman with a crown of twelve stars (chap. 12:1); the twelve gates, twelve angels, twelve foundations of the New Jerusalem, the twelve times twelve cubits of its wall, and its tree of life that yields twelve harvests a year (chaps. 21:12, 14; 22:2).  We have also the same number combined with a thousand, the general symbol for a great number.  From each of the twelve tribes of Israel are sealed twelve thousand (chap. 7:4-8), making for the symbolical number of the redeemed twelve times twelve thousand (chap. 14:1, 3); and the walls of the New Jerusalem are in every direction twelve thousand furlongs (chap. 21:16).