Note (return) — Chapter VI

It is fitting that we notice particularly the agents of destruction employed by this rider. He possesses a sword with which to kill—the same instrument wielded by the rider of the red horse—but it is evident that he uses it with more terrific energy, by reason of which he receives the name Death, or The Destroyer. It is possible, also, that in this case a sword, wielded by the hand of an ecclesiastical power, may be used as a symbol of a spiritual cutting off, or excommunication. The sword of excommunication has been the most terrible ever wielded by human hand. When this pale horseman was careering over the world in the zenith of his power, excommunication and interdiction were the terror of individuals and the scourge of nations. At his word the rights of an individual as king, ruler, husband or father, nay, even as a man, were forfeited, and he was shunned like one infected with the leprosy. At his command the offices of religion were suspended in a nation, and its dead lay unburied, until its proud ruler humbled himself at the feet of the ecclesiastical tyrant who bore rule over the "fourth part of the earth."4