ive that the books are now
sealed up, and that the sentence of God remains unchanged henceforward to
the end of the year. The same thing is signified by the two Goats, upon
whose foreheads the High-Priest yearly, on the day of expiation, lays the
two lots inscribed, _For God_ and _For _Azazel__; God's lot signifying the
people who are sealed with the name of God in their foreheads; and the lot
_Azazel_, which was sent into the wilderness, representing those who
receive the mark and name of the Beast, and go into the wilderness with the
great Whore.

The servants of God being therefore sealed in the day of expiation, we may
conceive that this sealing is synchronal to the visions which appear upon
opening the seventh seal; and that when the Lamb had opened six of the
seals and seen the visions relating to the inside of the sixth, he looked
on the backside of the seventh leaf, and then saw _the four Angels holding
the four winds of heaven, and another Angel ascending from the _East_ with
the seal of God_. Conceive also, that the Angels which held the four winds
were the first four of the seven Angels, who upon opening the seventh seal
were seen standing before God; and that upon their holding the winds,
_there was silence in heaven for half an hour_; and that while the servants
of God were sealing, the Angel with the golden Censer offered their prayers
with incense upon the golden Altar, and read the Law: and that so soon as
they were sealed, the winds hurt the earth at the sounding of the first
trumpet, and the sea at the sounding of the second; these winds signifying
the wars, to which the first four trumpets sounded. For as the first four
seals are distinguished from the three last by the appearance of four
horsemen towards the four winds of heaven; so the wars of the first four
trumpets are distinguished from those of the three last, by representing
these by _four winds_, and the others by _three great woes_.

In one of _Ezekiel_'s visions, when the _Babylonian_ captivity was at hand,
_six men_ appeared _with slaughter-weapons_; _and a seventh_, who [5]
appeared _among them clothed in white linen and a writer's ink-horn by his
side_, is commanded to _go thro' the midst of _Jerusalem_, and set a mark
upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and cry for all the abominations
done in the midst thereof_: and then the six men, like the Angels of the
first six trumpets, are commanded to slay those men who are not marked.
Conce