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This vision of the blood-red horse corrects the idea which we might have entertained from the fact that the Prince of Peace had begun His reign. We should have supposed that the progress and triumphs of the gospel would at least have assured to the earth a deliverance from the miseries of war, but it is not so. Since the time of the first preaching of the gospel to the present moment, there have not been twenty years of continued peace amongst the nations and people with which, as we suppose, the various visions in this Book have to do. And this history of war is not occupied with the wars of Christians against heathen, but with the wars of professing Christians against one another. Before the Reformation, when all the Christians of Europe professed to belong to one Church, there was a constant state of warfare amongst them. Since then the state of war has been quite as continuous — not Protestants with Papists only, but Protestants among themselves. Thus in this country, on the murder of Charles I., an ultra-Protestant republic was established, and the very first thing it did was to go to war with the only Protestant republic then existing — the Dutch. In our own time also we have seen the most powerful republic in the world, a republic more Protestant or Evangelical than any other, engaged in a long and sanguinary civil war. So that we have before us this most remarkable fact, that for 1,800 years the Gospel of Christ and the Demon of War have ridden side by side. For the rider on the red horse does not himself war or fight. He is apparently engaged in stirring up strife in which he personally takes no part. He is no human tyrant or general, but, as it were, the embodiment of the Spirit of War, who has power given to him to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another.

(M. F. Sadler, M. A.)

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KJV: And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.

WEB: When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, "Come!"