And there stood up one of them named Agabus, and signified by the Spirit that there should be great dearth throughout all the world: which came to pass in the days of Claudius Caesar.
Ver. 28. And there stood up one] So Bishop Hooper prophesied, long before, of his own death. For, taking Mr Bullinger by the hand, at his return from Zurich, There, said he, where I take most pains you shall hear of me to be burnt to ashes. And being made bishop, he took for his arms a lamb in a fiery bush, and the sunbeams descending down upon the lamb; rightly denoting, as it seemeth, the order of his suffering, which afterward followed. So father Latimer ever affirmed of himself, that the preaching of the gospel would cost him his life; to the which he no less cheerfully prepared himself, than certainly was persuaded that Winchester was kept in the Tower (in King Edward VI's days) for the same purpose; and it proved so. In November, 1572, appeared a new star in Cassiopeia, and continued sixteen months. Theodore Beza wittily applied it to that star at Christ's birth, and to the infanticide then, and warned Charles IX, author of the French massacre, to beware, in this verse:
" Tu vero Herodes sanguinolente time. "
The fifth month after the vanishing of this star the said Charles, after long and grievous pains, died of exceeding bleeding. Spotswood, Archbishop of St Andrews, a deep and subtle dissembler, who had discouraged, and by degrees rooted out, most of the faithful ministers of Scotland, thought it seasonable (A. D. 1639) to repair into England, where he died a martyr, to the design of bringing in Popery and slavery. And so was the prediction of Mr Walsh, a famous Scotch minister, fulfilled upon him, who in a letter to the bishop, written 1604, told him he should die an outcast.
Great dearth throughout the world] Suetonius and Josephus make mention of this famine. It went hard when this voice was uttered in the marketplace at Rome, Pone pretium humanae carni. Let us set a price on human flesh. At Antioch in Syria, many of the Christians engaged in the holy war (as they called it) were glad, through famine, to eat the dead bodies of their recently slain enemies. This was that Antioch here mentioned in the text.
In the days of Claudius Caesar] Who was an arrant slowbelly, counted for a fool by his own mother Antonia, judged unworthy of the empire by his own sister Livilla, poisoned at length by his own wife Agrippina, and her son Nero, qui dixit boletos Θεων βρωμα ειναι, quod Claudius bolero in numerum Deorum relatus esset. The times were then so bad when he ruled the empire, ut nihil amplius virtus esse putaretur quam το γενναιως επιθανειν, saith the historian. (Dio.) What marvel, then, though God scourged the world with extreme famine; wherein the Church also was inwrapped, but graciously provided for, as ever she is in a common calamity.