can suggest such an interpretation of the minor details and less important parts of the prophecy as shall bring them into harmony with the whole. And this is the attempt which the writer of these pages ventured to make in his previous publications. The following commentary differs only in form from his 'Practical Interpretation,' published nine years ago, in which work the reader will find many points more fully argued out than would have been convenient in such a volume as the present.

What the general reader requires is a short and easy explanation of the meaning of each verse, as it occurs either in the lessons in church, or in his daily private study of Holy Scripture, and some practical reflections upon it. This the author has now endeavoured to supply. It is the result of the reading and thought of thirty-five years, and is the residuum which remains after the rejection, on the ground of inconsistency, of countless tempting suggestions which have come to the writer either from the works of others or from his own searching of Scripture. And, as it has greatly confirmed his own faith in the reality of prediction, the inspiration of Holy Scripture, and the Divinity of Him Who gave it, he hopes and prays that it may have the same effect upon others in these most trying and perplexing times.

There is no lack of able works upon the date, authenticity, and genuineness of the Apocalypse. The reader will find these questions ably and fully treated by Bleek, whose work has been translated into English. The plain statement of Irenæus that the book was written by St. John in the reign of Domitian has not prevented critics, especially those of the naturalistic school, from assigning its composition to an earlier date. Kuenen affirms that it must have been written before A.D. 70, because, from a misconception of the meaning of chapter xi., he considers it certain that the writer speaks of Jerusalem and the Temple as still undestroyed by the Romans. Renan determines that it must have been composed about

A.D. 64, because he conceives it to refer so plainly to the burning of Rome in the reign of Nero. It is satisfactory to find the early date of the prophecy so positively fixed by modern criticism.

Sir Isaac Newton suggested a still earlier date. He accounts for the great difference of style between the Greek of the Apocalypse and that of the Gospel and Epistles of St. John by supposing that the former was written much earlier than the latter. He considers the purer and less Hebraic character of the Greek of the Gospel and Epistles due to St. John's long residence in Asia Minor, and his more frequent intercourse with Greek-speaking people. He also thinks this supposition corroborated by many figurative expressions in the Apostolic epistles, which, he conceives, may have been suggested by the symbolic pictures of the Revelation.1

However this may be, there can be no doubt whatever about the early date of this book. And this being established alike by the testimony of the friends and the enemies of the truth, renders it impossible for the unbeliever to treat the visions of St. John as Kuenen and his school have treated those of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The symbolic pictures are drawn for us, and the pages of history lie open before us. We compare them carefully together, and we feel, to our unspeakable comfort, that in every age from the beginning to the end the testimony of Jesus is the spirit. of prophecy;' that we have in fulfilled and fulfilling prophecy an ever-present miraculous evidence of the veracity and superhuman character of the sacred writings which contain it; and therefore of the supernatural origin of the religion which we profess, and of the Divine nature of its Founder.

Who except God can be conceived to have before him a real knowledge of the remote future, contingent as its events Newton on Daniel, part ii. ch. i.

are upon the thoughts and actions of free moral agents? Who except God can speak of the things which are not yet as though they were? Who except the All-seeing can look out upon the vast panorama of the ages and trace upon the tablet of the prophet's imagination the giant forms of those Wild-beasts of worldly power and hierarchical tyranny which He beholds ever rising up out of the abyss and going into perdition? We need not believe, we do not believe, that the human seer comprehended the full meaning of the pictures which God impressed upon his imagination and commanded him to describe for the support in after ages of the patience and the faith of His saints. But in the evident correspondence of the characters and events of history with the symbolic pictures of prophecy we recognise the reality of prediction, and so the reality of Divine foreknowledge; and we prove the fact that in the Revelation of Jesus Christ' God showed to his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and that He sent and made-them-known-by-symbols (esemanen) by his angel unto his servant John, who bare record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw.'1

A General Sketch of the History of Roman Christendom, from the Age of St. John to the present Day.

According to the writers of the naturalistic school, the Apocalypse was intended by its author to be an allegorical picture of events which he conceived to be close at hand, of the fortunes of the Church in the Roman world up to the time of the Second Advent of Christ, of the destruction of all His enemies, and of the final establishment of His kingdom. Even, therefore, upon naturalistic principles of interpretation—that is to say, regarding the prophecy simply as the unaided human effort of the imagination of St. John-we 1 Rev. i. 1, 2.

D

should be justified in limiting the area of the prophecy, so far as it is intended to be a prediction of historical events, within the confines of the oikoumene, the Roman world of the first century of our era. It is natural to expect in such a work warnings and exhortations applicable to all times and to all men in every part of the world; but, as a prediction intended by its manifest fulfilment to prove the supernatural origin of Christianity, it is equally natural to suppose that it should refer chiefly, if not exclusively, to the Roman world of the Apostle. What then has been the extent and the history of that Roman world?

For about three hundred years from the time when the Apocalypse was written, the Roman world comprised Britain and the whole of Europe up to the Rhine and Danube; Africa north of the range of the Atlas; and Western Asia as far as the Euxine and Caspian seas. The whole of the Empire was grouped round the Mediterranean, and Rome by nature and by its position was the centre of this extensive territory.... Within these limits no state preserved its independence. Its government and its language were exchanged for Roman. Every successive attempt of the Roman Emperors had been directed towards the complete uniformity and the perfect centralisation of the numerous and heterogeneous elements of which their unwieldy dominions consisted. Even the Christian Church imbibed much of the same spirit, and helped on the general result. To the thought of the Roman, whether civil or ecclesiastical, all 'form was formless, order orderless,' save what had grown up under the shade of Rome, and submitted to its bidding.'1

Such was the extent and condition of the Roman world during the first four centuries of our era; and such already, during the latter part of this period, was the influence of the Christian Church in amalgamating its different races, and consolidating the imperial power. Of what, then, was this 1 Brewer's Elementary Atlas, &c., p. 1.

vast Empire the result? and to what state of things did it lead?

6

Freeman, in his interesting General Sketch,' answers these questions for us: The nations which have stood out foremost among all have been the Greeks, the Romans, and the Teutons. And among these it is the Romans who form the centre of the whole story. Rome alone founded a universal empire in which all earlier history loses itself, and out of which all later history grew. That Empire, at the time of its greatest extent, took in the whole of what was then the civilised world, that is to say, the countries round about the Mediterranean Sea, alike in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Roman Empire was formed by gradually bringing under its dominion all the countries within those bounds which had already begun to have any history, those which we may call the states of the Old World. And it was out of the breaking up of the great dominion of Rome that what we may call the states of the New World, the kingdoms and nations of modern Europe, gradually took their rise.''

We may divide the history of the Roman world, therefore-which is, speaking generally, the European world of our day, or what we may call Roman Christendom—into several periods, being guided in making those divisions by the relations existing in each section of the history between the ruling powers of the world and the Christian Church.

1. Thus we have first a period of about three hundred years during which the Emperors of Rome were pagans, and violence and persecution were often resorted to by the Roman magistrates to check the rapid spreading of Christianity among all classes of Roman citizens. These were the ages of open and violent persecution, that is, of pagan persecution, during which the Church, as an army of martyrs, fought her way to supreme dominion as the established religion of the Empire.

Freeman's General Sketch, p. 15.