THE PREFACE. HE Supreme God has deigned to give revelations whereby He seeks to communicate His purposes to men, and thus, by a gentle process, to bend their minds to His mighty and irresistible will. Nevertheless, myriads of professing Christians are content to reach the end of life in total ignorance of these gracious disclosures, while accredited ministers of Christ are too frequently unable to expound them. But, since God has thought fit to set them before us, are we not deliberately charging Him with folly while. we neglect them? And is not the significance of our conduct much the same if we persist in perverting them from their proper meaning and use-as, for instance, those do who can find little in the Apocalypse save events that had become history before it was written, and doctrines that are fully taught in other parts of Scripture; although the Lord Himself declares that the object of the Book is "to show unto His servants the things that must shortly come to pass" ?1 Rev. i. 1. With the future, then, dating from the time when it was written, and with that future alone, the book is concerned. And we do not violate this rule, as we have been accused of doing, when we interpret the Travailing Woman, in the twelfth chapter, of the Church in affliction. For although her sorrows had commenced many years before John saw the vision, yet they were still going on at the time, and were destined to continue for some eighteen hundred years afterwards. And again, may we not attribute much of the apathy of Christendom, the Laodicean spirit with which we are surrounded, and the worldliness of popular Christianity, to the fact that believers will not give themselves to those studies and contemplations which God has provided for them. A passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews seems to force such a conclusion upon us. The inspired writer complains of the difficulty of communicating what he wishes to say concerning Melchizedec, because those to whom he is writing are dull of hearing and unskilful in the Word of Righteousness; and their condition draws from him a severe rebuke, followed by the exhortation; "Wherefore, leaving the word of the beginning of Christ, let us press on unto perfection; not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God, of baptisms of instruction, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of dead persons, and of eternal judgment.” 1 We may observe that this list of foundations includes nearly all the doctrines ordinarily heard from our pulpits. And yet the Apostle compares those who are incessantly occupied with them to one who wastes. labour and time by repeatedly laying down and taking up again the foundation of a building, when he ought to be raising the superstructure. He, therefore, solemnly urges the Hebrews to pass on from first principles to perfection, and presses his exhortation with the words "For it is impossible in the case of those who were once enlightened, and tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and tasted the 'Heb. vi. 1, 2. |