how they trusted in God, the living God! How steadfastly they looked to the great First Cause through all second causes! How is it now, in this age of the apotheosis of nature, the adoration, almost, of science, the industrial arts, and the gold to which they are made so mightily to minister? We are men of the third century of New England. Let us not forget the lesson of the first and second centuries. Think of the first age. Call up the image of the Pilgrim band. We may almost hear the Atlantic waves beating against the rock-bound coast, and see the weary ship appear with its Heaven-guided company, and catch the sound of their mighty anthem, "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory for thy mercy and for thy truth's sake." The worthies of the second age appear, and, with their more advanced civilization, thought, and liberality, speak the same sentiment through men as diverse as the rigid Edwards and the more hopeful Chauncy. Let the men of the third age give the response. Let not the cares of the world, nor the delusions of partial science, nor the worship of second causes, nor the decencies of external morality, nor even the excitements of social reform, lead us to forget to worship the God of our fathers, and crave the grace proffered through his Son. Whilst so many causes give the mind a horizontal turn, and in this line so many of our interests lead, let us not slight the beacon fingers that point upward to God and eternity. Edwards may help to teach us this lesson the more, if we can look upward through a more cheering creed than was his.

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ART. V. THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN.*

THE "Revelation" of St. John is, to the majority of readers, still a riddle. We welcome, beforehand, the attempt, coming from one of the freer sections of the Church, to remove the seventy times seven-fold seal with which a book, to us so impressive and practical, as well as poetical, has for ages been sealed, by those whom “much learning”

* A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, the Divine. By THOMAS WHITTEMORE. Boston: J. M. Usher. 1848. 12mo. pp. 388.

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Whittemore's Commentary.

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(or much ignorance) had made "mad." The appearance of a popular commentary on the Apocalypse, in style and size corresponding to the Notes of Barnes and Livermore, is, to us, an interesting, and, we would fain think, a promising, phenomenon in our modern Church history. It is one of our favorite notions, that the Revelation of St. John, the Divine, is destined, one day, to become a popular book; we mean a book which the people can understand, appreciate, and admire. That the work before us will help toward this result we do not doubt, notwithstanding our dissent from several of the writer's positions. For he respects, on the whole, poetry and common sense in his interpretation far more than does any treatise on the subject in English with which we are acquainted. Even this liberal critic, indeed, seems to us somewhat too literal, at times, and prosaic in the tone and tendency of his explanations; but, on the whole, we are grateful for the volume he has given us, and glad to speed it on its mission, which we trust will be successful, so far as to draw a wide and rational and greatly enlightened attention to a long abused part of Scripture.

We differ from Mr. Whittemore on two points. He maintains that John wrote his Revelation fifteen or twenty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, in the reign of Nero. Not considering the external evidence as decisive, he relies upon internal. We do not think he makes out his case. We should like, if we had room here, to shake apart his loose logic on the subject; but we must hasten on to bring forward presently our own view on a more important topic, the general character of the Apocalypse and its meaning for us and for all time. We would submit, however, for the present, to Mr. Whittemore and his readers, whether it is really credible that Nero was the great beast, the scarlet-colored beast on which the mystic woman rode, the seven-headed, ten-horned beast, one of whose heads was apparently wounded to death and then healed, — that Nero was the terrible beast whose enmity to the Lamb occupies so much of the book, and which not till after the destruction of Rome (or Paganism, or Popery, whichever it be) was cast into the lake of fire. We submit whether it would not have been wiser in this case, as in the case of the "Six hundred and sixty-six," to say, "Let him that hath understanding give the name and number of the beast; we have not that understanding." For ourselves, we apprehend that the

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assigned as the number of the kings is purely a poetic Hebraism. It seems to us that the greater proportion of Mr. Whittemore's eight arguments prove no more than that John describes the destruction of Jerusalem, as we, and all, admit he does; but simply by taking a position in imagination out of time, whence he can see the past as future and the future as past. As to resemblances between the Revelation and Apostolic writings confessedly earlier than the destruction of Jerusalem, we see not why John may not have borrowed from them, as well as they from John. The idea, that Peter's sure word of prophecy" refers to the Apocalypse, is refuted by Peter himself, who says, a verse or two after, that he means prophecy of "old time.’ The argument, that a man of ninety or a hundred years would not be apt to display such "luxuriance of imagination," is met by the facts, that John was in a peculiarly exciting situation, that he is very greatly indebted to the imagery of the ancient prophets, and that, as an Apostle, he was open to special inspiration. Finally, we commend to Mr. Whittemore a passage or two from Bishop Prettyman, who, after adducing Irenæus, Origen, Eusebius, and several ancient fathers, all of whom placed the banishment of St. John to Patmos in the latter part of the reign of Domitian, says: "It appears from the book itself, that churches had already been established for a considerable time in Asia Minor, since St. John reproaches them, in the name of Christ, with faults which do not take place immediately; he blames the church at Ephesus for having left its first love... ... Now the church at Ephesus, for example, was not founded by St. Paul till the latter part of the reign of Claudius; and when he wrote to them from Rome in the year 61 or 62, so far from reproaching them with any defect of love, on the contrary he commends their love and their faith."

But Mr. Whittemore's argument involves the assumption, that all those prophecies of the Saviour and his apostles respecting his second coming, which John's so much resemble, relate to the destruction of Jerusalem only, and this brings us to our second topic of dissent. We hold it a signal error to believe that the second coming of Jesus meant only, or chiefly, the destruction of Jerusalem. Undoubtedly it meant that, but it meant infinitely more. That was the signal, the beginning, of his kingdom; but it stretches forward into eternity. Mr. Whittemore overlooks the important fact, that the de

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scent of the New Jerusalem, the setting up of the great white (mediatorial) throne, the renovation of the heavens and the earth, the sitting of Christ's followers on their thrones, which were to take place, according to this Commentary, immediately upon the downfall of the holy city, do not after all take place till the destruction of Rome, which (according to any calculation) must date some centuries later. Our Christian faith, our poetic sense, and our common sense alike revolt at the idea of explaining that language about the earth and sea giving up their dead as a mere figurative way of describing the moral resurrection of men in this world. And we must protest here, generally, against the paradox, which vitiates the Commentary before us, of making the solemn "Revelations" of John and of Jesus preach (even negatively) the Universalist doctrine, we mean the predestined, certain, inevitable salvation of all souls.

But, commending Mr. Whittemore's book, for all this, as an interesting, ingenious, and suggestive work, we must proceed to present our own view of the whole subject.

We do not propose, in this article, to give an exposition of the Apocalypse, which has been done in two earlier numbers of our journal.* We wish simply to make such general remarks on the book as may help to prepare the way for a right study and a practical application of it.

The Apocalypse, as we have said, though called a "Revelation," is, to the majority of readers, still a riddle. And if the literal mode of interpreting it be the right one, must we not think that it was a great misnomer on the part of the author, or of the Church, his editor, to call the book a Revelation? Literally interpreted, prosaically approached, experience would seem to declare that it veils far more than it reveals; or, if this mysterious character must be supposed to belong to the very nature of a spiritual revelation, then let us amend the phrase by saying, that the Apocalypse, literally expounded, only makes visible the very darkness it proposed to dispel, and may well justify the title given to a celebrated commentary upon it, Revelation Revealed," in other words, Illumination Illuminated.

If the mode in which the Apocalypse has been so generally handled in the Church, by learned and simple, be the correct one, vain was it, one would think, that the writer, at the out

Christian Examiner for May, 1830, and September, 1844.

set, represented the Holy Spirit as intending to show unto his servants the things which must shortly come to pass; vain was it, that, at the conclusion, he was told not to 66 seal" his book, because the time was at hand. It certainly may be said to have been, from the beginning, a "sealed book," and to be so at this day, with multitudes, and not unlearned readers alone. It was not altogether a frivolous or foolish remark of Voltaire's, that "Sir Isaac Newton wrote his comment upon the Revelation to console mankind for the great superiority he had over them in other respects." Luther, imaginative as he was, when he would indulge himself in that way, gave up this book for a perfect puzzle, and the reason was, that he wanted to reduce it to a statement of facts. "Let whoso can make any thing of it make what he can," says he; "I can make nothing."

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It is probably known to most of our readers, that the Revelation was the last of the sacred books admitted into the volume of the New Testament. The slowness of its admission into the canon, which was not ecclesiastically completed till after several Councils, seems to have been owing, not so much to want of evidence in regard to its authorship, (though the opinion of antiquity was divided on that point, some maintaining it to be the work of one John, an Ephesian elder,) as to a feeling that its obscurity or its enigmatical character made its insertion in the public Church Scriptures unadvisable, a feeling strengthened by the fact of its having been made the occasion of confirming, even so early in the history of the Church, the notion, against which an Apostle had warned his brethren, that the day of the Lord was literally at hand. that, even in those early ages, the Apocalypse seems to have been a sort of sealed book, and since it has been published, so to speak, and in the hands of all, as an inspired, authoritative, didactic production, it has too generally been made worse than a sealed book, between ignorant fanaticism on the one hand, and learned folly on the other.

So

Many and various Symbolical Dictionaries have been prepared for the purpose of guiding the reader through the, socalled, mystical writings of the Bible, such as the prophecies of John and Daniel, and particularly for furnishing rules by which any one, no matter whether he has the poetic spirit or not, may understand and apply the figures (both arithmetical and rhetorical) with which these writings are so filled and marked. These keys have been made out, generally, by