The obscurity of the Revelation arises both from its literary form and from the mystical character of its contents. The Apocalyptic form is so foreign to our way of thinking, and the mysticism is so peculiarly Oriental and Jewish, that these are apt to perplex rather than enlighten us. The Apocalyptist, deeply absorbed in the later prophecies of the Old Testament, especially those of Daniel and Ezekiel, and his mind steeped in the dreams and images of current Jewish apocalypses, found under the influence of the Spirit a fitting sphere for his prophetic fervor in a series of strange symbolic visions such as belonged to the fashion of his time. The chief symbolism throughout is that of the Old Testament, quickened and vivified by the thought of the New,—for it is everywhere assumed that the mysteries of the former dispensation find their only adequate solution in the supreme and final testimony of Jesus the Christ,(4)—but the atmosphere of the visions is that of Apocalyptic, which curiously enough has contrived to cast its own peculiar glow upon all the Old Testament teachings and thus create a new symbolism out of the old. And even when many of the symbols are assumed to be drawn in their present form from apocalypses then current in the Jewish world but which are no longer extant, and these to be derived in part from Babylonian and Persian sources, as held by one class of interpreters, they are yet found to have become so assimilated by the Jewish mind that they reflect the later development of Old Testament thought. These visions of the seer, like shadows cast upon the foreground of the future, depict in outline great fundamental truths or pervasive principles of the divine government that are, and are to be, manifested in multiple facts in the progress of the ages. It is not the purpose of the visions to disclose the facts themselves, for that belongs to the development of history, but rather to furnish the means for interpreting the facts, when once they appear, by the exalted standard of the divine ideals. There are, indeed, a few cardinal facts of the future that are kept well in the foreground, such as the second coming of Christ, the triumph of God’s kingdom, and the end of the present world; but these belong to the content of previous revelation as well, and are not new or peculiar to this book. The content of the visions is generic and not specific, and whenever we depart from broad generalization and attempt to enter into detail in our interpretation, we destroy the beauty and force of the lesson conveyed, and wander into the field of speculation concerning things that were never intended to be revealed, if the analogy of all other prophecy can be relied upon as a guide.(5) For though the Apocalypse undoubtedly contains an element of predictive prophecy, yet such prophecy is not history written before its time, but a divinely inspired and profoundly discriminative pre‐view of certain dominant issues in the future that belong to the purpose of God, and are the resultant of well established principles of the divine government—issues that stand out to the prophet’s illumined eye in bold relief against the sky‐line like the headlands of a continent amid the surrounding mists which envelop them.