a definite religious experience which assumed in part the form of a trance or rapture. Vision here, as elsewhere, in apocalyptic litera- ture is occasionally the literary form of allegory and tradition ; but not always. The psychological problem is to explain the relation between this inner consciousness of inspiration and the curious imaginative forms in which the prophet seemed to think it needful to embody his Christian conceptions. He employs a large number of suggestive figures and metaphors, drawn from the Old Testament and elsewhere, in spite of their literal inadequacy ; these phantas- magoria it is impossible to regard as mere symbols, but on the other hand they are hardly to be taken literally in the case of John any ‘more than that of the later prophets of Judaism (cf. Riehm’s Mes- sianic Prophecy, pp. 228 f.) from whom he borrowed many of them. ‘Often the best way to explain them is to let them appeal to the religious imagination, since it is in this way that they are likely to ‘disclose any permanent truth of which they may be at once the -vesture and the vehicle. But whatever they are, they are suggestives not dogmatic ; they are poetic coefficients rather than logical defini- tions of the author’s faith.
The comparative independence with which, like the psalmists (cf: ‘Cheyne’s Origin of the Psalter, pp. 285, 286), he occasionally em- ploys “anthropomorphic, or, let us say at once, mythic expressions, is a consequence of the sense of religious security which animates ”’ him. These expressions helped out his Christian consciousness by their vivid realism and their time-honoured associations in the circles for which he wrote. He could embody in them some deeper truths of his own faith. In this weird world of fantasy, peopled by a rich Oriental imagination with spectral shapes and uncouth figures,! ‘where angels flit, eagles and altars speak, and monsters rise from sea and land—in a world of this kind many Asiatic Christians of that -age evidently were at home, and there the prophet’s message had to find them. Often the point of an allusion lies in some half- forgotten contemporary belief; the terms of it may be superstitious enough, but the aim is predominantly spiritual. An apt illustration of this procedure in the sphere of popular religion is afforded by Luther’s well-known use of the superstition about the wood of the -cross. ‘The cross of Christ,” he writes in one of his letters, “is parted throughout all the world, and every one meets with his portion. Do not you therefore reject it, but rather accept it as the
1 Even grotesque symbols of an Oriental cast would appeal to Hellenic readers -who were familiar, ¢.g., with the”Aptepis πολύμαστος of Ephesus, on whose statue “winged bulls and rams appear (cf. Apoc. iv. 5 f.).