most holy relic, to be kept, not in a gold or silver chest, but in » golden heart, that is, a heart imbued with gentle charity.” Here we have a Christian message couched poetically and effectively in terms of a familiar superstition which neither Luther nor his readers any longer shared. A similar explanation may fairly be applied now and then to John’s poetic use of the superstitions about amulets, talis- mans, secret names,! and the like, although it is often a fair question. how far his language is faded metaphor, and whether he did not sincerely attach himself to some of the current beliefs which under- prop his imagery. Otherwise we must allow that details are often used for their poetical impressiveness, which depends on the power of starting old associations and of suggesting dim, mysterious beliefs-
His relation to history is equally free. Nothing could well be more jejune than to suppose that he is covertly conveying political information to his readers, or laboriously spelling out the course of providence from the politics, warfare, and meteorology of his age. History does not move in neat systems of seven, and even apocalyptic prophecy—for all its artificial dogmas and tendency to produce an im- pression by means of prediction—forms no calendar of exact events to come, much less any chronicle of recent happenings. It is the dogmatic programme which is uppermost in apocalyptic. The seer, by virtue of his inherited ideas, knew how external events must move; his schematism was more to him than anything else, and this accounts for the large haggadic element in such writings (c/. Baldensperger, 100, 117 f.). But John’s prophetic impulse in the revelation of Jesus to his spirit overbore the tendency to rest the weight of his message on exact disclosures of the future. “For the mass of his audience,” George Eliot says of Savonarola (Romola, ch. xxv.), “all the pregnancy of his preaching lay in his strong. assertion of supernatural claims, in his denunciatory visions, in the false certitude which gave his sermons the interest of a political bulletin.” John’s forecasts, such as they were, did not aim, at any rate, at the gratification of curiosity, and even his dogmatic pro- gramme was little more than a traditional form of expressing his absolute certainty that the God of Jesus Christ would conquer evil.
(0) Asa product of Asiatic Christianity towards the close of the first century, no less than as a member of a literary class which was usually heterogeneous in eschatology, the Apocalypse further reflects. the religious syncretism which prevailed especially in Phrygia and
privileges of the Divine cult after death, instead of the pagan cults which they~ abjure.