prophet, and the Christian prophet is ranked beside Moses and the angels as the servant of God κατ ἐξοχήν. The order of prophets is second only to the apostles.
If it is the vocation of the prophet to reveal and emphasise the faith, it is the corresponding duty of the martyr to be loyal at all costs to that faith in the killing times. Hence the martyr or con- fessor is, next to the prophet, the most prominent figure in the landscape of the Apocalypse. One of the tests proposed (most un- fairly) by an anti-Montanist in the second century as a criterion of Montanist prophecy was its capacity for producing martyrs. Did it inspire a faith equal to the stress of persecution? Was the religion it fostered strenuous enough to provoke persecution? The crisis of the imperial cultus under Domitian seemed to John at any rate to demand an attitude of passive resistance! on the part of Christians which involved the risk of death. -Neither rebellion nor suicide was to be contemplated as a means of escape, and flight was out of the question. Whither could one flee from the Caesar? The Christian must be prepared to be faithful unto death, and if there is any dis- tinction among Christians drawn by the prophet’s mind it lies not between Jewish and Gentile Christians, but between the mfrtyrs on the one hand and the rank and file of the church upon the other. The martyr is primus inter pares ; an exceptional place and space is assigned him for his persistent fidelity. At the same time the extravagant prerogatives of the martyrs and the confessors in later Christian belief lie outside the purview of the Apocalypse. The prophet’s homage to them is partly due to the exceptional circum- cumstances of the ‘‘killing ” time, and the permanent element un- derlying it is the truth (witnessed by Zoroastrianism in its own way, cf. Encycl. Rel. and Ethics, i. 210) that history is neither caprice nor blind fate, but a moral order in which sacrifice for the sake of Christ and loyalty to God are not water spilt upon the ground—a moral order, too, whose end is bound up with the person of Jesus Christ as Lord and Redeemer. It was perhaps inevitable that the expression of this great religious conception should, by its very emphasis, lead to some exaggeration. The flood-tide which sub- merges some truths isolates others in a position of abnormal pro- minence. Thus the Apocalypse, which is a tract for the bad times of persecution, views the philosophy of history as catastrophe rather
1 With xiii. 9-10 compare the Jewish high-priest’s prayer on the day of atone- ment (Jer. Jom. v. 42 ο.), that ‘neither this day nor through this year may any captivity come upon us. . . . And as for Thy people Israel, let no enemy exalt him- self against them.”