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100) for a full understanding of the books in question--but these references are only made with a view to comforting the oppressed and afflicted with the thought that even the most mighty of earthly powers are shortly to be overthrown by. the advent of the new and glorious era when every injustice and all the incongruities of life will be done away with. So that every reference to the present is merely a position taken up from which to point to the future. Now, since, as we have seen, the Apocalyptists despair of any bettering of the present world, and therefore contemplate its destruction as the preliminary of the new order of things, they look away from this world in their visions of the future; they conceive of other-worldly forces coming into play in the reconstitution of things, and of society generally; and since these are other-worldly forces the supernatural plays a great part in the Apocalyptic Literature. This supernatural colouring will often strike the reader of this literature as fantastic, and at times bizarre ; but this should not be permitted to obscure the reality which often lies behind these weird shadows. Mental visions are not always easily expressed in words; the seer who in a vision has received a message in some fantastic guise necessarily has the impress upon his mind of what he has seen when giving his message; and when he describes his vision the picture he presents is, in the nature of the case, more fantastic to the ear of the hearer than to the eye of him who saw it. Allowance should be made for this; especially by us Westerns who are so lacking in the rich imaginativeness p. x of the Oriental. Our love of literalness hinders the play of the imagination because we are so apt to "materialize" a mental picture presented by another. The Apocalypses were written by and for Orientals, and we cannot do justice to them unless we remember this; but it would be best if we could get into the Oriental mind and look at things from that point of view. Another thing which the reader of the Apocalyptic Literature must be prepared for is the frequent inconsistency of thought to be found there, together with variableness of teaching often involving contradiction. The reason of this is not to be sought simply in the fact that in the Apocalypses the hand of more than one author is frequently to be discerned, a fact which would easily account for divergence of views in one and the same book-no, the chief reason is that, on the one hand. the minds of the Apocalyptists were saturated with the traditional thoughts and ideas of the Old Testament, and, on the, other, they were eagerly absorbing the newer conceptions which the spirit of the age had brought into being. This occasioned a continual conflict of thought in their minds; the endeavour to harmonize the old and the new would not always succeed, and in consequence there often resulted a compromise which was illogical and which presented contradictions. Inconsistency of teaching on certain points is, therefore, not surprising under the circumstances. Again, to realize the significance of much that is found in these Apocalypses one has to reckon with a rigid predestinarianism which was characteristic of the Apocalyptists as a whole. They started with the absolute conviction that the whole course of the world, from beginning to end, both as regards its physical changes and also in all that concerns the history of nations, their growth and decline, and of every single individual, was in every respect predetermined by God Almighty before all time. This p. xi belief of the Apocalyptists is well illustrated in one of the later Apocalypses by these words: "For He hath weighed the age in the balance, And by number hath He numbered the seasons; Neither will He move nor stir things, Till the measure appointed be fulfilled." (ii. (iv.) Esdras iv.