black horse, were it not that Ezekiel's mimic siege has accustomed us to associate famine with eating bread by weight and drinking water by measure. And when we reach the tumult of winds and sea and the beasts coming up out of the sea, the vision becomes pointless unless the prophecies of Daniel are assumed throughout. It will be understood that the use in Revelation of the Old Testament prophecy is no borrowing or travelling backward; on the contrary, the conceptions of the prophets become intensified by being massed together, and ideas from diverse sources unite in a single new conception. The horror of nature that attends the opening of the sixth seal is given in a single description. Its first clause, as to the sun becoming black as sackcloth and the moon as blood, gives a phenomenon of change three times used by Joel. Then the stars falling from heaven, "as a shaken fig tree casts her unripe figs," unites Isaiah's expression of stars falling "as a fading leaf from the fig tree" with Nahum's application of the image of a shaken fig tree to the succession of fortresses yielded in a panic. Then the detail of the heavens being rolled up as a scroll recalls Isaiah's ideal ruin of Edom; that of the mountains and islands moving and fleeing has been a stock prophetic image; the idea of men's hiding in the caves and rocks has been used in Isaiah's opening manifesto, their crying to the rocks and mountains to fall on them and cover them has been pictured by Hosea. The final climax of the description - that the great day of wrath is come, and who is able to abide it?- borrows the refrain of Joel's rhapsody. Or again: when the angel casts his sickle to the earth, we at once recognise the consummation foreshadowed by Joel; but when the vintage so gathered is cast into the winepress of the wrath of God, the association is with the vision of judgment in the Isaiahan Rhapsody; when again blood comes out of the winepress and reaches even to the bridles of the horses, the image of that rhapsody has become united with an early picture of Isaiah, which represented the Assyrian flood deluging the land and reaching to the horses' necks. The song over Fallen Babylon recalls many such songs of old prophecy;

but before it has gone far the details have entirely changed, and identified the fallen power also with Tyre whose ruin is wept over by the merchant and the shipman: the suggestion is that all the bulwarks of evil are included in the Babylon of Revelation. To take a final example. The New Jerusalem seen with the measured symmetries of its walls and gates is the Jerusalem of Ezekiel. coming down as a bride adorned for her husband is the thought of one of the songs to Zion Exalted in the rhapsody of Isaiah ; from another of these songs come the foundations of precious stones and pearly gates; yet another has foreshadowed the gates open day and night, the Divine Sun in the glory of which nations walk. And the additional picture of the river of water of lifewith the trees of life, yielding their monthly fruits, and leaves for the healing of the nations has brought us back to the visions of Ezekiel.

Even as a literary effect this building up of new conceptions out of details that come to us hallowed with the associations of past literature is eminently impressive. It is another form of that which in secular literature is the chain of 'classic' succession, by which Miltonic poetry will in its every detail echo some classic image or expression of Italian and Roman literature, as these in their turn had made their details suggest their origin in the classic poetry of Greece. The emblematic ideas of prophecy, however, go far beyond literary imagery; and, whether we consider matter or form, it is highly significant that the final outpouring of Scriptural Prophecy should be a Procession of symbolic visions in which the visionary symbols of all preceding prophecy have grown together into their consummation.

APPENDIX I

LITERARY INDEX TO THE BIBLE

In this first Appendix the whole Bible, and the more important parts of the Apocrypha, are divided up into the separate literary compositions of which they are composed. The form of each composition is indicated, and, in cases that admit of it, a suitable title is suggested. The arrangement follows the order in which the books of the Bible stand; the Appendix will therefore serve as a guide to Bible reading where it is desired to read from the literary point of view.

Reference figures (in brackets) are added to previous pages in which particular compositions have been discussed. The Appendix will therefore serve also as an Index to the present work.

It is suggested to the student to mark with pencil in his copy of the Revised Version the divisions and titles here suggested, or to make divisions and titles of his own. It is an immense help to literary appreciation to have the form of a piece of literature conveyed directly to the eye (as is done by the printer in all books except the Bible), instead of having to collect the form by inference while reading.

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