Psalm cxli. 2

description of one coming with the clouds, of hair white as wool, a golden girdle, feet like burnished brass, eyes of fire, is entirely from Daniel; from Ezekiel come the rainbow round about the throne and the four living creatures. The naming of Him who is worthy to open the book as the Root of David' brings up the Branch' and 'Shoot' which have figured in the Messianic pictures of Isaiah; and the other appellative, the Lion of the tribe of Judah,' takes us back to Primitive Prophecy and the Blessings of Jacob on the tribes. It is the same with the symbols that make up the succession of scenes. The book written within and without, the little book to be eaten and found sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly, have both become familiar from the prophecy of Ezekiel; the golden candlestick of Zechariah's vision is multiplied sevenfold for this supreme revelation, and its appendage of the two olive trees now becomes the centre of a separate chapter of allegory; the incense symbolising the prayers of the saints realises the imagery of the psalms; if again the delivered psalmist has cried that God has put a 'new song' in his mouth, the thought finds here a realisation in the mystic new song which none but the sealed of the Lord can learn. The prophetic conceptions undergo alteration and enlargement as they reappear. Zechariah's vision had presented spirits of ministration on the earth in the form of horses, white, red, black, grisled, the colours being a picturesque detail but the horses of Revelation the white, the red, the black, the pale-have each a hue mystically connected with its office of judgment. Prophecy had frequently couched its mysteries under the image of a book sealed up: this consummation of all things presents the unsealing. Among the instruments of woe the trumpets represent the trumpet sound which in the rhapsodies had marked the commencement of panic, the bowls poured out repeat the regular image of the Doom Songs, - the cup of Jehovah's fury. The woes thus hurled upon the world are the 'plagues' of Egypt magnified: when locusts are mentioned, the mystic imagery of Joel is worked into the description; when hail

is pictured, the expression "every stone about the weight of a talent" reads like a momentary finger-pointing to Zechariah's vision of Wickedness pressed down with the talent of lead. Where the form of woes goes outside the Egyptian plagues prophecy has other symbols to contribute, and the burning mountain' recalls Jeremiah's Doom of Babylon, as the star Wormwood the Doom of Babylon in Isaiah. Again, the recital of the number of the saved, tribe by tribe, recalls in its rhythm a similar recital of the portions of the tribes of Ezekiel. Of course a new chord has been struck in the vision that immediately follows: the "great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation, and of all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne." But as the description is continued hallowed associations from old prophecy come in. That they have "washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb," combines Isaiah's promise that sins red as crimson should be as wool with Zechariah's vision of the filthy garments taken in the heavenly court from Joshua that he might be clothed in rich vestments; while the sweetly sounding promise

They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun strike upon them, nor any heat, for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall be their shepherd, and shall guide them unto fountains of waters of life

has been spoken before by the Servant of Jehovah in the Isaiahan Rhapsody. Sometimes St. John's symbols or descriptive touches would fail to produce their effect if separated from the associations they recall. It would seem harsh in so mystic a scene to speak of exact numbers: but the phrase of the old processional psalm

The chariots of God are twenty thousand,
Even thousands upon thousands —

renders it possible for Revelation to make the armies of the horsemen "twice ten thousand times ten thousand." Again we might see no point in the symbol of the balance held by the rider on the

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. Its 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 life— with 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.