(^^iryo^'^ 
 
 
 
THE EPISTLES TO 
 THE SEVEN CHURCHES. 
 
A POPULAR EXPOSITION 
 
 THE EPISTLES 
 
 SEVEN CHURCHES OF ASIA, 
 
 E. H. PLUMPTRE, D.D., 
 
 VICAR OF BICKLEY ; 
 
 NGS COLLEGE, LONDON 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & CO. 
 
 713, BROADWAY. 
 
 MDCCCLXXVIII. 
 
 (Al/ rights reserved.) 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY I 
 
 II. 
 THE EPISTLE TO EPHESUS 53 
 
 III. 
 THE EPISTLE TO SMYRNA 87 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO PERGAMOS I05 
 
 V. 
 THE EPISTLE TO THYATIRA 1 33 
 
 VI. 
 THE EPISTLE TO SARDIS 155 
 
 VIL 
 THE EPISTLE TO PHILADELPHIA 173 
 
 VIII. 
 THE EPISTLE TO LAODICEA 193 
 
I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
I. 
 
 I DO not purpose entering on a discussion 
 of the authorship or date of the Revelation 
 which claims to have been written by John the 
 Divine (6 6eo\6jo<i).^ I accept the all but 
 unanimous tradition of the writers of the ante- 
 Nicene Church that it was the work of the 
 
 ^ The title thus given to the Apostle claims, however, a few- 
 words of notice. The view commonly taken by Patristic writers 
 and modern critics that it represents his special character as the 
 special witness of the incarnation of the divine Logos ("the 
 IVord was God") is, of course, probable enough in itself and 
 has much to recommend it. It should not be forgotten, how- 
 ever, that it may have had a local starting-point. The researches 
 of Mr. Wood {Ephesiis, Theatre, p. 23) have brought to light in- 
 scriptions connected withthe great Temple of Artemis which shew 
 that this very title was given to the highest order of priests con- 
 secrated to the service of the goddess. They were pre-eminently 
 the theologi, or divines, who unfolded to the worshippers the 
 inner meaning of her culttis. The name may therefore have 
 been at first the embodiment of the thought that the Evangelist 
 occupied in the service of the true God the position which they 
 occupied in that of the Ephesian goddess, that he was the witness 
 of the Truth, of which her worship was the counterfeit, and could 
 tell men how and through whom the Eternal had manifested 
 Himself both through nature and among men. 
 
2 Introductory, 
 
 beloved disciple, partly because the tradition in 
 this case is sufficiently early (a.d. 170) to hav.e 
 something of an historical value (I refer espe- 
 cially to the Muratorian Fragment), partly on 
 account of the internal coincidences of thought 
 and language, on which I have dwelt elsewhere.^ 
 I hold, with not a few recent commentators, that 
 it belongs to a date earlier than that of the per- 
 secution under Domitian, to which Patristic 
 tradition for the most part assigned it ; that it 
 was written certainly before the destruction of 
 Jerusalem, probably during a time in which the 
 Asiatic Churches were suffering from the perse- 
 cution of which we have traces, as affecting that 
 portion of the Empire, in the Pastoral Epistles 
 (2 Tim. i. 8, 15 ; ii. 3 ; iii. 12), yet more defin- 
 itely in the First Epistle of St. Peter (i. 6, 7 ; 
 ii. 12 ; iii. 14-17 ; iv. i, 12-19), and in that 
 Epistle to the Hebrews which I have been led 
 to assign to the same period.^ The Neronian 
 persecution was obviously more than the effect 
 of the cruelt}^ or policy of an individual tyrant. 
 It was only possible through the excitement, 
 the suspicion, the hatred, which pervaded men's 
 minds in the imperial city as they found them- 
 
 ^ Bible Educator^ i. pp. 27, 79. 
 
 ^ See papers in the Expositor on " The Writings of Apollos," 
 vol. i. pp. 329-348, 409-435- 
 
Introductory. 3 
 
 selves face to face with the power and life of the 
 new society that bore the name of Christian ; 
 and that hatred and suspicion were as certain 
 to be felt in every city of the Empire as in 
 Rome itself. 
 
 About this period, then, probably shortly 
 after the death of Nero (say circ. a.d. 68 or 69), 
 John, who speaks of himself — as Paul (Phil. i. i) 
 and Peter (2 Pet. i. i) and James (James i. i) 
 had done before him — as the servant i^ovKo^^^ i.e. 
 the slave) of Jesus Christ, dropping the name 
 of apostle where there was no pressing necessity 
 to assert his authority as such, wrote the book 
 to which he prefixed the title of Revelation. Ex- 
 ceptional as that title now is among the Books 
 of the New Testament, we must remember that 
 neither the word nor the thing were exceptional 
 in the apostolic age. It was by *' visions and 
 revelations of the Lord" (2 Cor. xii. i) that 
 each Apostle was carried forward from truth to 
 truth and received fresh insight into the work he 
 had to do. In this way Stephen had seen the 
 Son of Man standing at the right hand of God 
 (Acts vii. 55, 56), and Peter had been taught 
 that the gate of Eternal Life had been thrown 
 open to the Gentiles (Acts x. 11), and Paul had 
 been carried up to the third heaven and the 
 Paradise of God (2 Cor. xii. 1-4, 7), and had 
 
4 Introductory. 
 
 from time to time beheld the form of the risen 
 and ascended Christ (Acts xxii. 17, 18 ; ^xviii. 9), 
 or of some angel sent by Him (Acts xxvii. 23). 
 In this way prophets and apostles had been 
 taught what till then eye had not seen nor ear 
 heard, neither had it entered into the heart 
 of man to conceive, (i Cor. ii. 9, 10.) Each 
 mystery of the faith was imparted by a new 
 revelation. An apocalypse extending to the far 
 future, to the coming of the Lord, to the signs 
 of its approach, is implied as given to St. Paul 
 in 2 Thess. ii. 1-12 ; in i Tim. iv. 1-3 ; and 
 to St. Peter in 2 Pet. ii. 10-13. It would 
 hardly be a paradox to say that a state com- 
 monly so abnormal as that of trance or ecstasy 
 was part of the normal life of the Apostles 
 of the Faith. John, when he addressed his 
 Revelation to the Churches of Asia was claim- 
 ing no exceptional privilege. They would not 
 be startled by it as by something altogether 
 extraordinary. 
 
 The writer describes himself further as one 
 " who bare record " {i/juapTvprjae) " of the Word 
 of God and of the testimony " {/uLaprvpLo) *' of 
 Jesus, and of all things which He saw" (i. 2). 
 I cannot bring myself to confine the application 
 of these words to the contents of the Book to 
 which they are thus prefixed. The Apostle 
 
Introductory. 5 
 
 had, for some greater or less length of time, 
 been working and preaching in these Asiatic 
 Churches, and describes himself as having done 
 a work which they would recognise as truly his. 
 If we accept the Fourth Gospel as either being 
 by St. John, or as, at least, representing the 
 characteristic features of his teaching, we note 
 that the idea of witness, record, testimony, is 
 throughout the keynote of that teaching. When 
 the spear pierced the side of Jesus, " he that 
 saw it bare record, and his record is true " 
 (John xix. 35). He closed his Gospel with the 
 declaration, " This is the disciple which testifieth 
 of these things and wrote these things " (John 
 xxi. 24). I do not, of course, assume that the 
 Gospel was written before the Revelation, but 
 I infer from the prominence given to the word 
 fjuaprvpcd and its cognates, alike in Gospel, 
 Revelation, and Epistles,^ that it had all along 
 been characteristic of his oral teaching, and 
 that that teaching is referred to here. And, 
 assuming this, I cannot hesitate to see in 
 " the Word of God " to which he bore witness 
 more than the spoken Message of the Gospel. 
 He who beheld in Christ the " Word made 
 
 ^ The word ** witness," in its noun or verb form, is foui/l not 
 less than seventy-two times in the writings ascribed to St. John. 
 It is pre-eminently his characteristic word. 
 
6 ' Introductory. 
 
 flesh," who, even in the earHer stage of thought 
 to which the Apocalypse belongs, saw Him who 
 was faithful and true, on whose head were 
 many crowns, who was clothed with a vesture 
 dipped in blood, and whose name was called 
 THE Word of God (Rev. xix. 11-13), was not 
 likely in his opening words to use that name 
 in any lower sense than when he wrote after 
 wards that, " In the beginning was the Word " 
 (John i. i), or that the "Word of Life" was 
 that which he had seen with his eyes, and had 
 looked upon, and his hands had handled 
 (i John i. i). 
 
 And he writes to the Seven Churches of Asia. 
 What chain of events brought the Apostle to 
 that region we know not. The silence of Scrip- 
 ture is nowhere more remarkable than in 
 connection with the period of his life from the 
 time of the Council at Jerusalem (Gal. ii. 9) 
 to that in which we find him as an exile in 
 Patmos. All that we can say is that it is 
 probable that the sacred charge of watching 
 over the mother of his Lord kept him for several 
 years in comparative seclusion, and that he 
 appears to have left Jerusalem before St. Paul's 
 last visit there, and not to have arrived at 
 Ephesus when the last extant Epistle of that 
 Apostle was written to Timotheus. We can. 
 
Introductory. 7 
 
 however, form a fairly full picture of the state 
 of things which he found on his arrival, and 
 which probably had drawn him thither that 
 he might fill up the gap that had been left by 
 the departure or the death of the two great 
 Teachers to whom these Churches had till then 
 looked for guidance. A time of fiery persecu- 
 tion, of fierce outrage, and foul calumnies; a 
 time also of sects and schisms, evil men and 
 seducers waxing worse and worse, deceiving 
 and being deceived ; the polity and discipline 
 of the Church thrown into confusion ; the 
 teaching of St. Paul forgotten, or, worse still, 
 exaggerated and distorted ; the very teachers 
 and bishops of the Church becoming the leaders 
 of sects and schisms, — this is what we find 
 portrayed in the writings which must have 
 preceded his arrival (on the hypothesis which 
 I have adopted as to the date of the Apocalypse) 
 but a few short years or months. And the 
 storm of persecution falls on him also, and he 
 finds himself at Patmos. The tone in which 
 he speaks of himself as being there "for the 
 sake of the Word of God " (I do not abandon 
 the higher sense even here) " and of the 
 testimony of Jesus Christ " (i. 9) suggests the 
 thought that he had been banished there by 
 some judicial sentence. Rejecting, as unsup- 
 
8 Introductory. 
 
 ported by any adequate evidence, the tradition 
 that that sentence came from the mouth of 
 Domitian, or of any other Roman emperor, I 
 fall back upon an assumption which is in the 
 nature of the case far more probable, i.e. that 
 he had been condemned by some local authority, 
 most probably by the Proconsul of Asia, who 
 had his seat at Ephesus ; and I find in the com- 
 parative leniency of the sentence as a substitute 
 for that death, which fell on so many believers 
 elsewhere, even in the Asiatic Churches (Rev. 
 ii. 13), a token of the continued influence of 
 those who, like the Asiarchs that were friends 
 of Paul, and the town-clerk of Ephesus, were 
 so far favourable to the Christian society as 
 to be unwilling to join in violent measure'.: for 
 its extirpation. (Acts xix. 31, 37.) There is no 
 proof, so far as I know, that Patmos was at 's 
 period one of the ordinary places of deportati 
 though it is true that any one of the Cyclades 
 or Sporades might have been chosen for this 
 purpose, and so far as the Book now before us 
 suggests an inference it points rather to solitary 
 exile and comparative freedom. There is no 
 trace of the cnstodia of a state prisoner, no 
 indication of chains, or of sentinels in guard 
 over him. 
 
 At such a time the thoughts of the exile 
 
Introductory. 9 
 
 would naturally turn to the Churches from 
 which he was thus for a time separated. He 
 would know the excellences, the trials, the perils 
 of each. They would be prominent in his 
 anxieties and prayers. He would crave to 
 know what were the right words to speak at 
 such a time to his companions in tribulation. 
 The Churches to which he is told to write were, 
 perhaps, actually those with which, and w^ith 
 which alone, he had been personally connected; 
 but it is also possible that the habit of his mind 
 was to group whatever was presented to it under 
 definite numerical relations ; and that the num- 
 ber Seven, so full of sacred and mystic meaning, 
 the symbol of completeness-and of calm, seemed 
 to him to include all the chief types of spiritual 
 life with which he had been familiar. Certain 
 lS that that number is nowhere more prominent 
 3 clothed with mystic meaning than it is in 
 this Book. Over and above the seven golden 
 candlesticks and the seven stars which corre- 
 spond to the Seven Churches, we have the seven 
 lamps of fire (Rev. iv. 5) and the seven Spirits 
 before the Throne (Rev. i. 4), the seven 
 seals (Rev. vii. i) and trumpets (Rev. viii. 2), 
 the seven thunders (Rev. x. 3) and angels 
 (Rev. XV. i) and vials (Rev. xv.) ; the beast 
 with the seven heads (Rev. xii. 3), the seven 
 
lO Introductory, 
 
 mountains (Rev. xvii. 9), and the seven kings 
 (Rev. xvii. 10). The seven Churches thus 
 chosen were accordingly for him the types and 
 representatives of the whole family of God. It 
 may be said, as our induction from the seven 
 messages will shew, that there has never been 
 a Christian community, flourishing or decaying, 
 exposed to the dangers of persecution or pro- 
 sperity, that may not find its likeness in one or 
 other of them. 
 
 And to these Churches he writes with a salu- 
 tation which the Epistles of St. Paul had made 
 familiar — " Grace and peace'' — and which, so far 
 as we know, had been used by none before him. 
 Men felt that it was truer and deeper than the 
 old 'xalpeiv of the Greeks in either of its senses ; 
 more full of meaning than the " Peace " which 
 had been the immemorial greeting of the 
 Hebrews. (Luke x. 5.) It brought with it the 
 truth that ''grace," the favour of God, was 
 more than joy, and was the fountain of all 
 peace ; it did not suggest, as yaipeiv^ like our 
 Farewell, had come to do, the idea of parting. 
 In any case it is interesting to note the fact 
 that St. John, to whom both the other greetings 
 must have been familiar in the Church at 
 Jerusalem (Acts xv. 23, and James i. i), throws 
 himself thus freely into Pauline phraseology. 
 
Introductory. 1 1 
 
 If I mistake not, even this coincidence, trivial 
 as it may seem, is at least of some weight 
 against the theory of some recent critics,^ that 
 the Apocalypse is a polemic anti - Pauline 
 treatise. The individuality of the writer asserts 
 itself, however, in the words that follow. It is 
 not, as with St. Paul, " Grace and peace from 
 God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ," 
 but, ^^ from him which is, and which was, and 
 which is to come,'* — or, as the Greek has it, 
 with a singular disregard of the technical rules 
 of grammar — airb rod 6 wv koI 6 rjv koX 6 
 
 ip')(^6/jL€V0<^. 
 
 It would be idle to ascribe this departure 
 from usage to any ignorance of those rules, and 
 to infer from it the early date of the Apocalypse, 
 as written before the Galilean disciple had 
 become familiar with the language in which 
 he wrote. It is clear that the Apostle looked 
 on the Divine Name, though it took the form 
 of words that admitted of inflection, as having 
 a character as sacred as that of Jehovah or 
 Adonai had been in his mother tongue, not 
 losing its majesty by changing its unapproach- 
 able loftiness. The LXX. translation of 
 Exod. iii. 14 had made 'O '/2N (" He that is ") 
 
 ^ I may name M. Renan as the ablest and most distinguished 
 advocate of this theory, in his " L'Antechrist, " pp. xxix. 34, 
 
1 2 Introductory . 
 
 the Greek equivalent for the I AM of our 
 English Bible; and that was, therefore, 
 naturally the first word in the strange compound 
 which the Apostle formed to express the 
 Eternity of God. But that Eternity, that Ever- 
 present Being, might be thought of as stretching 
 into the infinite past and the infinite future, and 
 two other names were wanted. The Greek 
 verb of being, however, had no past participle, 
 and therefore he had to fall back upon its 
 imperfect tense, " the He was." It might, of 
 course, have supplied him with a future 6 eVo- 
 fxevo^, but from that word he turned aside, partly, 
 it may be, because it would have suggested the 
 thought of coming into being at some future 
 point of time, partly because Hebrew phrase- 
 ology had led him to find the thought of futurity 
 in the verb "to come." And so we have 
 6 ipxofJievo^, " he that cometh." It is possible 
 that the familiar "he that cometh" of the 
 Gospels {e.g. Matt. xi. 3 ; xxiii. 39), applied 
 by the Jews of Galilee and Jerusalem to the 
 expected Christ, might have helped to determine 
 the choice of that word ; but the distinct men- 
 tion of the Christ himself in the next verse 
 forbids us to refer the word even remotely to 
 the thought of his second Coming to judge the 
 world. The one idea which the Apostle strove 
 
Introductory. 1 3 
 
 to embody was that of the Eternal Now, as 
 contemplated in the time before the world, and 
 as it shall be when God shall once more be all 
 in all. If St. John uses a familiar phrase, it is 
 as with a significance altogether new. It is 
 scarcely possible to think of this Divine 
 Name without remembering that inscription so 
 strangely like, so yet more strangely different, 
 of which Plutarch speaks as being in the Temple 
 of Athene (the Egyptian Isis) at Sais : " I am 
 all that has come into being, and that which is, 
 and that which shall be " {"Eyco elfjn irav to 
 jeyovo^, Kol ov, koI iao/xevov), " and no man hath 
 lifted my veil." Alike in contemplating the 
 mystery of existence as spreading through the 
 infinite past into the infinite future, they differ 
 in all else as widely as any two creeds that the 
 world has ever seen. The one, in its identifica- 
 tion of God with the universe, in its postulate 
 of an " Ever-becoming " instead of an Eternal 
 Being, in the absolute exclusion of personality 
 by its use of the neuter form of the participles ; 
 in its assertion that the Deity thus described is 
 the Unknown and Unknowable is the despairing 
 creed of the Pantheist. The other is the pro- 
 clamation of the name of One who is not only 
 the I AM THAT I AM (Exod. iii. 14), but the 
 Everlasting Father, revealing Himself through 
 
1 4 Introdiictojy. 
 
 his Son. Is it altogether too bold a conjecture 
 to suggest that the contrast between the two 
 formulae was deliberate and designed ? The 
 inscription at Sais was, we know, from the way 
 in which Plutarch speaks of it, at this very 
 time one of the familiar topics of many religious 
 inquirers. Was it likely to have been unknown 
 to the Alexandrian Jew who had recently been 
 at Ephesus, mighty in the Scriptures, and not 
 unversed, as a scholar of Philo, in the lore of 
 Heathenism ? Is not the contrast between the 
 6 wv and the m-av to yeyovo'; identical in character 
 with that so sharply drawn in the prologue to 
 St. John's Gospel, between the self-same verbs, 
 "He was'' (tjv) "in the beginning with God," 
 and "All things were made''' {ijevero) "by him." 
 (John i. 2, 3)'. 
 
 In the next words we have a yet more 
 marked individuality. St. Paul nowhere joins 
 the Spirit with the Father and the Son in the 
 opening salutation of his Epistles. The near- 
 est approach to such a combination is found 
 in the well-known words of blessing of 2 Cor. 
 xiii. 13, " The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 and the love of God, and the fellowship of the 
 Holy Ghost, be with you all." The use of the 
 three Names, however, in the formula for Gen- 
 tile baptism (Matt, xxviii. 19), which by this 
 
Introdtidory. 1 5 
 
 time must, to a large extent, have superseded 
 the earlier or Jewish form, '' In the name of the 
 Lord Jesus" (Acts ii. 38; viii. 16; xviii. 8), must 
 have made it natural to use them in benedic- 
 tions, as they were shortly afterwards used in 
 doxologies ; and we may add that the order in 
 which the Names were to be used was shewn, 
 by St. Paul's example in the words just cited, 
 to be a variable one. We are startled, how- 
 ever, by a yet greater variation. He speaks not 
 of the one Holy Spirit, but of '' the Seven 
 Spirits which are before the Throne y Why, 
 we ask, should he, who so distinctly records 
 afterwards, and must even now have remem- 
 bered, the teaching of the Lord Jesus as to 
 the One Spirit, the Paraclete, the Comforter, 
 bring in here the idea of plurality ? The 
 answer is to be found, in part, in the nature 
 of the visions which he proceeds to record. 
 He had seen " the seven lamps of fire burning 
 before the Throne " (iv. 5), and the seven eyes 
 of the Lamb (v. 6), and had learnt to see in 
 each of these the symbol of the Seven Spirits 
 of God, as representing in their completeness 
 all gifts of illumination and insight that are 
 possessed by God, and are communicated to 
 man. That imagery rested on the older sym- 
 bolism of a prophet whom the writer of the 
 
1 6 Introdudojy, 
 
 Revelation seems to have studied devoutly. In 
 the visions of Zechariah also there had been 
 seen the seven lamps, or branches of the one 
 lamp (Zech. ii. 2), the seven Eyes of God 
 (Zech. ii. 9; iii. 10), as symbols of his eter- 
 nal Light and all-embracing Knowledge. But 
 the genesis of the symbol carries us yet higher. 
 In the passage in Isaiah (xi. 2) which had 
 most impressed on men the thought that the 
 Messianic King was to be filled by the Spirit, 
 there were found numerically seven spiritual 
 gifts, each described as being an attribute ot 
 the One Spirit of the Lord. As an influence 
 nearer to the Apostle's own time, and traceably 
 operating in other instances (as, e.g., in that of 
 the Logos) on his thoughts and phraseology, we 
 may note the fact that Philo also speaks of the 
 number seven in its mystical import as identical 
 with unity, as unity developed in diversity, and 
 yet remaining one.^ The Seven Spirits were, 
 therefore, under such conditions of thought, the 
 fit symbols of the diversities of gifts bestowed 
 by the one and self-same Spirit, dividing to 
 every man severally as He wills, (i Cor. xii. 11.) 
 It was to be expected that one who had first 
 learnt to know God in Christ, the Father 
 through the Son, should reserve the fulness of 
 
 ' Philo, Bohn's Translation, i. p. 145. 
 
Introductory. 1 7 
 
 his thoughts and speech for Him whom he had 
 thus known and loved. And the words in 
 which his thoughts find utterance are every 
 way characteristic. For him the first great 
 attribute which attaches to the name of Christ 
 is that of " the faithful witness'^ That was 
 the thought which had been prominent in the 
 personal teaching of his Lord as recorded in 
 his Gospel. He had come into the world to 
 bear witness to the truth. (John xviii. 37.) 
 He testified that which he had seen and heard. 
 (John iii. 11, 32.) Though in one sense He 
 did not testify of Himself, but of the Father, 
 yet the works which the Father had given Him 
 to do bore their witness of Him. (John v. 36.) 
 But this thought also attached itself to divine 
 words of earlier date. In the very prophecy 
 which, as speaking of the " sure mercies of 
 David," had come to be looked on as essen- 
 tially Messianic (Acts xiii. 34), as the sequel to 
 the invitation, " Ho, every one that thirsteth, 
 come ye to the waters," which is quoted by St. 
 John himself in this very Book (Rev. xxi. 6 ; 
 xxii. 17), we find the character of the coming 
 Christ portrayed as one who is to be given as 
 "a witness to the people" (Isaiah Iv. 4). In 
 the Psalm, which had in like manner acquired 
 a like significance, the reign of the future King 
 3 
 
1 8 Introductory. 
 
 was described as that of one who should be as 
 the "faithful witness'' in heaven (Psa. Ixxxix. 38); 
 and if those words referred, as they have been 
 thought to do, to the "bow in the cloud" as 
 being, like the moon in her vicissitudes and 
 her sameness, the ever-recurring token of the 
 stability of the divine promise, then "the rain- 
 bov^ round about the Throne, in sight like unto 
 an emerald," of Rev. iv. 3, may well have re- 
 called the very words (6 /xaprv^; 6 'jnaro^ in the 
 LXX. Version) which had been used of it by the 
 Psalmist. But the Christ is also " the first 
 begotten from the dead and the Prince of the kings 
 of the earth.'' The reference which we have just 
 traced to the great Messianic Psalm explains in 
 part these words also. If that Psalm had been 
 present in its completeness to the writer's 
 memory, he would find there that it was said of 
 the divinely-appointed King, " I will make him 
 my first-born" (tt/jwtoto/co?, LXX.), "higher ' 
 than the kings of the earth." More noticeable 
 still is the fact that the very words now used 
 by St. John had been used before by St. Paul 
 (Col. i. 18), and that we must therefore infer 
 either that the name had come, through the 
 
 ' The Hebrew for "higher" is Elion, the word used for the 
 " Most High " of the divine name, so prominent in many 
 passages Loth of the Old and New Testament. 
 
hitrodudory. • 1 9 
 
 teaching of that Apostle, to be familiar to all 
 the Asiatic Churches, or that the Disciple, who 
 has been sometimes thought of as representing 
 a different section of the Church and a different 
 phase of teaching, deliberately adopted a title 
 which St. Paul had used before him. But it 
 must be remembered also that to him the words 
 came with a special significance and power. 
 He had seen his Lord after He was risen. He 
 had heard the words, " All power is given unto 
 me in heaven and earth " (Matt, xxviii. 18). 
 He had witnessed the great proof of that claim 
 of sovereignty in the Ascension into heaven. 
 And so his whole view of the world and its 
 order had been changed. Above all emperors 
 and kings, above all armies and multitudes, he 
 thought of the Crucified as ruling and directing 
 the course of history, and certain in his own 
 due time to manifest his sovereignty. 
 
 In this last clause of the opening words of 
 salutation the Apostle had been as regardless 
 of the technical rules of language as he had 
 been in the first. Here also the epithets stand, 
 not in the genitive, as in apposition with the 
 name of Christ, but in their unimpaired ma- 
 jesty, in the nominative. But that salutation 
 is hardly ended before, with the speech of one 
 who writes as in the ecstasy of adoration, he 
 
 3* 
 
20 Introductory, 
 
 passes from it to a doxology. And the doxology 
 thus uttered is marked by some special charac- 
 teristics. It is not, as those of St. Paul for the 
 most part are, addressed to the Father only, or 
 to the Father through the Son, but directly and 
 emphatically to Jesus Christ. Knowing, as we 
 do, the horror with which every devout Israelite 
 shrank from ascribing Divine Glory to any but 
 the Divine Being, we cannot but see in this 
 the recognition that the Lord Jesus Christ, the 
 first-begotten from the dead, was also one with 
 the Father; that to Him, no less than to the 
 Eternal, belonged all *' glory and might" forever 
 and ever. If there are still those who contend 
 that prayer and praise and adoration were not 
 offered by the Apostolic Church to the Person 
 of the Son, this takes its place among the 
 foremost witnesses against their error. But 
 the substance of the doxology is even more re- 
 markable. The preceding words had spoken 
 of the glory of the Christ in His own essential 
 majesty. These tell of the special relation in 
 which He stood to the spiritual life of the 
 Apostle who wrote, and to all his fellow- 
 believers: ''To him that loveth ws " (I follow 
 the better-supported reading, which gives the 
 present, not the past), ''and washed us'' (I see 
 no adequate reason for preferring the reading 
 
Introductory. 2 1 
 
 *' and freed us") ^^ with his own blood.'' We 
 need scarcely dwell on the thought which had 
 impressed itself upon the mind of the Disciple 
 that the Lord, who had loved him with so 
 deep and personal an affection upon earth, w^as 
 still loving him, and loving others with an 
 equal love, now that He was in heaven. 
 There is a deeper interest in the clause which 
 speaks of the special act of which he thought 
 as manifesting that love. It tells us, if I mis- 
 take not, that he had entered now into the full 
 meaning of words that had once been dark and 
 dim to him. We can hardly suppose that the 
 hard saying, " He that is washed needeth not 
 save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit " 
 (John xiii. 10), had been clear at the time to 
 those who heard it. Who was to give them 
 that entire cleansing ? How were they to 
 maintain their purity by that daily washing of 
 the feet ? The words came, we may believe, 
 with a new force to the mind of the disciple 
 who records them, when he stood by the Cross 
 and saw the water and the blood flow from the 
 pierced side of Him who hung there. How 
 deep the impression of that moment was we 
 see in the reference to it that follows imme- 
 diately upon this. What we are now con- 
 cerned with is the consciousness that then or 
 
22 Introductory. 
 
 afterwards it became clear within him that the 
 Love which was consummated in that supreme 
 act of sacrifice, the love which then seemed 
 that of a man who " lays down his life for his 
 friends " (John xv. 13), but was afterwards 
 seen to be that of one who was content to die 
 even for his foes (Rom. v. 8, 10), had a power, 
 which nothing else could have, to kindle a new 
 love in his own heart also ; and so, through the 
 power of that new affection, to purify him from 
 the taint of evil and from the close-clinging 
 impurity of his lower selfish nature. Here 
 was " the fountain opened for sin and for un- 
 cleanness " (Zech. xiii. i), in which the stains 
 of the past life could be washed away. We 
 are so familiar in hymns and sermons with the 
 words and phrases which have flowed from this 
 as their source, that for the most part we 
 hardly care to trace their genesis and meaning ; 
 but the process of thought and feeling which 
 I. have ventured to .indicate seems the only 
 legitimate explanation of the association of 
 ideas, at first apparently so incompatible as 
 are those of cleansing and of blood, which we 
 find thus brought together. The two were at 
 any rate linked indissolubly in the mind of the 
 Apostle. He saw in "the blood of Christ " that 
 which '' cleanseth from all sin " (i John i. 7). 
 
Introductory. 2 3 
 
 The multitude of those whom he saw in vision 
 "arrayed in white robes" had "washed their 
 robes and made them white in the blood of the 
 Lamb " (Rev. vii. 13, 14). 
 
 But the train of thought thus originated led 
 on in natural, or, more truly, perhaps, spiritual, 
 sequence to another. Once before, as by some 
 mystic embodiment of the great idea, or dim 
 foreshadowing of the great fact, blood had been 
 received as the symbol of purification. The 
 Tabernacle and the vessels of the ministry had 
 been sprinkled with it. In the bold language 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, " almost all 
 things are by the law purified with blood" (ix. 21). 
 But the special cardinal instance of its use had 
 been when Aaron and his sons had been conse- 
 crated to their priestly office. The two ideas, 
 of being cleansed with blood and of entering 
 on a priest's work, were accordingly closely 
 linked together. But in that baptism of blood 
 of which St. John thought, the washing was not 
 limited to any priestly family, but was co-exten- 
 sive with the whole company of believers. They 
 therefore had become what the older Israel 
 of God was at first meant to be in idea and 
 constitution, "a kingdom of priests."^ That 
 
 * I follow this as a better reading than that which gives 
 **hath made us kings and priests." 
 
24 Introductory, 
 
 sprinkling of blood upon the whole people, before 
 the great apostasy of the golden calf, had been 
 the symbol that they too were all consecrated 
 and set apart for their high calling. (Exod. xix. 
 6, 10 ; xxiv. 8.) So St. John (in this instance 
 also following in the track of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews) looked on the true priest's work as not 
 limited to any order of the Church's ministry. 
 All might offer the sacrifice of praise and thanks- 
 giving, the incense of praise and adoration ; all 
 might pass within the veil, and enter into the 
 Holiest and plead for themselves and for their 
 brother in the power of the blood of Jesus. To 
 Him, then, who had done, and was yet doing, 
 such great things for them, the beloved Disciple 
 offers an ascription of praise and glory and power 
 like that which went up from the lips of every 
 devout Israelite to the Everlasting Father. 
 
 But the thoughts of the Seer travel on to the 
 far future. " Behold^ he cometh with clouds^ 
 The words that had been spoken by the Lord 
 in his hearing in the High Priest's palace 
 had claimed for the Christ the fulfilment of 
 the vision of Daniel, in which the prophet 
 had seen one like unto the Son of Man come 
 with the clouds of heaven, even unto the Ancient 
 of days. (Dan. vii. 13 ; Matt, xxvii. 14.) Even 
 before that utterance of the truth, as he with 
 
Introductory. 25 
 
 Peter and Andrew and James, had sat on the 
 Mount of Olives, hearing from the Lord's lips 
 that wondrous unveiling of the future, he had 
 learnt that a day would come " when all the 
 tribes of the earth shall mourn, and they shall 
 see the Son of man coming in the clouds of 
 heaven with power and great glory " (Matt. 
 xxiv. 29). The reference here to that declara- 
 tion is clear and unmistakable, and so far we 
 have a proof, in a book which the latest and 
 least traditional criticism ascribes to the reign 
 of Nero, which, at the latest, is as early as that 
 of Domitian, that, if not the whole Gospel of 
 St. Matthew in its present shape, at least that 
 prophetic discourse was already current and 
 recognised in the Churches of Asia, or else that 
 the memory of the writer of the Apocalypse 
 supplied him with the selfsame record. 
 
 "And every eye shall see him and they also 
 which pierced him,'" Here, as elsewhere, we 
 have words which carry us back, first, to the 
 Gospel of St. John, and, secondly, to the teaching 
 of an older prophet. The Fourth Gospel alone 
 records the fact, which the writer, we must 
 believe, alone of all the four, had seen with his 
 own eyes, of the pierced side and of the water 
 and the blood. (John xix. 34, 2>7') The writer 
 of this book remembers that fact, and connects 
 
26 InU^odudory. 
 
 it with words which are a literal Greek rendering 
 (not, be it observed, from the version of the 
 LXX., which translates the words quite dif- 
 ferently) of part of Zech. xii. lo. The Gospel, 
 the later work, as we believe, of the same wTiter, 
 does explicitly what is here done implicitly, and 
 cites the prophecy as fulfilled in the event ; and 
 with identically the same variation from the 
 current Greek version as that which we find 
 here. It would be difficult, I think, to find 
 anywhere a much stronger indirect proof of 
 identity of authorship. It is clear, however, 
 that St. John had learnt to generalise and 
 idealise the event to which he thus refers. As 
 those who fell away from the faith, or became 
 its open enemies, crucified to themselves the 
 Son of God afresh (Heb. vi. 6), so it was not 
 only the lance of the Roman soldier that actually 
 pierced Him, but much more all those whose 
 sins of act or thought, whose want of faith and 
 love, had been to Him as those of the inhabitants 
 of Jerusalem had been, in the language of the 
 older prophet, cutting and piercing to the quick. 
 And ^^ all the kindreds of the earthy''^ so run the 
 words of the Apostle, " shall wail because of him.'' 
 That Epiphany of the Judge in his Majesty and 
 Righteousness cannot but call forth terror and 
 dismay in all who under this name, "0/ the 
 
Introductory. 27 
 
 eavth^'' earthy, are described as unholy and 
 rebellious. The memory of past sins, the dread 
 of penalty, the shame at having sinned against 
 the Holiest, these will all be elements of woe 
 and sorrow unspeakable. The words seem at 
 first to tell not only of such an ineffable anguish, 
 but of a wailing hopeless and irremediable. We 
 turn, however, to the words of the older prophet, 
 which, as we have seen, were clearly in St. 
 John's thoughts ; and there, so far from the 
 picture of an irremediable penalty, we find that 
 looking upon Him whom men had pierced, con- 
 nected closely with the pouring out " of the 
 spirit of grace and supplication," with a great 
 and bitter mourning, it is true, but also with the 
 opening even then of " the fountain for sin and 
 for uncleanness." (Zech. xii. 10 ; xiii. i.) So 
 it was, we may believe, that the Seer, accepting 
 the thoughts of the terror and judgment as 
 coming from the Manifestation of One. who was 
 infinitely righteous, could contemplate that dark 
 vision of the future without misgiving, and add, 
 as in adoring acceptance, ^^ Even so, Amen.'' 
 And then, for the first time, the form of the 
 message changes, and the voice of the Lord 
 is heard speaking in his own name : " / am 
 Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending'' 
 (these latter words, however, are wanting in the 
 
28 Introductory, 
 
 best manuscripts, and are probably a gloss upon 
 the names of the Greek letters), '' saith the Lord 
 God " (I follow the best manuscripts in this 
 reading), "which is, and which was, and is to 
 come, the Almighty.'" I am not aware that 
 there is any example in any writing earlier than 
 the Apocalypse of this mystical use of the first 
 and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and the 
 instances which are quoted of a like employment 
 of the corresponding letters (corresponding i.e, 
 in position) of the Hebrew alphabet, x and n, are 
 all of much later date. So far as the evidence 
 goes, it may well have been that St. John himself 
 was the first to seize on that mystic significance, 
 and to see in the two letters of the alphabet 
 which was at least comparatively new to him, 
 the symbol of the Eternity of God, so limitless 
 that we can imagine nothing as either before 
 or after it. As the words stand with the reading 
 ^' the Lord God,'' and interpreted by what has 
 gone before in verse 4, they refer primarily to 
 the Eternity of the Father. We need not fear 
 lest, in adopting that reading, we should sacrifice 
 one jot or tittle of the witness which, with the 
 received reading, the words have been thought 
 to bear to the divinity of the Son. The more 
 distinctly we refer them here to "the Almighty'' 
 in the Old Testament sense of the word (6 
 
Introductory, 29 
 
 TravTOKpdrcop, the LXX. rendering of the Lord 
 of Sabaoth — the Lord of Hosts), the more 
 wonderful is their explicit application in the 
 immediate sequel to Him, rather, their utterance 
 by Him, who was seen in the midst of the seven 
 golden candlesticks. 
 
 The words in which the writer of the Apo- 
 calypse describes himself, and the process by 
 which the messages he is about to write came 
 to him, are every way significant. " Tribu- 
 lation " had come upon those Churches, and he 
 was a ^^fellow-sharer'' with them in the suffer- 
 ings which it brought ; but through the tribu- 
 lation he and they were alike gaining their place 
 "m the kingdom.'' He repeats, ^'.e. the lesson 
 which the Churches in that region had heard at 
 the outset from St. Paul, that " we must through 
 much tribulation enter into the kingdom of 
 God" (Acts xiv. 22). But he is their partner 
 also in iht patience or ^'endurance," not of (I 
 follow the better reading), but " w Jesus." The 
 thought expressed is not, as it is perhaps in 
 2 Thess. iii. 5 (if we accept our English render- 
 ing), that of "the patient waiting for Christ," 
 nor yet of a patience like that of which Christ 
 had been the great example, but of an endurance 
 which had its life and energy in union with Him. 
 He goes on to tell how it was that he found 
 
30 Iiiti^odudory. 
 
 himself in Patmos. He had proclaimed the 
 Word of God ; he had borne his witness, and 
 this was the result. It would help us but little 
 in the work on which we have entered to picture 
 to ourselves the rocks and shores of that island. 
 With its scenery w^e have but small concern. 
 The imagery of the visions that follow is all but 
 entirely unaffected by the external surroundings 
 of the Seer. At the furthest, we can but think 
 of the deep-blue waters of the Mediterranean, 
 now purple as wine, now green as emerald, 
 flushing and flashing in the light like the hues 
 on the plumage of a dove, opalescent and phos- 
 phorescent, according to the changes of sun- and 
 moon-light, as accustoming the Apostle's eye, 
 and, through the eye, his thoughts, to impres- 
 sions of splendours and glories — the rainbow 
 round about the throne, and the sea of crystal 
 mingled with fire (Rev. iv. 3-6) — which we find 
 it all but impossible to represent to the imagi- 
 nation, and which even he found it hard to 
 express adequately in words. 
 
 And he was " zn the Spirit y on the Lord's 
 day.'' I cannot hesitate for a moment to accept 
 the current explanation of the latter phrase as 
 meaning the first day of the week, the day of 
 the Lord's resurrection, the day also, let us 
 remember, of the Lord's supper. The adjective 
 
Introductory, 3 1 
 
 (Kupta«;6?=belonging to the Lord), which in each 
 case expresses the sacred character of the supper 
 or the day, was, so far as we can trace it, either 
 coined by St. Paul, or for the first time taken 
 out of colloquial into written use, as applied to 
 the former. It is found in no earlier writer. 
 It seems probable that, fashioned as it was to 
 express a new thought and meet a new want, it 
 spread rapidly among the Greek - speaking 
 Churches, and its first extension would naturally 
 be to the day on which the disciples in each 
 Church met together to partake of the sacred 
 meal to which it had been originally applied.^ 
 Let us think, then, what that day would be to 
 the beloved Disciple in his Patmos exile ; how, 
 absent from his flock in the body, he, at that hour 
 of closest communion with them and with his 
 Lord, would yet be with them in the spirit ; how 
 the very separation would throw him back more 
 entirely upon the earlier memories of the day as 
 that on which he had first beheld his Master as 
 
 ^ The same word KvpiaKog is, according to a current, but not 
 quite certain, etymology^ the origin of Kirche, Kirk, Church, as 
 being the Lord's house. " Cyriac," as a proper name, is another 
 instance of its extension. Some modern philologists, however, 
 are inclined to refer the word Church to a Gothic or Teutonic 
 root . It is, at any rate, a suggestive fact that while the Teutonic 
 languages of modern Europe make it the representative of 
 "ecclesia," all the Romance languages have some word directly 
 derived from the Greek original. 
 
32 Introductory. 
 
 ^ 
 
 the conqueror of Hades and of Death. It was 
 natural, if we may apply that term to the 
 orderly sequence of spiritual phenomena, that 
 such emotions should pass into ecstatic adora- 
 tion, that the life of sense should be suspended, 
 that he should be in the state of half-conscious- 
 ness which St. Paul so well portrays: " Whether 
 in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell : 
 God knovveth " (2 Cor. xii.). In that trance- 
 state so described, in which the man sees what 
 others cannot see and hears voices which others 
 cannot hear, and which, in this case at least, 
 did not deprive the Seer of the power of distinctly 
 recording afterwards what had been thus made 
 known, the messages to the Seven Churches 
 were revealed to him. 
 
 The first impression made on the new con- 
 sciousness is that which is described as like the 
 sound of " a great voice ^ as of a tnunpetJ" It 
 woke him out of the sleep that was the transition- 
 stage between the lower and the higher life. Its 
 sounds thrilled through brain and nerve, as will 
 thrill one day the trump of the archangel. He 
 heard the words, " I am Alpha and Omega, the 
 first and the last,'' of which he had already re- 
 produced the echoes. He heard too, as if in 
 answer to unuttered and unrecorded prayers, 
 the words which told him that there were 
 
Introductory, 33 
 
 messages from that Eternal One to each of those 
 Churches, or communities of believers, whose 
 wants and perils had been as a burden on his 
 soul. If his waking thoughts had travelled, as 
 thoughts do travel at such times and under such 
 conditions, to those sheep of the flock of the 
 Great Shepherd whom he had so often visited, 
 with whom he had so often on the Lord's day 
 broken the bread and drunk of the cup of bless- 
 ing, it must have been welcome tidings to him 
 that he could preach to them a diviner word of 
 counsel and reproof from his place of exile than 
 he had done when he had been living and 
 working in the midst of them. And then he 
 turned and looked — and the vision that met his 
 gaze was one of glory and majesty unspeakable. 
 The " seven golden candlesticks " which he there 
 beheld would at least remind him of the 
 seven-branched candlestick which stood in the 
 inner sanctuary (not the Holy of Holies) of the 
 Tabernacle and the Temple. They had borne 
 their witness there for centuries that God was 
 Light, and that that Light revealed itself in 
 manifold variety growing out of a central unity. ^ 
 
 ^ The description of the golden candlestick in Exod. xxv., 
 with its central stem, the three branches on either side, parting 
 into smaller branches, with buds and flowers, and almond-like 
 fruit on each, is singularly suggestive. It was tree-like in its 
 form — but if so, with what meaning ? Was it intended to sym- 
 
34 Introductory. 
 
 In the vision of Zechariah — whose prophecy 
 had, as we have seen already, been much in the 
 mind of St. John, suggesting imagery and 
 phraseology — it had been seen (probably after 
 the pattern of the lamp constructed, at the time 
 of the return from the Babylonian exile under 
 Zerubbabel, for the restored Temple) as a 
 " candlestick all of gold, with a bowl upon the 
 top of it, and his seven lamps thereon, and seven 
 pipes to the seven lamps, which are upon the 
 top thereof" (Zech. iv. 2). To make the symbol 
 yet more complete, and adapted to what were 
 then the pressing necessities of the time, he saw 
 in his vision two olive-trees feeding from their 
 branches, through two golden pipes, the bowl 
 through which the lamps were kept burning. 
 He learnt in the interpretation of the symbol 
 that the two olive-trees were the two " sons of 
 oil," the two " anointed ones," the representa- 
 tives of priestly and of civil authority, Joshua 
 
 bolise the " Tree of Life that was in the midst of the Paradise 
 of God?" (Rev. ii. 7.) Was this the earHest expression of the 
 Truth that in God the light and Hfe were one, and that both 
 flowed from Him into the spirits of his creatures? (See the 
 present writer's Biblical Studies, p. 62.) I may add, as con- 
 firming this conclusion, the remarkable fact that a rough outline 
 of the seven-branched candlestick, or lamp, occurs frequently in the 
 Jewish cemeteries at Rome and elsewhere (Milman's History of the 
 Jeius, vol. iii. p. 457). Simply as such, it was not a natural 
 ornament for a sepulchre, but if it were also the symbol of the 
 Tree of Life, its appearance there is sufficiently accounted for. 
 
Introductory. ^--g 
 
 and Zerubbabel, upon whom at that period 
 the welfare of the nation's Ufe depended. The 
 candlestick, or lamp, that was thus seen in the 
 prophet's vision was probably identical in form 
 with that which has become familiar to us as 
 represented on the Arch of Titus, among the 
 spoils of Jerusalem. Here, however, we have 
 what seems at first a modification of the sym- 
 bolism, almost a new symbol. The Seer beholds 
 not a lamp with seven branches, but seven 
 distinct lamps. The ethical reason of the 
 change is, perhaps, not far to seek. For him 
 the lamp was the symbol not merely of the un- 
 created Light, but (so he had been taught by 
 his Lord himself) of a Christian society, as the 
 channel through which that light was to be 
 diffused through the world, a lamp set upon the 
 lamp-shaft or pedestal (Matt. v. 15). What he 
 needed therefore was to bring out clearly the 
 individuality of each such society, and this was 
 done by the manner in which they were thus 
 presented to his vision. If one were to endeavour 
 to realise the vision as it were pictorially, it may 
 have been that the Form which he beheld in the 
 seven lamps stood in front of the central shaft, 
 hiding it from view, and so leaving them to 
 appear each in its own separate distinctness. 
 That Form he describes as ''lilie unto the 
 
36 Introductory. 
 
 Son of many Taken by themselves, and 
 standing as they do without the article, the 
 words might be translated simply as in the 
 great prophecy of Daniel (vii. 13), from which 
 the title had been derived, " One like unto a 
 Son of man,'' ^ a form which, though arrayed 
 in glory, was yet human. But the constant 
 appropriation of the title by the Lord Jesus, 
 its use by Him in the words which had stamped 
 the expectation of His second Advent upon the 
 minds of His disciples, forbid us to assign that 
 lower meaning to it here. What the Seer meant 
 his readers to understand was, that he had seen 
 the Master whom he had known and loved. 
 
 The description that follows lies obviously 
 beyond the region of art. It is an attempt to 
 portray thoughts and impressions which are 
 almost, if not altogether, beyond the reach of 
 words. The Seer strives to represent a glory 
 which has dazzled and confounded him. A 
 human form, pervaded and clothed with light 
 in all its purity, glorified and transfigured, so 
 
 ^ This is beyond the shadow of a doubt the right rendering 
 in the older Revelation. Here it is, I think, open to some 
 question. On the one hand there is no definite article in the 
 Greek ; and in our Lord's application of it to Himself the article 
 is always found. On the other, its constant use by Him may 
 have given to it something of the character of a proper name 
 or title, so that, with or without the article, it could not fail to 
 suggest a reference to Him. 
 
Introductory. 37 
 
 that what he had once beheld on the Mount 
 of Transfiguration seemed to pale in memory 
 before this greater brightness, this was what he 
 looked upon. It is important that we should 
 remember that there had been that anticipation 
 of the glory of the Son of man while He was 
 yet on earth, that the Seer who now beheld 
 the vision had then been one of " the eye- 
 witnesses of his Majesty." It is not less im- 
 portant to remember how far it was now 
 surpassed. The head and hair in their dazzling 
 whiteness spoke at once of stainless purity and 
 of the crown of glory of the Ancient of Days ; 
 the eyes seemed to burn into the soul with their 
 fiery and searching gaze ; the voice was like 
 the sound of many waters; even the feet, ^ just 
 shewn below the long robe that reached to the 
 ankles, glowed with the same pervading bright- 
 
 ^ It is not, I think, important for our purpose to discuss the 
 mysterious xakKoKi^avoc, — the "fine brass" of the English 
 Version. As this is the one passage in which it is found, its 
 meaning must be more or less conjectural. I incline with Bleek 
 to the view that it is a hybrid compound of the Greek ■)(aXKoc, 
 and the Hebrew ''labdn " — white. Such technical words were 
 likely enough to be current in a population like that of Ephesus, 
 consisting largely of workers in metal, some of whom, if we may 
 judge from the case of Alexander the coppersmith (Acts xix. 34 ; 
 2 Tim. iv. 14), were without doubt Jews. I believe the word 
 in question to have belonged to this technical vocabulary. 
 It is, at any rate, used by St. John as familiar and intelligible 
 to those for whom he wrote. 
 
3 8 hi trodttdory. . 
 
 ness. The other details of the manifestation 
 are, however, more significant. The form of 
 the Son of man is seen arrayed, not, as in the 
 days of his ministry, in the short seamless tunic 
 and the flowing cloak (the ^j^^iVwz/ and If^drcov, 
 which were the common dress of the Jewish 
 peasant), but in the long robe reaching to the 
 feet, that had been the special garment of the 
 High Priest. St. John uses, i.e. the very 
 word 7roSr}p7]^, which stood in the LXX. version 
 of Exod. xxviii. 31 for the Ephod of Aaron. 
 And He is girded with a golden girdle, not, as 
 of one who toils and runs, around the loins 
 (comp. Luke xii. 35), but, as of one who had 
 passed into the repose of sovereignty, around 
 the breast. That the girdle should be of gold, 
 as the symbol of that sovereignty, was almost 
 a necessary consequence. In this combination 
 of the received emblems of the two forms of 
 rule there was setforth, in its simplest symbolism, 
 that union of the kingly and the priestly offices, 
 that revival of the priesthood after the order of 
 Melchizedek, which the argument of the writer 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews had by this time 
 made more or less familiar. And in His hand 
 He holds seven stars (verse 16). In what way 
 they were seen as held by Him we are not told ; 
 but the s3'mbolism is, I venture to think, far 
 
Introductory. 39 
 
 more suggestive if we think of them as shining 
 as precious gems would shine if used as signet- 
 rings, than if w^e picture to ourselves the seven 
 stars as held in the palm of the hand, or sus- 
 pended from it as a wreath.^ Here, at least, 
 there is the guiding precedent of the old pro- 
 phetic language. Of one king of the house 
 of David it had been said that though he were 
 as the " signet upon the right hand " of Jehovah, 
 he should be plucked from it and cast away. 
 (Jer. xxii. 24.) Of another heir to the kingly 
 succession of that house the promise had been 
 written, " I will take thee, O Zerubbabel, my 
 servant, . . . saith the Lord, and will make 
 thee as a signet" (Hagg. ii. 23). To the 
 Eastern mind no symbol could more adequately 
 express the preciousness of the Angels of the 
 Churches to Him who thus held them, the 
 honour to which He had exalted them, the 
 care with which He watched over them. 
 
 The character of the next symbol is less 
 ambiguous — " Out of his month went a sharp 
 
 ^ If one may venture on representing to the eye the manner 
 in which they were thus held, I would suggest that they were 
 seen on the inner side of the open hand, arranged in an order 
 like that of the seven stars in the constellation of Ursa Major. 
 It may be noticed that Philo refers both to that constellation and 
 the Pleiades as examples of the prominence of the mystic number 
 even in the visible and material universe. 
 
40 Introductory. 
 
 two-edged swovdy The thought expressed is 
 obviously that of the power of the Divine Judge 
 to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart, 
 and to punish those which were evil and deserved 
 punishment. The sword was thus identical 
 with " the word of the Lord " of the older 
 prophets (Isa. xlix. 2), and of Heb. iv. 12, 
 " sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing 
 even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, 
 and of the joints and marrow." Here, adopting 
 the new nomenclature of the writer, we may 
 call it " the word of the Word " — the spoken 
 utterance of Him who Himself utters the mind 
 and will of the Eternal Father. What the Seer 
 beheld in vision was the expression of the truth 
 that the message he was about to record would 
 be conveyed in keen and piercing words, cutting 
 through the ulcers of the soul, cutting off the 
 diseased members, laying bare the inmost organs 
 of the inner life, slaying those who deserved 
 slaughter ; but also wounding to heal, even 
 slaying that He might raise as from the dead. 
 And therefore it was that the countenance which 
 he beheld was " as the sun shining in his 
 strength,'' bright and terrible to look upon, and 
 yet the source of all life and joy. In the light 
 of that countenance he and all men, if they 
 walked in it, should see the light of life. 
 
Introductory. 41 
 
 So it was in the immediate personal expe- 
 rience of the Disciple. As though that sword 
 had pierced his soul, as though that light were 
 too dazzling for mortal eye, he ^^ fell at his feet 
 as dead.'' And then from that death-like trance 
 he was roused by a touch and by a word : ^' He 
 laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, 
 Fear not.'' We can hardly doubt that that 
 touch must have recalled many an hour of 
 loving and tender companionship in what 
 seemed now as a remote past, when he had 
 leant his head upon the Master's breast, and 
 had felt the hand that told of sympathy and 
 of love laid, in hours of sorrow and perplexity, 
 upon his shoulder, or clasping his hand in the 
 confidence of friendship. ''Fear not!" that 
 too had been often heard by the disciples on 
 the Lake of Galilee (Matt. xiv. 27 ; John vi. 19) 
 in the dark hours of night. It had been the 
 cheering watchword of his call to be one of the 
 " fishers of men" (Luke v. 10), one of the "little 
 flock" which the Good Shepherd had deigned to 
 take under his especial guardianship(Luke xii.32) . 
 Then, for the most part, it was the thought of 
 their Lord's presence that removed their fear, 
 the presence of One who was then " despised 
 and rejected of men," like themselves in the 
 outward accidents of life. That which removed 
 
42 Introductory. 
 
 the greater fear now was the assurance which 
 the word and the touch gave him that the 
 glorified form on which he looked was one with 
 the Son of man, whom he had known and loved, 
 one also with the Eternal Lord, One who had 
 triumphed over death, the living One who had 
 died, but was henceforth " alive for evermore.'' 
 The word ^^ Amen'' which followed, so often 
 used by our Lord during his earthly ministry, 
 placed this assurance of His own everlasting life, 
 the source of all life to others, on the level of the 
 highest truths which He had been wont to seal 
 with this emphatic affirmation. 
 
 And to this there was added the new pro- 
 clamation : "/ have the keys of death and of 
 Hades" (I take the words in what appears to 
 be their true order). What thoughts would 
 those words raise in the mind of the hearer ? 
 What abiding truths do they set forth for us ? 
 He, we know, had heard his Master speak of 
 " the gates of Hades " (Matt. xvi. i8). He 
 had accepted the interpretation of the old 
 Messianic psalm, which spoke of the soul of 
 the Christ as not having been left in Hades. 
 He must have known the faith of St. Peter, that 
 in his descent into Hades his Lord had, in that 
 unseen world, preached to "the spirits in prison," 
 who had once been disobedient (i Pet. iii. 19), 
 
Introdttdory . 43 
 
 proclaiming his gospel to those that were dead, 
 that they might be judged according to men 
 in the flesh, but live according to God in the 
 Spirit (i Pet. iv. 6). He may have been familiar 
 with the half-proverbial saying which appeared 
 afterwards in the Targums and the Talmud, 
 that the key of the grave was one of the four 
 keys which the Eternal King committed to no 
 ministering angel, but reserved exclusively in 
 his own power and for his own use. In any 
 case he knew, both from the language of the 
 older prophets (Isa. xxii. 22) and from his 
 Lord's promise to Peter (Matt. xvi. 18), that 
 the key was the recognised symbol of supreme, 
 though, it might be, delegated authority, of the 
 power to open and shut, to admit and to ex- 
 clude. In these words, therefore, he would 
 hear the assurance that the shadowy realms 
 on which men looked with terror, and which 
 they peopled with all dark imaginings, were 
 in very deed subject to the rule of Him who, 
 though He had tasted death for every man, was 
 now alive for evermore. ^^ Death and Hades'' 
 — these were familiar sounds, as the names of 
 the two great enemies of mankind, the forces 
 that opposed the fulfilment of God's purposes 
 and the completion of his kingdom. Now he 
 heard that they had been despoiled of their 
 
44 Introductory. 
 
 power to harm, as afterwards he was to hear 
 that they would dehver up the dead that were 
 in them, and that they themselves should be 
 cast, together with those who were not found 
 written in the Book of Life, into "the lake of 
 fire " (Rev. xx. 13-15). That thought was 
 the one adequate remedy for the fear of death 
 through which, with hardly an exception, men 
 had been all their life-time subject to bondage 
 (Heb ii. 15) ; for the secret of that fear was 
 their want of faith that there also, in that un- 
 seen world, behind the veil, were to be traced 
 the workings of an absolute Righteousness and 
 an everlasting Love. 
 
 The command that followed — " Write the 
 things which thou hast seen, and the things 
 which are^ and the things that shall be here- 
 after''' — was simple and clear enough. But as 
 yet the inner meaning of the vision that he had 
 looked on had not been made known to him, 
 and it was the fitting sequel to the education 
 through which his Lord had led him while on 
 earth, explaining to hiro and to his brother 
 disciples the mysteries of the Kingdom of Hea- 
 ven, which to others were veiled in parables, 
 that here also, before he entered on the special 
 task assigned him, he should be taught the 
 meaning of the symbols of the seven stars that 
 
Introductory. 45 
 
 were in or on the right hand of the Son of man, 
 and of the seven golden candlesticks in the midst 
 of which He stood. The seven stars were, he 
 heard, " the angels of the seven churches.'' 
 
 The question. Who were meant by these 
 Angels ? has received very different answers. 
 On the one hand it has been urged that every- 
 where else throughout the Book " angels " are 
 angels in the ordinary acceptation of the word, 
 superhuman messengers and ministers of God ; 
 that the term is nowhere else applied in the 
 New Testament, nor in early Patristic writings, 
 to any officer or teacher in the Church ; that 
 the symbolism of the visions of Daniel, in which 
 Persia and Grecia are represented by angels 
 (Dan. X. 20, 21 ; xii. i.), who are as their 
 princes and guardians, finds a natural parallel 
 here. On the other hand it is urged that, even 
 admitting, what it is hard to admit, that the 
 language of Daniel is more than symbolic, and 
 that there are round the Eternal Throne the 
 guardian angels of nations, with the divided 
 counsels and conflicting interests of the peoples 
 committed to their care, diplomatic representa- 
 tives, as it were, at the court of the Great King, 
 the words that are addressed to the angels of 
 the Churches are altogether inapplicable except 
 to men of like passions with ourselves. They 
 
46 Introductory. 
 
 have ''laboured and not fainted," or they have to 
 suffer "even unto death," or they have ''left their 
 first love," or they are " neither cold nor hot," and 
 are in peril of utter rejection. I follow accord- 
 ingly the majority of commentators in identi- 
 fying these angels with those whom we should 
 call the bishops of the Churches, the chief 
 presbyters, vested with authority over other 
 presbyters, exercising control over all the 
 Churches of what in modern phrase would be 
 called their diocese, — the city and its suburbs 
 committed to their care. 
 
 But the question comes why these chief 
 presbyters were described here, and here only, 
 by this new title ; and the answer is to be found, 
 I believe, in the special phenomena of that 
 transition period of the apostolic age to which 
 we have referred the Book before us. In the 
 earlier organisation the names of bishop and 
 elder were, as is well known, interchangeable,^ 
 and the Apostles occupied a position more or 
 less analogous to that of the bishops of later 
 date. But at the time when St. John wrote, 
 the personal care of St. Paul had been with- 
 drawn from the Asiatic Churches, and had been 
 
 Mt is hardly necessary to prove an admitted fact, but a refer- 
 ence to the following passages will shew the equivalence of the 
 two terms : Acts xx. 17, 28; Phil. i. i ; i Tim. iii. I, 8j Tit. 
 i. 5, 7 ; I Pet. V. I, 2. 
 
Introductory. 47 
 
 delegated to one specially sent by him, like 
 Timotheus, to act on his behalf in appointing, 
 reproving, or deposing elders. What title was 
 to be given to this new officer, this Vicar Apos- 
 tolic of the primitive Church ? The term 
 " bishop " had not yet risen to the higher level 
 in which it implied a superiority to presbyter. 
 The name ''apostle," as applied to those w^ho 
 had been called and chosen by Christ himself, 
 was too high. In its other sense, as used of 
 those who were simply the "messengers" of 
 the Churches (2 Cor. viii. 2, 3), it was too low. 
 The word " angels " might well commend itself 
 at such a time as fitted to indicate the office for 
 which the received terminology of the Church 
 offered no adequate expression. Over and 
 above its ordinary use it had been applied by 
 the prophet whose writings had been brought 
 into a new prominence by the ministry of the 
 Baptist, to himself as a prophet (Mai. i. i), to 
 the priests of Israel (Mai. ii. 7), to the fore- 
 runner of the Lord (Mai. iii. i). It had been 
 used of those whom, in a lower sense, the Lord 
 had sent to prepare his way before Him (Luke 
 ix. 52), and whose work stood on the same 
 level as that of the Seventy. Here then seemed 
 to be that which met the want. So far as it 
 reminded men of its higher sense it testified 
 
48 Introductory . 
 
 that the servants of God who had been called 
 to this special office were to " lead on earth an 
 angel's life ; " that they, both in the liturgical 
 and the ministerial aspects of their work, were 
 to be as those who in both senses were " minis- 
 tering spirits" in heaven (Heb. i. I40- It helped 
 also — and this may well have commended it — 
 to bring the language of the Revelation into 
 harmony with that of the great apocalyptic 
 work of the Old Testament, the prophecy of 
 Daniel. On the other hand, we need not 
 wonder that it did not take a prominent place 
 in the vocabulary of the Church. The old 
 associations of the word were too dominant, 
 the difficulty of distinguishing the new from 
 the old too great, to allow of its being generally 
 accepted. It was enough that it answered, as 
 now, a special purpose. 
 
 That these bishop-angels of the Churches 
 should be represented by the symbol of the 
 stars must have seemed, as soon as the key 
 was once given, to be simple and natural 
 enough. They too were set in the firmament 
 of heaven, of the kingdom of heaven, to give 
 light upon the earth. "Their sound had gone 
 
 ' It may be worth while to note that there are two distinct 
 Greek words in this verse rendered by the same English word 
 and that the first expresses the service of worship, the second the 
 of ministration. 
 
hitrodudoiy , 49 
 
 into all the earth " (so St. Paul had interpreted 
 the words of the noblest of the Psalms of nature, 
 which referred in their original meaning to the 
 voiceless witness of the stars), "and their words 
 unto the ends of the world" (Rom. x. 18). 
 And for those to whom these messages were 
 sent, the fact that they were as stars in the 
 right hand of Christ was at once solemnising 
 and strengthening. They were not what they 
 were, or where they were, by chance. In the 
 hand of Christ, subject to his power, but sus- 
 tained also by his strength, safe so long as they 
 continued there, shining in their unclouded 
 brightness ; in danger if they strayed from his 
 protection, to be as the " wandering stars, to 
 whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for 
 ever" (Jude, verse 13) — this was and is a thought 
 of comfort and of awe for all those who have 
 been called to be successors to their office and 
 sharers in their responsibilities. 
 
 Of the symbolism of the candlesticks, or 
 lamps, I have already spoken. All that need 
 be added here is that which grows out of the 
 connection of the two symbols. The stars, 
 shine, each in its brightness and its beauty, and 
 if true to the light given them, will shine for 
 ever as gems upon the right hand of the Lord 
 of the Churches. But to give light to those 
 
 5 
 
50 Introductory. 
 
 that are in the house (Matt. v. 15), to diffuse 
 the knowledge of the truth by word and yet 
 more by act, to derive their power thus to let 
 their light shine before men from Him who gives 
 the oil without which the light would be extin- 
 guished — these attributes of the life of the 
 Church were better represented by the lamps 
 that shed their rays through the surrounding 
 darkness. In the gloom of this world's night the 
 light of the lamp is more serviceable to those who 
 have to live and move and work in it than the 
 shining of the far-off star. It is the collective 
 action of the Christian society that makes 
 manifest the Truth of God even more than the 
 highest individual holiness. That the Lord was 
 seen in the midst of the seven lamps was a 
 witness that they too were subject to his rule 
 -and were not exempted from his care. 
 
II. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO EPHBSUS, 
 
THE REVELATION. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 1 Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write ; These things 
 saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh 
 in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks ; 
 
 2 I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how 
 thou canst not bear them which are evil : and thou hast tried them 
 which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars : 
 
 3 And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name's sake hast 
 laboured, and hast not fainted. 
 
 4 Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast 
 left thy first love. 
 
 5 Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, 
 and do the first works ; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and 
 will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent. 
 
 6 But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolai- 
 tanes, which I also hate. 
 
 7 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the 
 churches ; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of 
 life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God. 
 
II. 
 
 WITH the topography of the city of 
 Ephesus, with its history prior to the 
 formation of a Christian Church within its 
 walls, we are not at present concerned.^ They 
 have hardly the slightest appreciable bearing 
 upon the interpretation of the words which 
 now come before us. All that we need to re- 
 member is that its far-famed Temple of Artemis 
 — visited by pilgrims from all quarters of the 
 Empire, who carried away with them on their 
 departure the silver shrines made by Demetrius 
 and his craftsmen as memorials of their visit ; 
 surrounded by a population of priests, guides, 
 artisans, who by that craft had their living — 
 made it one of the great centres of Heathenism ; 
 and that when St. Paul and his companions, 
 
 ^ I may, perhaps, be permitted to refer the reader who wishes 
 for information on these points to a small book — one of a series 
 on " St. Paul's Work in the great Heathen Centres " — on Tarsus, 
 Antioch, and Ephesus, published by the Society for Promoting 
 Christian Knowledge. 
 
54 The Epistle to Ephesus, 
 
 following in the footsteps of Apollos, planted 
 the Church of Christ there, they must have 
 felt that they were gaining a victory over one 
 of the strongholds of the powers of darkness. 
 Its religion was, however, ver}^ largely Oriental 
 rather than Hellenic in its character. The image 
 of the many-breasted Artemis who was there 
 worshipped, which was fabled to have fallen 
 from heaven, looking to our eyes like an Indian 
 idol, would have offended the cultivated taste of 
 an Athenian, accustomed to gaze on the works 
 of Phidias and Praxiteles. As in all Eastern 
 cities, its people dealt much in magic and 
 charms and incantations, and the Ephesian 
 talismans, or " books of curious arts" (ihe'ypd^- 
 iiara 'E(f)€aLa of Greek writers), had a world- 
 wide renown, and fetched an almost fabulous 
 price (Acts xix. 19). There, as in most com- 
 mercial cities, Jews had found their way in 
 large numbers, and had their synagogues open 
 to proselytes and inquirers. Not a few of them 
 drifted more or less openly into connection with 
 the superstitions against which they ought to. 
 have borne their witness. They were copper- 
 smiths, like Alexander (2 Tim. iv. 14), and had 
 apparently trade relations with the workmen 
 of Demetrius {Ads xix. 38). They boasted 
 of their powers in the cases commonly ascribed 
 
The Epistle to Ephestts. 55 
 
 to demoniacal possession, and, like the seven 
 sons of Sceva, who claimed to be in some sense 
 a chief priest of the house of Aaron, sought 
 gain and fame as exorcists (Acts xix. 13-16). 
 In spite of this decline from their true dignity, 
 perhaps in proportion to it, they were con- 
 spicuous for their fanatic zeal for holy places 
 and for holy customs, and were the first to 
 raise their outcry against St. Paul when, as 
 they thought, he had taken an uncircumcised 
 Ephesian within the precincts of the temple, 
 beyond the wall of partition, which it was death 
 for any Gentile to pass (Acts xxi. 27, 21). 
 
 The stages of progress in the Christian 
 community at Ephesus may be traced with 
 sufficient distinctness. First, there had been 
 the preaching of some disciples of the Baptist, 
 reviving the zeal of the Jews, calling them to 
 repentance, imposing more rigid rules of life 
 (Acts xix. 3). Then had come Apollos himself, 
 as yet knowing only the baptism of John, but 
 with wider thoughts, and teaching more fully 
 than they had done the " first principles of the 
 oracles of God" (Heb. v. 12). Then had come 
 Aquila and Priscilla, with their more perfect 
 knowledge, teaching the way of the Lord as St. 
 Paul taught it, though, we must believe, with 
 less power and completeness (Acts xviii. 24). 
 
56 The Epistle to Ep he sits. 
 
 Then St. Paul himself appeared, preaching his 
 gospel, at first in the synagogues to his own 
 people of the stock of Abraham, afterwards to 
 the disciples and to Gentile inquirers as a 
 separate body in the lecture-room (belonging, 
 possibly, to a school of medicine) that was 
 known as the property of Tyrannus.^ Wonders 
 of a kind precisely adapted to meet the faith 
 of the Ephesians in charms and talismans 
 were wrought by his hands, and even by the 
 handkerchiefs and aprons to which contact 
 with his flesh had imparted a mysterious power 
 (Acts xix. 9-12). The result of this two-fold 
 influence was the rapid conversion of a large 
 number of the Heathen, chiefly among those 
 who had been practitioners in the arts of sorcery. 
 They brought the books in which they had 
 learnt to see the work of the enemy of God, 
 and burnt them publicly in some open square 
 or market-place (Acts xix. 19). How full and 
 thorough was the success of the Apostle in his 
 
 ^ The name Tyrannus occurs in the " Columbarium " of Livia 
 as belonging to a physician of the Imperial household. Such 
 occupations often descended, with the name, from father to son 
 among the freedmen attached to the Imperial household ; and 
 I venture to surmise that this Tyrannus also was of the same 
 calling, that the "beloved physician " who was St. Paul's friend 
 and fellow-worker may have been acquainted with him, and 
 that it was through his influence that the use of the lecture-room 
 was obtained. 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus. 57 
 
 mission-work among his new disciples, how 
 rapid the progress which they made in Chris- 
 tian thought and feeUng, we find from his 
 earnest desire to see the elders of the Ephesian 
 Church on his last journey to Jerusalem, even 
 though he could not personally visit their city, 
 and from the words of parting counsel which 
 he addressed to them. He who spake to others 
 as to carnal, as to babes in Christ, had not 
 shunned to preach to them " all the counsel of 
 God" (Acts XX. 27). In the midst of constant 
 opposition, with the fear of frequent plots, amid 
 tears and trials, he had done his work. But even 
 then his eye saw signs of evils as yet half latent : 
 " the grievous wolves not sparing the flock," 
 Jewish persecutors from without, the " men 
 from among their ownselves speaking perverse 
 things," who should draw away disciples after 
 them — these filled him with anxious and sad 
 forebodings. And so they parted, as they both 
 then thought, never to meet again (Acts xx. 
 17-38). 
 
 So far as we can gather from the Epistle 
 to the Ephesians, no tidings had reached the 
 Apostle in the interval to cause him fresh 
 anxiety. Its tone is throughout free from the 
 indignation or warning or reproof which we 
 find in so many of his letters. He remembers 
 
58 The Epistle to Ephesus. 
 
 his intercourse with them with thankfulness 
 and joy. He has heard of their faith in the 
 Lord Jesus and their love towards all saints. 
 He appeals to them as able to understand his 
 knowledge in the mystery of Christ. No mes- 
 senger has come from them, as Epaphras had 
 come from Colossse, to tell him that false 
 teachers had crept in and were subverting the 
 gospel which he had preached. He must have 
 looked forward to his return to them — and we 
 know from the letter to Philemon (verse 22) that 
 he wa^ looking forward — with joy and hope. 
 The Pastoral Epistles, if we accept them as St. 
 Paul s, and place them in their right relation to 
 his life, shew us how bitterly he was disappointed. 
 False teachers had come, claiming the authority 
 of Rabbis, desirous to be teachers of the Law, 
 and >et ignorant of its true scope and office 
 (i Tin. i. 7). There were perverse disputings 
 of men of corrupt minds, having a form of 
 godliness, but denying its power; creeping into 
 houses and leading captive silly women laden 
 with sins (2 Tim. iii. 4-7). His own followers 
 and friends had not the courage to stand by 
 him, and all men forsook him (2 Tim. i. 15). 
 It was necessary to leave Timotheus behind 
 him to maintain purity of doctrine and com- 
 pleteness of organisation. And even he, zealous 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus, 59 
 
 and devoted as he was, seemed hardly equal to 
 the burden that was thus laid upon him. He 
 was too young to speak with the authority of 
 a wide experience, younger than many of those 
 whom he was called to control and to reprove. 
 He was weak in health, and the overstrained 
 asceticism which he had imposed on himself 
 as a rule of life tended to want of promptness 
 and of energy (i Tim. v. 23). He needed, even 
 in the last parting words of counsel which St. 
 Paul ever wrote to him, to be stirred to fresh 
 activity, to be warned against the spirit of 
 timidity that shrinks from hardship and from 
 conflict, against the profane and vain babblings 
 which, under the show of a mystical elevation 
 that seemed to men as a rising from the death 
 of sin, were denying that there was any other 
 resurrection (2 Tim. i. 6, 7). 
 
 It was necessary to bring before our thoughts 
 what we know of the Ephesian Church just as the 
 great Apostle of the Gentiles was about to pass 
 from the scene of his labours, that so we might 
 the better enter into the spirit of the message 
 sent to it through the pen of the beloved Dis- 
 ciple. The shorter the interval between the two 
 — and, on the assumption which I have adopted 
 as to the date of the Apocalypse, the interval 
 must have been very short — the closer must 
 
6o The Epistle to Ephesus. 
 
 have been the resemblance between the state of 
 things described in the Pastoral Epistles and 
 that pre-supposed in the message with which 
 we are now dealing. But the facts lead us, if 
 I mistake not, to a conclusion of deeper and 
 more personal interest. Timotheus had been 
 left in charge of that Church. That was the 
 flock committed to him as one of the chief 
 shepherds. If we think of the Angel of the 
 Church of Ephesus as its personal ruler and 
 representative, there is at least a strong pre- 
 sumption in favour of our thinking of the words 
 before us as addressed to none other than to 
 St. Paul's true son in the faith. It will be 
 seen that a closer examination of the message 
 confirms this conclusion. 
 
 It is noteworthy that each one of the mes- 
 sages opens with a description of Him who 
 speaks them, embodying one or more of the 
 characteristic attributes given in the preceding 
 chapter. It is, perhaps, impossible to connect 
 in each case the attribute thus selected w^ith 
 the wants or trials of each particular Church ; 
 but there can be little doubt that as Ephesus 
 stands first in order of importance among the 
 Seven Churches, and so the fact that He who 
 sends the message *' holdeih the seven stars in 
 his right hand'' and ''walketh in the midst of the 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus. 6i 
 
 seven golden candlesticks,'' is that on which 
 most stress is laid. He holds the stars as one 
 who rejoices in their brightness so long as they 
 shine clearly, who sustains, protects, and guides 
 them as He guides the stars of heaven in their 
 courses, who can and will cast them away, 
 even though they were as the signet on His 
 right hand, should they cease to shine. He 
 walks among the candlesticks as One who 
 knows and judges all that makes the lamps 
 burn brightly or dimly, who feeds the lamp 
 with the oil of His grace, and trims it with the 
 discipline of His love that it may burn more 
 brightly, and who, if it cease to burn, though 
 He will not quench the smoking flax while as 
 yet there is a hope of revival, will yet remove 
 the lamp out of its place, and give to another 
 that work of giving light to those that are in 
 His spiritual house, which it has failed to 
 accomplish. 
 
 If I am right in my inference from the 
 assumed early date of the Apocalypse, the 
 words that follow ought to present some strik- 
 ing points of coincidence with the language 
 addressed to Timothy in the Pastoral Epistles ; 
 and this, if I mistake not, they do in a measure 
 which leaves hardly the shadow of a doubt. 
 The work, the labour, the endurance — these 
 
62 The Epistle to Ephesus, 
 
 are precisely what St. Paul acknowledges in 
 his true son in the faith, and exhorts him to 
 abound in them more and more. He reminds 
 him that the husbandman that lahoureth must 
 be the first partaker of the fruits (2 Tim. ii. 6) ; 
 calls on him to be " a workman that needeth 
 not to be ashamed" (2 Tim. ii. 15); to do 
 *' the work of an evangelist," and to ^^ endure 
 afflictions " (2 Tim. iv. 5). Still more definitely 
 do we find in the words of praise that follow 
 that which corresponds to the Apostle's coun- 
 sels. With reiterated earnestness we find him 
 warning his true son in the faith against false 
 teachers, such as Hymenseus, Alexander, Phi- 
 letus ; against those who gave heed to seducing 
 spirits and doctrines of demons ; against pro- 
 fane and vain babblings, whether they came 
 from Judaizing teachers on the one hand or 
 the fantastic dreams of Greek or Gnostic 
 speculation on the other. One who had acted 
 on these cautions might well have earned the 
 commendation bestowed on the Angel of the 
 Church of Ephesus: '''Thou canst not hear 
 them that are evil, and thott hast tried them 
 which say that they are apostles and are not, 
 but hast found them liars.'" To hate evil, to 
 feel the presence of those who are persistent in 
 it as an intolerable burden, to try the claims of 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus. 63 
 
 those who used great names to cloke it, by 
 some certain test, like that which St. Paul 
 (i Cor. xii. 3) and St. John himself, here also 
 agreeing with his brother apostle, had else- 
 where suggested (i John iv. 2, 3), by their 
 agreement with the truth on which the faith of 
 the Church rested, that Christ Jesus had come 
 in the flesh ; this was no small work to have 
 done, no light praise to have deserved. 
 
 The question who these teachers were, who 
 said they were' apostles and were not, is not 
 one which can be answered with any certainty. 
 Doubtless the leaders of every sect and heresy 
 at the opposite poles of error were in the habit 
 of putting forth such claims. The balance of 
 probability inclines, I think, in favour of the 
 view that they were not identical with those 
 who are afterwards named as Nicolaitanes, and 
 that they represent the leaders of the Judaizing 
 anti-Pauline party in the Asiatic Churches. 
 These, we know, claimed to be apostles, either 
 of Christ himself or of the Church at Jerusalem, 
 with special and extraordinary powers, the 
 "very chiefest apostles'' of 2 Cor. xii. 11. Of 
 these St. Paul speaks as " false apostles,, deceit- 
 ful workers," doing the work of Satan, and yet 
 disguised as angels of light (2 Cor. xi. 13, 14). 
 Those who followed him with ceaseless hostility 
 
64 The Epistle to Ephesus. 
 
 in Galatia, Corinth, Philippi, and Colossse were 
 hardly likely to leave Ephesus untouched ; and 
 it is noticeable that among the errors against 
 which his warning is most earnest in the 
 Pastoral Epistles, those which are Jewish and 
 legal occupy the foremost place (i Tim. i. 7 ; 
 Tit. i. 14). Those who do not come to the 
 study of the Apocalypse with a preconceived 
 theory that it is an anti-Pauline polemic, will 
 find a confirmation of this view in the corres- 
 ponding words in the message to the Church 
 of Smyrna against those "who say that they 
 are Jews, and are not, but are of the synagogue 
 of Satan " (Rev. ii. 9). 
 
 The words that follow, though they seem for 
 the most part to repeat the praise already given, 
 present some special points of interest. Then 
 the Angel of the Church had been praised 
 because he could not hear the evil workers. 
 Now he is commended because he has home 
 so much. To be intolerant of evil, and to be 
 tolerant of all besides, to hear the burdens of 
 other men (Gal. vi. 2), their weaknesses, or 
 coldness, or inattention, to hear also the 
 burden and heat of the day, — all this belongs 
 to the true pastor. In this way he hears the 
 cross which his Lord bore before him. And 
 with this there is the renewed mention of 
 
The Epistle to Ephestis. 65 
 
 '' endurance," not simply the passive resigna- 
 tion to suffering which we commonly associate 
 with the word " patience," but the temper of 
 calm heroic stedfastness which belongs to him 
 " who endureth to the end," and therefore wins 
 his ultimate and complete deliverance from evil. 
 And this endurance has been for the name of 
 Christ, and has shewn itself in many labours 
 (note the use of the self-same word as in 
 I Tim. V. 17 ; 2 Tim, ii. 6) which have not, 
 arduous as they were, led to weariness or sloth. ^ 
 It was significant, as a token of the gentle- 
 ness and tenderness of the Judge, that all that 
 was good should be fully acknowledged first, 
 and that not till then should the evil that 
 threatened its completeness be noticed with 
 words of warning. That, we may note, is ever 
 the true method of those who enter in any 
 measure into the mind of Christ. Every 
 Epistle of St. Paul (with, perhaps, the solitary 
 exception of that to the Galatians, where the 
 
 ^ The various readings require a word of notice. The greater 
 uncial Manuscripts give ovk tKOTriacrag, or vv KSKOTriaicag. 
 "Thou hast not toiled," and nothing more. The seeming 
 difficulty of this use of the verb, as a word of prais^, led (i) to 
 the omission of the negative, and then (2) to the insertion of 
 "thou hast not fainted," by way of expressing the original 
 thought more clearly. Taking the above reading we must 
 understand it as if it were, " Thou hast not toiled wearily," 
 i e. " hast not felt thy labour to be a toil. " 
 6 
 
66 The Epistle to Ephesus. 
 
 need was urgent and the peril great) is a 
 practical illustration of it. The thought that 
 He with whom we have to do as at once Judge 
 and Friend and Advocate, judges us after this 
 manner, not closing His e3'es to any evil that He 
 discerns in us, but also not extreme to mark 
 what is done amiss, and recognising the good 
 He has enabled us to do even more fully than 
 we ourselves can recognise it, is one which may 
 well come to the minister of Christ in times 
 when his spirit droops within him and he has 
 misgivings as to his labours and their result, 
 with a power to strengthen and ennoble. 
 
 The special nature of the fault reproved is, I 
 believe, entirely in accordance with the view 
 which I have taken as to the person who was 
 thus addressed. No one can read the Epistles 
 to Timothy without feeling that, in the midst 
 of all St. Paul's love for his disciple, his recog- 
 nition of his loyalty, purity, earnestness, there 
 is a latent tone of anxiety. The nature with 
 which he had to do was emotional even to tears 
 (2 Tim. i. 4), ascetic (i Tim. v. 23), devout 
 (2 Tim. i. 5) ; but there was in it a tendency 
 to lack of energy and sustained enthusiasm. 
 To supply this defect he exhorts him once and 
 again to be strong, and to endure hardness ; to 
 stir up, i.e, to rekindle (dva^coirvpelp, 2 Tim. 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus. 67 
 
 i. 6), the grace of God ; to continue in the 
 things he had learnt, knowing of whom he had 
 learnt them (2 Tim. iii. 14). Such an one falls 
 easily into labours that are genuine as far as 
 they go, and yet are not pervaded by the fervour 
 and energy of love. Whether the " first love " 
 is that which has God, or Christ, or man for its 
 object, I am not careful to inquire ; for the 
 true temper of love or charity includes all three; 
 but it is more important to insist that the defect 
 spoken of was one which attached to the angel 
 or bishop of the Church personally, and only to 
 the Church at large so far as it was represented 
 by him and influenced by his example. The 
 *' first love" which had been *' left " was 
 accordingly not that of the bride for the bride- 
 groom of her espousal, as in Jeremiah ii. 2, 
 but rather that of the friend of the bridegroom, 
 loving and unselfish, whose work it was, the 
 work which St. Paul had claimed as his own in 
 writing to the Corinthians, to bring the bride 
 to her betrothed and, with loving care, to guard 
 her from defilement (2 Cor. xi. 2, 3). 
 
 It has been urged, on the assumption that 
 the words point only or chiefly to the short- 
 comings of the Church of Ephesus as distinct 
 from its ruler, that they supply an almost 
 decisive proof of the theory which assigns the 
 6* 
 
68 The Epistle to Ephesus. 
 
 Apocalypse to the time of Domitian.^ The 
 change, it is said, is too great, the falling away 
 from the first love too complete, to have taken 
 place in any shorter interval. I cannot but 
 think (i) that the personal reference for which 
 I have contended is open to no such objection ; 
 ind (2) that, even on the assumption of there 
 being a reference, direct or indirect, to the 
 condition of the Ephesian Church, those who 
 lay stress on this objection have dwelt too 
 much on the bright side of the picture presented 
 in the Epistle to the Ephesians, and too little 
 on those darker features which, as we have 
 seen, were already coming into prominence 
 before the ministry of St. Paul had reached its 
 close. What we meet with here is certainly 
 not otherwise than consistent with the warnings 
 and the fears, the all but total desertion, and 
 the thickening heresies which the Pastoral 
 Epistles bring before us. If anything, it indi- 
 cates something even of a revival, partial 
 though not complete, from the state there por- 
 trayed ; and we may legitimately connect that 
 revival, both as regards the Church and its 
 representative, with the parting counsels of the 
 Apostle. 
 
 The warnings and the counsels which follow 
 
 * Archbishop Trench, " Seven Churches," p. 73. 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus, 69 
 
 on this reproof have a deep ethical significance. 
 *' Remember^ therefore^ from whence thou art 
 fallen; and repent, and do the first works.'' 
 The words bring before our thoughts one of 
 the functions of the awful gifts of memory in 
 the spiritual education of the individual soul. 
 As it is true, — 
 
 "That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembei-ing 
 happier things," 
 
 SO also is it true that the first step towards 
 repentance is to call to mind, distinctly and 
 vividly, the highest moments that we have 
 known in our religious experience. There may 
 come a time when that will be the sharpest 
 pang of a sorrow almost or altogether hopeless, 
 when the recollection that we have been illu- 
 mined, and tasted of the heavenly gift and the 
 powers of the world to come (Heb. vi. 4, 5), will 
 but make us feel more bitterly the difficulty or 
 impossibility of renewal. But, short of that, the 
 memory of the past, however painful, is yet 
 remedial. It tells us of the blessedness of 
 which we have once been capable, which we 
 have actually attained, and therefore may attain 
 again, and so far is an element of encourage- 
 ment as well as sorrow — of repentance and not 
 of mere remorse. We can yet look back upon 
 the height which we once had reached, and 
 
70 The Epistle to Ephesiis. 
 
 slowly and with painful steps begin to climb 
 again. Out of that memory springs a true 
 contrition and a stedfast effort. And the counsel 
 which follows is precisely that which meets the 
 exigencies of the case. It may not be possible 
 to renew at once the ^^ first love.'" The old 
 fervour and enthusiasm of faith will not come 
 back at our bidding or our wish. We must 
 take that which, so long as we retain our power 
 to choose, does lie within our reach, and do the 
 ^^ first works'' — in this case those very works 
 on which the Lord of the Churches had already 
 bestowed his praise ; and then, in due time, the 
 warmth will come back to the heart which, in 
 spite even of its own coldness, has persevered 
 in duty. It is possible, though there is no 
 virtue without faith, to gain faith by virtue. 
 It is possible, in like manner, to regain the first 
 love by doing the first works. 
 
 The call to repentance is followed by a 
 warning, — "Or else I will come unto thee 
 quickly ^ and will remove thy candlestick out of 
 its placey except thou repents The words shew 
 that the ** coming of the Lord " had gained a 
 wider and, in some sense, deeper meaning than 
 that which we commonly attach to the second 
 advent. That to which the warning points is 
 not the great far-off event fixed in the everlasting 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus. 71 
 
 counsels, but the Judgment-day of the language 
 of the Old Testament, the "day of the Lord," 
 whose coming may be averted or delayed by 
 repentance, hastened by impenitence and defi- 
 ance. Such days of the Lord come, in the 
 course of the world's history, on all nations and 
 churches that are faithless to their trust. The 
 judgment lingers, the wheels of the Lord's 
 chariot tarry, and men eat and drink, plant and 
 build, marry and are given in marriage, as 
 though all things would go on as they are for 
 ever, and then He ''^ comes quickly,'" in one or 
 other of the sore judgments which are sent as 
 the chastisment of their want of faith and their 
 evil deeds. Here the judgment threatened was 
 determined by the symbolism of the vision. The 
 lamp was not burning brightly. If it were 
 rekindled and trimmed and fed with oil, well. 
 If not, there would come on it the sentence 
 which falls on all unfaithfulness, and the lamp 
 should be removed. The Church which had 
 not let its light shine before men would lose 
 even its outward form and polity, and be as 
 though it had never been. 
 
 The Church and its ruler are here, in some 
 measure at least, identified. Unless he repents 
 and does the first works, the society over which 
 he rules, and which is represented by him, will 
 
72 The Epistle to Ephesus. 
 
 suffer the penalty which attaches to the failure 
 of faith and love in which it has been a sharer. 
 So it is always in the history of nations and of 
 churches. But it would, I believe, be an error 
 to think of the warning and the exhortations as 
 addressed simply to the Church as such, and 
 not to the angel or ruler individually. Much 
 rather is it true that this is urged upon his 
 conscience as a motive to lead him to repent- 
 ance, that his sins, even though they are negative 
 rather than positive in their character, tend to 
 bring about that terrible result. One whose 
 heart was in his work, who had learnt to look 
 on the Church committed to him with a deep 
 and anxious tenderness, would feel that to be 
 a greater penalty than any personal chastise- 
 ment. To have the blood of souls that perished 
 required at his hand, to see his work destroyed, 
 even though he himself should be saved, so as 
 by fire, to lose that to which he had looked 
 forward as his joy and crown of rejoicing, — 
 this was and is the penalty of the shepherd 
 who is even partially unfaithful, who has ''^ left 
 his first love.'' For those who fill high places 
 to see systems collapsing, an organisation dis- 
 organised, polity giving way to anarchy ; for 
 those who have a lower work to perceive that 
 they are not gaining, but losing, ground, that 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus. 73 
 
 worshippers are scattered and listeners few, and 
 that their own want of love infects their people 
 — this is the penalty, as by an inevitable law, 
 of their transgression. That over which they 
 have not watched is " decaying and waxing old." 
 The next stage of *' vanishing away," the re- 
 moval of the candlestick, is not far distant. 
 
 I am not disposed to dwell, as most com- 
 mentators have done, on the present desolate 
 condition of the town of Agio-solouk, which 
 represents by a few scattered huts what was 
 once the Ephesus of world-wide fame, as shew- 
 ing that the warning was neglected and that the 
 penalty at last came. Doubtless that condition 
 illustrates the working of the law which was 
 proclaimed in the message as a prophecy, in the 
 higher sense of that word ; but the time which 
 elapsed before the decay and ruin were brought 
 about carries us too far beyond the horizon 
 indicated by that "coming quickly" for us to 
 look upon it as the distinct fulfilment of a pre- 
 diction. Rather may we see such a fulfilment 
 under its brighter aspects in the fact that when 
 we next come across traces of the spiritual 
 condition of the Church of Ephesus it is to 
 recognise a marked change for the better, a 
 revival of the old energy of life and love. 
 When Ignatius addressed his Epistle to that 
 
74 The Epistle to Ep/iestis. 
 
 Church, about half a century after what we 
 have assumed as the date of the Apocalypse, he 
 found it under the care of an Onesimus (whether 
 the runaway slave of Colossae or another of the 
 same name, we cannot say), and abounding in 
 spiritual excellences. It gives proof of a ful- 
 filment of prophecy of another kind than that 
 commonly dwelt on to find that the mes- 
 sage had done its work. The points on which 
 the Martyr touches are in singular harmony 
 with the counsel given in the message now 
 before us. That in which he rejoiced was that 
 the believers at Ephesus and their bishop " had 
 rekindled their life " {ava^coirvptjaavre^, the self- 
 same word as in 2 Tim. i. 6) "in the blood of 
 God," — that no sect or heresy was found among 
 them. They " had not suffered those who 
 came bringing an evil doctrine to sow their tares 
 among the wheat, but had closed their ears 
 against them." They carried God and Christ 
 in their hearts, and so became as temples ; they 
 were Theophoriy Chnstophori, Naophori. And so 
 the sentence was at least deferred, and for 
 many a long year the candlestick was not 
 removed, and the Church of Ephesus, which 
 had thus been warned, took its place in the 
 history of the Church Catholic as bearing its 
 witness, in the third Qj^cumenical Council 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus, 75 
 
 (a.d. 431), to the great central truth on which 
 St. Paul and Ignatius {ad Ephes. c. 9), had 
 alike laid stress, that " God was manifested in 
 the flesh." 
 
 And then once more, and as pointing to that 
 which was a gleam of hope even amidst the 
 symptoms of decay that had called for the word 
 of warning, there came words of recognition 
 and of praise. " This thou hast, that thou hatest 
 the deeds of the Nicolaitanes, which I also 
 hate/' The questions who these Nicolaitanes 
 were, whence they took their name, what were 
 their hateful deeds, are, I need scarcely say, 
 among the vexed problems of the history of the 
 apostolic age, for the solution of which we 
 have no satisfying data. On the one side 
 there is the Patristic, but by no means primi- 
 tive, tradition that the Proselyte of Antioch, 
 whose name appears in the list of the Seven in 
 Acts vi. 5, had either himself fallen away from 
 the faith, or had by unguarded words given 
 occasion of offence to those that followed him ; 
 that he had taught men to abuse (7rapa')(^priadac) 
 the flesh in the sense of punishing and afflicting 
 it, and that men had taken the word as mean- 
 ing that they might use it to the full, and 
 conquer their appetites by indulging them till 
 they ceased to stimulate, and that thus, in order 
 
76 The Epistle to EpJiesus. 
 
 to shew that lust had no power over them, they 
 lived in what the conscience of true Christians 
 condemned as hateful impurities.^ On the 
 other we have the conjectures of modern 
 critics that the very word was a play upon 
 the name so prominent about this time both 
 in these very messages and in other apostolic 
 writings — the name of Balaam the son of Beor, 
 after whom many had gone astray (2 Pet. ii. 15), 
 and had run greedily (Jude, verse 11), who 
 had taught Balak to cast a stum.bling-block 
 before the children of Israel, to eat things 
 sacrificed unto idols and to commit fornication.^ 
 The mention of the two as distinct, though 
 cognate in their corruptions and impurities, in 
 the message to the Church of Pergamos (Rev. ii. 
 14, 15) seems decisive against absolute identifi- 
 cation ; and I incline, with some doubt, to the 
 
 ^ See the articles on ** Nicolaos " and the " Nicolaitanes," in 
 Smith's Dictionary of the Bible. The earliest writer who states 
 that the sect so-called claimed Nicolaos the Proselyte as their 
 founder is Irengeus. Clement of Alexandria accepts the story that 
 his teaching had been perverted in the manner above described. 
 Epiphanius imputes the corrupt practices of the sect to the 
 actual example and direct teaching of their founder. 
 
 ^ Nicolaos ("conqueror of the people") is identified with 
 Balaam, according to one etymology of the latter word, as the 
 " lord," according to another as the "devourer," of the people. 
 Both derivations are, however, uncertain, and the best Hebraists 
 (Gesenius and Fiirst, the latter admitting the possibility of 
 " devourer ") explain the name as meaning, "not of the people," 
 i.e. , an alien and foreigner. 
 
The hpistle to Ephestis, jj 
 
 old Patristic view that the sect so described 
 took its name, under some colourable plea, 
 from Nicolaos the Proselyte, and reserve what 
 has to be said as to the error of Balaam 
 till we come to it in its own place. It is 
 enough for the present to note the fact that any 
 feeling of righteous hatred of evil, of loathing 
 for that which corrupts and defiles, is welcomed 
 by the Lord of the Churches as a sign of life. 
 As long as there is the capacity for this indig- 
 nation there is hope. When this also fails, 
 and men tolerate and accept impurity of words 
 and acts, — when conscience is seared, as with a 
 red-hot iron, then the last sign of life has passed 
 away and decay and putrescence have set in. 
 
 Lastly, we have the promise of reward with 
 which this, like all the other messages, ends. 
 Attention is called to it in the self-same words 
 that our Lord had so often used, almost, it 
 might be said, as a formula of teaching, in his 
 earthly ministry : " Whoso hath ears to hear, 
 let him hear" (Matt, xi 15 ; xiii. 9) ; ''He that 
 hath an ear let him hear what the Spirit saith 
 unto the churches.'" And the promise in this 
 case carries us back, as so much of the recorded 
 teaching of St. John does elsewhere, to the 
 earliest records of the Bible, ^ — to the opening 
 
 ^ See a Paper on " The Book of Genesis and the Revelation 
 of St. John," in the Bible Educator, vol. i. p. 27. 
 
78 The Epistle to Ephesus, 
 
 chapters of the Book of Genesis. '*To him 
 thai overcometh will I give to eat of the tree 
 of lif^i which is in the midst of the paradise 
 of Godr 
 
 We remember, as we read the words, that the 
 Apostle had once before heard that promise of 
 " paradise " from the hps of his Lord ; so far as 
 His recorded teaching goes, once, and once only 
 (Luke xxiii. 43). Both in the general absence 
 of the word and in that solitary use of it we 
 may reverently recognise a profound wisdom, 
 adapting the phases under which it presented 
 the truth to the capacities and necessities of 
 those who were to be recipients of it. In the 
 popular speech of Judaism, in the legends 
 alike of Pharisees and the multitude the word 
 " paradise " (as now among the followers of 
 Mahomet) brought with it the imagery of sensu- 
 ous enjoyment — of a region of fair trees and 
 pleasant fruits and clear streams, and the 
 soft south-west blowing for evermore. He, the 
 Teacher, was leading His disciples to a more 
 spiritual idea of the blessedness of the life to 
 come— say, rather, of the life eternal — and 
 therefore brought it before them under the 
 aspect of a kingdom in which the supreme 
 blessedness was to gaze upon the face of the 
 King and to be made glad with the joy of His 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus. 79 
 
 countenance. But that thought of a kingdom 
 required in its turn a preparatory training; 
 without some such teaching as that of the 
 Sermon on the Mount it was likely to suggest 
 such a restored monarchy, having its seat at 
 Jerusalem, as that of which Jewish zealots had 
 dream.t and were yet dreaming ; and, therefore, 
 to that poor sufferer on the cross — the wild out- 
 law, whose one element of religious life had, 
 we may believe, been the hope, in childish years 
 long past, of a garden of delight in which he 
 should wander at his will — He spake the word 
 which gave comfort and hope, '* This day thou 
 shalt be with me in paradise." 
 
 And now the beloved Disciple hears once more 
 the same word from the lips of the same Lord, 
 in the highest moment of spiritual conscious- 
 ness, as part of the apocalypse of eternal truths. 
 So it is that extremes meet — that the language 
 of symbols meet the necessities of children and 
 child-like souls, ceases often to attract or to 
 edify those who are in an intermediate state 
 of growth, and then, when the understanding is 
 ripened and mere abstract ideas have done 
 their work of formulating and defining, is found 
 to be, after all, their best, if not their only 
 adequate exponent. The Christian of highest 
 culture and most enlarged experience falls back 
 
8o The Epistle to Ephesus. 
 
 upon the imagery of the Golden City and the 
 Delectable Mountains, and the Paradise of God 
 and the Tree of Life. 
 
 The revival of this last symbol in the pages 
 of the Apocalj^pse is in many ways suggestive. 
 Prominent as it had been in the primaeval his- 
 tory, it had remained unnoticed in the teaching 
 where we should most have looked for its 
 presence, — in that of the Psalmists and the 
 Prophets of the Old Testament, Only in the 
 Proverbs of Solomon had it been used in a 
 sense half-allegorical, half-mystical. Wisdom 
 was a "tree of life " to them that laid hold on 
 her (Prov. iii. i8) ; and the same glorious 
 predicate was affirmed of the fulfilment of 
 the heart's desire (Prov. xiii. 12); of the fruit of 
 the righteous (Prov. xi. 30) ; of the wholesome 
 and health-giving tongue (Prov. xv. 4). In con- 
 nection with the revival of the symbol in the 
 Apocalypse it may be noted (i) that it was 
 the natural sequel of the fresh prominence that 
 had recently been given, as we have seen, to 
 the thought of Paradise ; and (2) that the 
 writings of Philo had specifically called atten- 
 tion to the Tree of Life as being the mystical 
 type of the highest form of wisdom and of 
 holiness— the fear of God {Oeocre^ela), by which 
 the soul attains to immortality. We trace in 
 
The Epistle to EphesMs. 8i 
 
 other things at least the indirect influence of 
 Philo's teaching on the thoughts and language 
 of St. John ; and as we must assume that all 
 imagery is adapted, even in the words of the 
 Divine Speaker, to the minds of those who 
 hear, there seems no reason why we should 
 not admit the working of that influence here. 
 
 It may be asked, however. What is the mean- 
 ing of the symbol as thus used,— how are we 
 to translate it into the language of more 
 abstract truth ? And here, if I mistake not, 
 the more developed form of the symbol at the 
 close of the Apocalypse gives us the true 
 answer: "The tree of life bare twelve manner 
 of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month, and 
 the leaves of the tree were for the healing 
 of the nations" (Rev. xxii. 2). The leaves and 
 the fruit obviously represent, the one the full 
 and direct, the other the partial and indirect, 
 workings of that eternal life which St. John 
 thought of as manifested in the Incarnate 
 Word, The "healing of the nations," the 
 elevation of their standard of purity and holi- 
 ness, of duty and of love, — this has been the 
 work of that partial knowledge which the 
 Church of Christ has been instrumental in 
 diffusing. Its influence has counteracted the 
 deadly working of the fruit of the other tree of 
 7 
 
82 The Epistle to Ephesiis. 
 
 "the knowledge of good and evil," which we trace 
 as due to a wisdom that is earthly, sensual, 
 devilish. But to '^ eat of the, fruit of the tree'' 
 implies a more complete fruition, a higher com- 
 munion and fellowship with the source of life. 
 And here, therefore, I cannot but think that 
 the promise of the Judge points to the truth 
 that He is Himself, now as ever, the "exceed- 
 ing great reward " (Gen. xv. i) of those that 
 serve Him faithfully, that the symbol veils 
 the truth that " this is life eternal, to know 
 the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He 
 has sent " (John xvii. 3). 
 
 And that reward is promised "^0 him that 
 overcomethy If anything were wanted to com- 
 plete the evidence of a resemblance in thought 
 and phrase in all the writings ascribed to the 
 authorship of St. John, it would be found in the 
 prominence of this word in all of them. Here 
 it is the burden of every message. '* I have 
 overcome the world " — this was the assurance 
 given to the disciples by their Master imme- 
 diately before that prayer which, as the great 
 High Priest of mankind. He offered up for 
 them and all His people (John xvi. 33). The 
 self-same word is echoed in the Epistles. To 
 overcome the wicked one is the glory of the 
 young men who are faithful to their calling 
 
The Epistle to Ephesus. 83 
 
 (i John ii. 13, 14), — "that which is born of 
 God overcometh the world " (i John v. 4). 
 " This is the victory that overcometh the world, 
 even our faith," the faith of him that believeth 
 that Jesus is the Son of God (i John v. 4, 5). 
 In the other Gospels it occurs but once, and 
 then with but little emphasis (Luke xi. 22). 
 In the Epistles of St. Paul it meets us once 
 only, and then in the simply ethical precept, 
 " Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil 
 with good " (Rom. xii. 21). It was reserved 
 for St. John ^ at once to record, to echo, and 
 to develop throughout his writings the words 
 which he had heard from his Master's lips ; 
 and through him they have become part of the 
 inheritance of Christendom, and have carried, 
 and will carry to the end of time, strength and 
 comfort to every faithful soldier in that great 
 warfare against evil in which Christ is the 
 Captain of our salvation. 
 
 ^ The verb occurs, it may be noted, twenty times in the 
 writings of St. John. 
 
 7* 
 
III. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO SMYRNA 
 
THE REVELATION. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 8 And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write ; These 
 thins^s saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive ; 
 
 9 I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art 
 rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, 
 and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan. 
 
 10 Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer : behold, the 
 devil shall cast some of you into prison that ye may be tried ; and 
 ye shall have tribulation ten days : be thou faithful unto death, and 
 I will give thee a crown of life. 
 
 11 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto 
 the churches ; He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second 
 death. 
 
III. 
 
 THE messages that follow that to the 
 Church of Ephesus stand in one respect 
 in very striking contrast to it. There we are 
 able, through the Acts of the Apostles and the 
 Epistles of St. Paul, to follow the history of 
 the Christian community from its very birth ; 
 to trace the influences that had acted on it ; 
 to see in what way the picture brought before 
 us in the Apocalypse was the result of those 
 influences. Here we know nothing of the 
 previous history. But for this mention of the 
 Churches we should not have known that any 
 Christian congregations had been planted there. 
 Knowing that they were so planted we can at 
 best conjecture that they owed their origin to 
 the evangelising activity of St. Paul, or his 
 associates in the mission-work of the Church, 
 during his residence at Ephesus, and that they 
 had become personally known to St. John 
 when he succeeded to the care of the Asiatic 
 Churches. 
 
88 The Epistle to Smyrna. 
 
 Nor does it help us here, any more than in 
 the case of Ephesus, to fall back upon the pre- 
 Christian history of Smyrna as a city. That it 
 had been wealthy, populous, commercial, from 
 the remote period that had preceded the Per- 
 sian conquest ; that it claimed, with other 
 cities (six or seven), to have been the birth- 
 place of Homer; that, after suffering great 
 injury from an earthquake in the early part 
 of the reign of Tiberius, it had risen from its 
 ruins into fresh magnificence ; that it courted 
 and gained the favour of that Emperor and his 
 successors, — all this is, for our present purpose, 
 of little moment. It is, perhaps, something 
 more to the point to remember that it was as 
 famous for the worship of Dionysos as Ephesus 
 was for that of Artemis, and that the mysteries 
 and games which were held yearly in his 
 honour were a prominent feature in its life. It 
 followed, almost as a matter of course, from 
 its wealth and trade, that it would attract a 
 considerable population of Jews, and that these 
 would occupy there much the same position as 
 at Ephesus,' worshipping in their synagogues, 
 zealous for their faith, some of them welcoming 
 
 ' The prominence of the Jews in the history of the martyrdom 
 of Polycarp at a later date shews how numerous they then were. 
 {Mart. Polyc. c. 12, 13, 17.) 
 
The Epistle to Smyrna. 89 
 
 the new doctrine of the preachers of the Cross 
 as the completion of that faith, some of them 
 hating and reviHng it even more than they 
 hated the Heathenism by which they were 
 surrounded. In such a city it was natural that 
 the believers in the name of Christ should 
 suffer persecution. It is clear that they had 
 not escaped the storm which swept over the 
 Asiatic Churches at the time of St. Paul's last 
 visit, and which had apparently burst out with 
 fresh violence at the time when the beloved 
 Disciple was suffering for the faith in his exile 
 in Patmos. Possibly its comparative remote- 
 ness from the great centre of apostolic activity 
 at Ephesus exposed it more to the excitement 
 of fear and agitation which persecution inevit- 
 ably brings with it. 
 
 To the Angel of that Church accordingly the 
 Lord, who speaks the word in season to them 
 that are weary (Isa. 1. 4), reveals Himself by 
 a name that speaks of permanence and calm, 
 of victory over all disturbing forces, victory all 
 the more complete and wonderful because it 
 came after apparent failure — " These things 
 saith the First and the Last, which was dead 
 and is alive.'' Those who were struggling, 
 suffering, dying for the faith, were the servants 
 of no party-leader, no founder of a sect, no 
 
90 The Epistle to Smyrna. 
 
 prophet with a temporary mission, but of One 
 to whom all the aeons of the world's history, 
 all wars and revolutions and the rise and fall 
 of kingdoms were but as " moments in the 
 eternal silence." They might be tempted to 
 think their cause desperate ; they might seem 
 to be fighting against overwhelming odds ; 
 death in all the myriad forms which the 
 subtle cruelty of persecution could devise might 
 appear imminent, but He who ^^ was dead and 
 is alive''' could give them there also a victory 
 like his own.^ 
 
 Nor were the words that followed less dis- 
 tinctive in their consoling power : He knew 
 their " works,'' their " tribulation," and their 
 ^^ poverty." The last word is specially sugges- 
 tive as pointing to that which weighed most 
 oppressively on the minds of the suffering com- 
 munity of Smyrna. Persecution has its heroic 
 and exciting side, and under its stimulus men 
 do and dare much ; but when, in addition to 
 this, there is the daily pressure of ignoble 
 
 1 1 can hardly bring myself to accept Dean Blakesley's sugges- 
 tion {Dictionary of the Bible, art. ** Smyrna "), that the words 
 imply a reference to the mythical legend of the death and 
 reviviscence of Dionysos, which, at Smyrna as elswhere, was 
 prominent in the mysteries that bore his name. That legend 
 must surely ha\'e been altogether foreign to the thoughts of the 
 Evangelist and the believers to whom he wrote. 
 
The Epistle to Smymia. 91 
 
 cares, the living as from hand to mouth, the 
 insufficient food and the scanty squalid clothing 
 of the beggar, the trial becomes more wearing, 
 and calls for greater fortitude and faith. We 
 do not sufficiently estimate, I believe, this 
 element in the sufferings of the first believers. 
 Taken for the most part from the humbler 
 class of artisans, often thrown out of employ- 
 ment by the very fact of their conversion, with 
 new claims upon them from the afflicted mem- 
 bers of the great family of Christ close at 
 hand or afar off, and a new energy of sacrifice 
 prompting them to admit those claims, sub- 
 jected not unfrequently to the " spoiling of 
 their goods" (Heb. x. 34), we cannot wonder 
 that they should have had little earthly store, 
 and that their reserve of capital should have 
 been rapidly exhausted. Traces of this meet 
 us, though they are not put forward ostenta- 
 tiously, in many scattered passages of the New 
 Testament writings. Collections for the poor 
 saints at Jerusalem were made in all the 
 churches of the Gentiles. Those who gave 
 most liberally to that work did so out of the 
 *' deep poverty " in which they were themselves 
 plunged, "to the utmost of their power, yea, 
 and beyond their power" (2 Cor. viii. 2, 3). 
 Even the stress laid in some of St. Paul's 
 
92 The Epistle to Smyrna. 
 
 Epistles on the duties of the rich points to 
 their position as altogether exceptional. And 
 poverty brought with it, as the Epistle of St. 
 James shews us, some trials to which those 
 who had been devout Israelites before their 
 conversion, and who had not ceased to claim 
 their position as such, would be peculiarly 
 sensitive. In the synagogue which they had 
 been in the habit of attending, and which there 
 was no reason for their at once forsaking, per- 
 haps even in the assemblies of Jewish disciples 
 which still retained the old name and many of 
 the old usages, they would find themselves 
 scorned and scoffed at, thrust into the back- 
 ground, below the footstool of the opulent 
 traders in whom a city like Smyrna was 
 certain to abound (James ii. 2, 3). The hatred 
 which the unbelieving Jews felt for the name 
 of Christ would connect itself with their purse- 
 proud scorn of the poor and needy, and '* those 
 beggars of Christians " would become a by- 
 word of reproach.^ 
 
 It was a message of comfort to those who 
 were smarting under that taunt to hear, as 
 from their Lord's lips, "/ know thy poverty y 
 
 ^ I may recall to the reader's memory that this is the most ac- 
 cepted explanatioai of the name Ebionites ("the poor"), applied 
 to a large section of Jewish Christians in the first century. 
 
The Epistle to Smyrna, 93 
 
 hid thou art richy He measured poverty and 
 riches by another standard than the world's, 
 and so the words recorded by St. John are, as 
 it were, the echo of those which the brother 
 of the Lord had addressed to men who were 
 in a like condition : " Hath not God chosen 
 the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs 
 of the kingdom which he hath promised to 
 them that love him ? " (James ii. 5.) And He, 
 looking upon their works and their tribulation, 
 knew that they had their treasure in heaven, 
 that they were rich with His own unsearch- 
 able riches, that they had laid up their wealth 
 where neither rust nor moth corrupt and where 
 thieves do not break through and steal. Their 
 state was the very antithesis of that which we 
 shall afterwards find described as that of the 
 Church of Laodicea, and in that deep poverty 
 of theirs they were wealthy, beyond the dreams 
 of avarice, in the " gold tried in the fire." 
 
 The stress thus laid on one special incident 
 of the tribulation of the Church of Smyrna 
 prepares us to understand the words that follow. 
 I take the blasphemy of which they speak as 
 coming from ^^ those who say they are Jews 
 and are not,'' as meaning, primarily, not direct 
 blasphemy against God, but the words of reviling 
 which were hurled in reckless scorn at the 
 
94 The Epistle to Smyrna, 
 
 believers in the name of Christ. It was in the 
 synagogue that they heard the words which 
 reproached them as Nazarenes, Galileans, 
 Christians, disciples of the Crucified ; and, as 
 in the case of those of whom St. James writes, 
 those who despised the poor, and whose contempt 
 was aggravated by the fact that these poor were 
 Christians, in reviling them " blasphemed also 
 that worthy name " by which they had been 
 called (James ii. 7). Upon all such, whether 
 they were Jews continuing still in their unbelief, 
 or, as is possible, professing some kind of faith 
 in Christ, yet retaining all the vices of their 
 original Pharisaism, the Lord of the Churches 
 pronounces the sentence that they are no true 
 Jews, that they do not belong to the Israel of 
 God, that the synagogue of which they are the 
 members is nothing else than the synagogue 
 of Satan. His spirit was working in them, the 
 spirit of pride, and hatred, and scorn, and un- 
 belief, and it was well that they, who knew not 
 what manner of spirit they were of, should have 
 their eyes opened to the perils of their true state. 
 And then there came words which at once 
 told them that they had to face evils that were 
 greater than any they had as yet experienced, 
 and enabled them to bear them. The storm 
 was not yet over. They had but heard its 
 
The Epistle to- Smyrna. 95 
 
 mutterings and seen its distant flashes as com- 
 pared with the violence with which it was about 
 to break on them. " T/z^ devil'' — for the an- 
 tagonismx to the Truth is traced up here, as 
 elsewhere, beyond all merely human instruments, 
 to the great enemy of God and man, the great 
 accuser and slanderer, the head of all the human 
 diaholi who made themselves instruments in 
 his work — would ^' cast some of them into 
 prison,'' and from that prison some of them 
 should pass out to encounter death in all the 
 manifold forms which the cruelty of their per- 
 secutors could devise. They were to be tried 
 with this fiery trial that the gold of their true 
 treasure might be at once tested and purified. 
 That which was designed by their great foe as 
 a temptation leading them to apostasy should 
 work, like all the other "manifold temptations" 
 to which they were exposed, so as to be fruitful 
 in all joy. 
 
 The specific mention of the 'Uen days" during 
 which the tribulation was to last has naturally 
 suggested many questions. Are the days to be 
 taken literally, and has the prediction therefore 
 the character of a promise, encouraging the 
 sufferers to stedfastness on the ground of the 
 short duration of the trial ? Are we to adopt what 
 has almost come to be assumed as an axiom 
 
96 The Epistle to Smyrna. 
 
 to the interpretation of other parts of the 
 Apocatypse, that a day stands for a year, and 
 that the words point therefore to the persecution 
 as at once severe and protracted, and calling 
 for the faith which alone endureth to the end ? 
 Without adopting, or even for the present dis- 
 cussing, the "year-day" theory, I am disposed 
 to accept the latter view in its general bearing. 
 The number Ten, the last of the scale of num- 
 bers, the total of the first four units, each of which 
 had a mystic meaning of its own, is naturally, 
 in the symbolism of numbers, the representative 
 of completeness, and here, therefore, of perse- 
 cution carried to its full extent, and lacking 
 nothing that could make it thorough and perfect, 
 as a test/ It comes as the climax of the whole 
 picture of the sufferings to which the Church 
 of Smyrna was to be exposed. It implies the 
 " death " which is prominently brought forward 
 in the words of promise that follow. In those 
 words we may perhaps find something of a local 
 colouring, imagery drawn from the associations 
 that were necessarily familiar to the Church of 
 
 ^ The usage of the Old Testament is not consistent. In Gen. 
 xxxi. 41, Num. xiv. 24, Job. xix. 3, the definite number is used 
 to convey the idea of indefinitely frequent repetition. In Gen. 
 xxiv. 58, Num. xi. 19, it is used, apparently, in its literal sense. 
 The interpretation now given is based upon Bahr, Symbolik^ 
 
The Epistle to Sniyi^na. 97 
 
 Smyrna and its Angel. In the great games of 
 that city, as in the Isthmian games and those 
 of Olympia, the victor in the strife received 
 the "crown," or "garland" (aricjiavo^) that was 
 the badge of conquest.' For that crown men 
 were ready to endure and dare. It was the 
 great joy and glory of their lives. And such 
 a crown of victory the Lord of the Churches 
 promises to him who is faithful unto death. 
 It is to be " a crown of life,'' the genitive (as 
 in the case of the " crown of righteousness " 
 of 2 Tim. iv. 8) pointing to that of which the 
 crown is, as it were, made up. Life, eternal 
 life, is that which makes the reward of all 
 faithful combatants, and that eternal life con- 
 
 ^ Dean Blakesley states, in the article already referred to, but 
 without giving his authority, that the "crown " was given to the 
 priest who presided at the Dionysian mysteries, and that Smyr- 
 naean inscriptions record the names of many persons, men and 
 women, distinguished as (TT^<pav)](p6poL. I cannot see any force 
 in the objection urged by Archbishop Trench to this reference, 
 that comparisons drawn from the games of Greece were foreign 
 to the thoughts both of the writer and the readers of the Apoca- 
 lypse, and that the crowns referred to are therefore the signs, not 
 of victory in conflict, but, like the ^lao'/yuara (diadems) of Rev. 
 xii. 3; xiii. I ; xix. 12, of regal majesty. The Asiatic Churches must 
 have been familiar by this time with the imagery which had been 
 so freely used both by St. Paul (i Cor. ix. 24-27 ; 2 Tim. iv. 7 ; 
 Phil. iii. 13) and the great unknown writer of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews (Heb. xii. i) ; and the fact that St. John uses the other 
 word where the other meaning is required is, at least, presumptive 
 evidence that he uses this in its usual and more definite meaning. 
 8 
 
gS The Epistle to Smyrna, 
 
 sists in knowing God and Jesus Christ whom 
 He has sent. Now, as ever, He is Himself 
 the exceeding great reward of those who serve 
 Him truly. 
 
 The promise with which the message ends, 
 though different and more general, as well as 
 more mystical in its form, expresses substantially 
 the same truth: ^^ He that overcometh shall not 
 he hurt of the second death.'' The word, so 
 strange and awful, was, so far as we know, 
 comparatively new. Nothing like it meets us 
 in the Gospels, or in the Epistles of St. Peter 
 and St. Paul. And, although we must believe 
 that it had been used before in the teaching of 
 St. John, so that it would not fall on ears to 
 which it would convey no intelligible meaning, 
 it is yet ckar that it had not up to this time 
 become part of the current phraseology of the 
 Church.^ Yet the meaning of the phrase was 
 not far to seek. One who had learnt that the 
 life of the body was not the true life, must 
 have learnt, as the complement of that truth, 
 
 ' The date of the several portions of the Jerusalem Targumto 
 which Archbishop Trench refers as shewing that the word was 
 not strange to Jewish ears, cannot, I believe, be fixed with pre- 
 cision ; but it is at least possible that the Jews of Palestine had 
 become familiar with the phrase through the paraphrase given in 
 it of Deut. xxxiii. 6, and Psa. xlix. ii, in which the "second 
 death " is that which comes upon the wicked in the world to 
 come, and is used as synonymous with Gehenna. 
 
The Epistle to Smyrna. 99 
 
 that there was a death more terrible than that 
 to which the body is subject — the loss of the 
 eternal life. The teaching of his Lord on earth 
 had indeed implied that " second deaths Men 
 were not to fear those who were only able to 
 kill the body, but him who was able to destroy 
 both soul and body in hell (Matt. x. 28). Who- 
 soever believed in Him should not see death, 
 even though his body was committed to the 
 grave ; " though he were dead, yet should he 
 live " (John xi. 25). More striking still, as 
 bringing more fully into view the latent terrors 
 of the phrase, is its recurrence in a later chapter 
 of the Revelation. There it is said that the 
 "second death" hath no power over the blessed 
 and holy ones who have part in the first resur- 
 rection (xx. 6) ; and, again, that it is identical 
 with "the lake of fire," into which both Death 
 and Hades are to be cast, together with every 
 one who was not found written in the book 
 of life (xx. 14, 15). 
 
 It does not fall within my aim in this 
 volume to enter upon the wide eschatolo- 
 gical questions which these passages open 
 as regards the time and sequence of the 
 events thus mysteriously shadowed forth. We 
 are compelled, however, to ask what light 
 they throw upon the promise to the Angel 
 8* 
 
lOO The Epistle to Smy7^na, 
 
 of the Church of Smyrna. Is the " second 
 death'' to be interpreted by the " lake of fire " 
 as implying a state of enduring pain ? Are we 
 to rob the *' lake of fire" of its terrors by seeing 
 in it only the " second death,'' of the loss of con- 
 scious life or utter annihilation ? Here also we 
 stand on the threshold of great problems which 
 we cannot solve. But, as a question of simple 
 interpretation, I am bound to express my con- 
 viction that the evidence leads to the former, 
 and not the latter, conclusion. The imagery 
 of the fieiy lake, like that of the worm and the 
 flame of the Valley of Hinnom, may be but 
 imagery; but it points at least to some dread 
 reality which is veiled beneath those awful 
 symbols. What that reality is we may infer 
 from St. John's conceptions of the higher life. 
 If the first death is the loss of the first or 
 earthly life, then the second death must be the 
 loss of that knowledge of God which makes the 
 blessedness of eternal life — and that loss is at 
 lea-st compatible with the thought of continuous 
 existence. What possibilities in the far-off 
 future were shadowed forth by the m\sterious 
 words that *' Death and Hades were cast into 
 the lake of fire," as though they were to be 
 robbed of their power to destroy, and were 
 punished as the great enemies of God and man, 
 
The Epistle to Smyrna. loi 
 
 how far those who were cast in with them 
 might even. there be not shut out from hope, 
 it was not given to the Seer of the Apocalypse 
 to know, nor did he care to ask. It was enough 
 for the faithful sufferers under persecution, who 
 overcame in that conflict with the phmnia 
 mortis imago, to which they were exposed, to 
 know that this was all that their enemies could 
 inflict on them, and that the " second death'' 
 should have no power to hurt them. 
 
 The date to which I have assigned the 
 Apocalypse, and which gave a special interest 
 to the message to the Church of Ephesus, a& 
 being probably addressed to the true son and 
 fellow- worker of St. Paul, deprives me of what 
 would have given an almost equal interest to 
 that now under consideration. I cannot assume 
 with Archbishop Trench and others, whatever 
 latitude I may give to the duration of his life or 
 the date of his conversion, that Polycarp, who 
 suffered martyrdom in a.d. i68, could have been 
 the Angel of the Church of Smyrna at the time 
 when the Apocalypse was written. And yet the 
 coincidences which these writers have pointed 
 out are hardly less interesting on the assump- 
 tion that though the message was not addressed 
 to him, his life, as a Christian and a pastor, 
 came, more or less, under its influence. In his 
 
I02 The Epistle to Smyrna, 
 
 long conflict for the faith — his stedfast endur- 
 ance — his estimate of the fire with which men 
 could destroy the body, and the fire that never 
 can be quenched/ we find a character on which 
 the promise to him that overcometh had been 
 stamped indelibly. In the narrative of his 
 sufferings, as in the Apocalyptic message, the 
 devil is represented as the great instigator 
 of the persecution of which he was the victim.^ 
 There also Jews were the most active instru- 
 ments, as was their manner always, in the 
 fiendish work, even to the point of heaping up 
 the faggots which were to form his funeral 
 pyre.3 
 
 It is perhaps worth noticing, as shewing the 
 continuance in the Church of Smyrna of the 
 Same phraseology as that in the passage before 
 tis, that, in the Epistle which purports to be 
 addressed to Polycarp by Ignatius of Antioch, 
 the term "synagogue" is applied to Christian 
 assemblies (C. 4), and that the narrative of the 
 martyrdom ends with describing him as having 
 obtained the crown {(uki^avo^) of incorruption/ 
 
 ' Mart. Polyc. c. 2. 3 ibid. c. I2, 13. 
 
 = Ibid. c. 3. 4 Ibid. c. 17. 
 
IV. 
 THE EPISTLE TO PERGAMOS. 
 
THE REVELATION. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 12 And to the angel of the church in Pergamos write ; These 
 things saith'^he which hath the sharp sword with two edges ; 
 
 13 I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's 
 seat is ; and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my 
 faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, 
 who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth. 
 
 14 But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there 
 them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a 
 stumbling-block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed 
 unto idols, and to commit fornication. 
 
 15 So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nico- 
 laitanes, which thing I hate. 
 
 16 Repent ; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight 
 against them with the sword of my mouth. 
 
 17 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the 
 churches ; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden 
 manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new 
 name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. 
 
IV. 
 
 IN this instance there seems reason to believe 
 that there is a somewhat closer connection 
 between the outward history of the city and the 
 language in which the Church in that city is 
 described in the Apocalypse than we have found 
 in dealing with the messages to Ephesus and 
 Smyrna. Something there was which gave it 
 a bad eminence over them and over the other 
 cities that are here grouped with it. More 
 emphatically than any other it was the metro- 
 polis and fortress of the powers of evil, the place 
 where " Satan's throne was,'' and where he 
 himself was thought of, as ruling from that 
 throne, as the strong man armed, resenting 
 and resisting the attack which was now made 
 upon him by one mightier than himself. How 
 it came to be so, that outward history may, 
 in part at least, explain. 
 
 It is not necessary to go back to the earlier 
 time when the rock citadel of Mysia, about 
 three miles from the banks of the Caicus, first 
 
io6 The Epistle to Pergamos, 
 
 became celebrated for its worship of the mys- 
 terious Cabiri, and then, like other sacred places, 
 became a treasury where kings and chieftains 
 deposited their wealth. It will be enough to 
 remember that after the break-up of the Mace- 
 donian monarchy it became the capital of a 
 wealthy kingdom, and that Eumenes 11. sought 
 to rival the glory of Alexandria by the foundation 
 of a library, in which were stored the chief works 
 of the literature and philosophy of Greece;^ that 
 it became famous for the worship of the great 
 deities, Zeus, Athene, Dionysos, Apollo, Aphro- 
 dite, and, with even a more special devotion, 
 of ^sculapius ; that round that last form of 
 idolatry there gathered a great medical school, 
 which was afterwards rendered illustrious by 
 the name of Galen. In this religious character 
 lay its special claim to greatness. It was, as 
 Dean Blakesley has well described it,'' " a sort 
 of union of a pagan cathedral city, an university 
 town, and a royal residence;" and when, on the 
 death of Attains III., it passed, by his bequest, 
 to the Roman Republic, and afterwards to the 
 Empire, it retained its old fame, and was 
 
 ' It may be interesting to some readers to be reminded that 
 from thislibraiy we get the name parchment (charta Pergamena), 
 as applied to the special kind of vellum that was manufactured 
 for the transcription of its choicest works. 
 
 - Dictionary of the Bible , art. ** Pergamos." 
 
The Epistle to Perganios. 107 
 
 described by Pliny as without a rival in the 
 whole province of Asia. 
 
 Such a city might well seem to the x\postle 
 to be the headquarters of that great evil Power 
 against which he and his fellow-believers had 
 gone forth in the name of Christ to wage an 
 internecine warfare. And if we picture to our- 
 selves some of the peculiarities of the worship 
 which was there prominent — how ^Esculapius 
 was honoured with the name of " Preserver," 
 or " Saviour" {^corrjp); how in his temple the 
 -^sculapian symbol of the wreathed serpent 
 must have been the most conspicuous object, 
 seeming alike to Jew and Christian to be nothing 
 else but an open adoration of the "great serpent, 
 or dragon, called the Devil and Satan " (Rev. 
 xii. g) ; how to them the works of healing that 
 were ascribed to the power of the guardian deity 
 of the city would seem to be lying signs and 
 wonders, and the name which he bore a blas- 
 phemous assumption of the power of the true 
 Saviour, and even the books which the followers 
 of iEsculapius studied to be of the class of those 
 belonging to the *' curious arts," which they held 
 in righteous abhorrence and which the first 
 fervour of faith had led the zealous converts to 
 destroy (Acts xix. 19) — it will not seem strange 
 that such a city should be described, as we find 
 
io8 The Epistle to Pergamos. 
 
 it described here, as the very throne of Satan, 
 even if there had been no special events to indi- 
 cate that there the powers of evil were working 
 in their utmost malignity. But the context 
 shews that they had thus displayed themselves. 
 In other cities there had been the trial of perse- 
 cution, but it had not extended beyond scorn, 
 contumely, spoliation, or, at the furthest, im- 
 prisonment, and stripes, and exile. Here it had 
 gone further, and Pergamos had witnessed the 
 death of one whom we may well believe to have 
 been the protomartyr of the Asiatic Churches. 
 
 The special intensity of the evils which pre- 
 vailed at Pergamos determined, it would seem, 
 the choice of the special attribute claimed by 
 the Lord of the Churches as " iJ^ ivhich hath 
 the sharp sivord with two edges.'' That sharp 
 sword (the word points, in its literal meaning, 
 to the long sword of the heavy-armed soldier, 
 as distinct from dagger or short sabre) came, 
 it will be remembered, from the mouth, instead 
 of being wielded with the hand, and so answered 
 to the description of the righteous and victorious 
 King given by the prophet (Isa. xi. 4; xlix. 2), and 
 was the symbolic representation of the imagery 
 which the language of St. Paul must have made 
 familiar, and in which the " sword of the Spirit" 
 was "the word of God" (Ephes. vi. 17). As 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos. 109 
 
 such the two-edged weapon was to do its two- 
 fold work. On the one hand it was to smite that 
 it might heal, " piercing even to the dividing 
 asunder of soul and spirit " (Heb. iv. 12), cutting 
 to the quick, reaching the conscience, laying bare 
 the hidden depths of each man's life. On the 
 other it was also quick and powerful to smite and 
 to destroy ; and with it, with the weapon of the 
 Divine Word, the champions of the Truth, and 
 the Captain of the great host of those champions 
 Himself, would win the victory even in that 
 battlefield where the throne of Satan was set up 
 as though he were undisputed lord. 
 
 The fact that the Church of Pergamos had 
 witnessed the death of one of its teachers 
 (Antipas) has been already noticed by anticipa- 
 tion : of that ''''faithful martyr'^ we must be con- 
 tent to confess that we know nothing more than 
 the name. The passing mention of him by 
 Tertullian is obviously drawn from this passage 
 and conveys no information ; the longer narra- 
 tive of Simeon Metaphrastes is as obviously 
 nothing but a martyrdom written to order in 
 the tenth century. The suggestion made by 
 Hengstenberg that the name is itself symbolical ; 
 that it is, as it were, equivalent to dvTL/coo-fMo^, 
 *' one who holds his own against every one " 
 (az^Tt-Tra?) , an Athanasms contra Mundinn ; and 
 
no The Epistle to Pergamos. 
 
 the still wilder conjecture that under this pseudo- 
 nym we may recognise the living form of 
 Timotheus, though nothing in what the New 
 Testament records connects him with the Per- 
 gamene district, may be dismissed as simply 
 and almost childishly fantastic.^ The name, 
 like that of the Tetrarch of Galilee, is simply 
 a form of Antipatros, as Lucas is of Lucanus, 
 or Zenas of Zenodorus. And so we must leave 
 the name that thus shines like a star in the firma- 
 ment of heaven, without knowing more than that 
 he who bore it had, in open conflict against the 
 powers of evil, borne his witness that Christ 
 was the one Healer, Preserver, Saviour, and 
 thus had drawn upon himself the wrath of those 
 who saw their craft endangered, or were roused, 
 apart from motives of interest, to fanatic indig- 
 nation. It remains only to note that here also 
 the blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church, 
 and was fruitful in a harvest of like noble souls, 
 and that among those who were most conspicu- 
 ous in the annals of martyrdom in the severer 
 persecutions of the second century were four, at 
 least, who claimed Pergamos as their birthplace.^ 
 
 ' It may be well to state that I can see nothing in the faint 
 apology which Archbishop Trench makes for Hengstenberg's 
 hypothesis to modify this conviction. 
 
 - Euseb. Hist. Eccl. iv. 15 ; v. i. 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos. 1 1 1 
 
 The words that follow note what there was 
 of evil in the Church in which there was so 
 much that was conspicuously good : *' / have 
 a few things against thee, because thou hast 
 there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, 
 who taught Balak^ to cast a stumbling-block 
 before the children of IsraeW" On the assump- 
 tion to which we were led in examining the 
 reference to the Nicolaitanes in the message to 
 Ephesus, we have here to deal with a distinct 
 form of error. Why the name of Balaam should 
 be the representative of that false doctrine, what 
 was its nature and its practical working, in what 
 relation it stood to the teaching of other parts 
 of the New Testament on the same subject, are 
 all questions of much interest. It will be con- 
 venient to deal w^ith the two last first, and 
 to trace the history of the controversy as to 
 elhwXodvra, or '' things sacrificed to idols." 
 
 Every convert from Heathenism to the faith 
 of Christ would acknowledge that he was bound 
 to abstain from any participation, direct or 
 indirect, in the false worship which he renounced 
 
 ^ The anomalous dative toj BaXoK, instead of the accusative 
 common after verbs of teaching, which is found in the better 
 MSS., must, I believe, be explained as an instance of the imper- 
 fect knowledge of Greek which led to the use of an idiom more 
 or less Hebraic rather than as a deliberate use of the datiznis 
 com?nodi. 
 
112 The Epistle to Pergamos. 
 
 at baptism. But the question what acts involved 
 an indirect participation was one that gave rise 
 to a perplexing casuistry, and yet could not be 
 avoided. Was the convert to go out of the 
 world and turn from all social gatherings but 
 those of his own community ? Was he to refuse 
 to join in the public meals, at inns or elsewhere, 
 which travel made almost indispensable ? If he 
 did so refuse, he cut himself off not only from 
 the pleasures, but from the duties and oppor- 
 tunities of family and social companionship. 
 Yet if he accepted the invitation, there was the 
 risk that he might be eating of the flesh of sheep 
 or ox which the host had himself sacrificed, as 
 a festive thank-offering, to Zeus or Apollo, or 
 that the wine which he drank might have been 
 poured out as a libation. If he did so eat, was 
 he not, in " eating of the sacrifice," a partaker 
 in the worship, eating the flesh and drinking 
 the cup which belonged to the demons that he 
 had learnt to identify with the gods whom the 
 Heathen worshipped? (i Cor. xi. 20.) Yet 
 another case presented itself which followed the 
 convert even to his own home. Of the sacrifices 
 that were offered in Heathen temples the greater 
 part became the perquisite of the priests. When 
 they had more than they could consume them- 
 selves they sold it to the meat-dealers of the 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos. 113 
 
 market. The Christian convert, therefore, could 
 never be sure that what he bought had not been 
 thus offered, and the sensitive conscience was 
 harassed w^ith the tormenting thought of an 
 unknown and involuntary transgression, which 
 yet brought with it defilement and condemnation. 
 The Jew might avoid the danger by dealing 
 only, as, for the most part, Jews deal now,, with 
 a butcher of his own persuasion ; but this im- 
 plied a more settled and organised society than 
 that of most Christian communities in the early 
 days of the Church's life, and many years would 
 probably pass away before the convert was able 
 to meet with a Christian butcher. On the other 
 hand, in most cases, the Jewish butcher would 
 probabl}' refuse to supply him ; or, if that were 
 not the case, would only do so under the re- 
 strictions (to the Gentile burdensome and 
 vexatious) of the Mosaic law of clean and 
 unclean meats. 
 
 How near the surface the question lay is seen 
 by the fact that it occupied an almost co-ordi- 
 nate place with that of circumcision, and entered 
 into what then appeared as the great charter 
 of the freedom of the Gentile converts. The 
 decision of the Apostles and Elders in that first 
 Council at Jerusalem was practically of the 
 nature of a compromise. On the one hand the 
 9 
 
TI4 The Epistle to Perganios. 
 
 converts were released from the necessity of 
 circumcision ; on the other, by way of make- 
 weight, they were commanded to " abstain from 
 meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from 
 things strangled, and from fornication " (Acts 
 xv. 20) . The grouping of these latter prohibitions 
 was due to the fact that they were popularly re- 
 cognised as among the precepts of Noah, which 
 were held to be binding upon all his descendants, 
 and were required, therefore, even by the more 
 liberal Rabbis, of all '' proselytes of the gate ; " 
 while those who aspired to the higher blessed- 
 ness of the children of Abraham had to 
 qualify themselves as *' proselytes of right- 
 eousness " by the sign of circumcision. The 
 decree was, as I have said, received at first 
 with a joyous welcome. But soon new diffi- 
 culties presented themselves as rising out of 
 the broad general language in which it spoke. 
 Did any eating of meat that had been sacri- 
 ficed to idols, even if unconscious, involve the 
 eater in pollution ? Others, at a distance from 
 Jerusalem, Gentile converts, reasoning from 
 broad principles to bold conclusions, rhight 
 question the obligation of that which seemed 
 to rest on no great principle, but to represent 
 a policy of conciliation and concession. If an 
 idol was '* nothing in the world," a powerless 
 
The Epistle to Pe^'gamos, 1 1 5 
 
 block of marble or of wood, how could it taint 
 the flesh of the victim sacrificed to it, and make 
 the creature of God, in itself good, unfit for 
 human food ? Some, waxing yet bolder, seem 
 to have contended that they might even take 
 their place in a public banquet within the 
 precincts of an idol temple, so long as they were 
 not required to join in any formal act of worship, 
 (i Cor. viii. 10.) 
 
 Such was the state of things which St. Paul 
 found at Corinth. There the more scrupulous 
 party, under the influence of Jewish feeling, 
 was obviously the weaker; the bolder were also 
 the stronger, exulting in their knowledge, their 
 rights, their independence. It is remarkable 
 that, in arguing with these latter, St. Paul 
 never makes even the most distant allusion to 
 the decree of the Council of Jerusalem, though 
 he himself had been at least a consenting party 
 to it. For some reason of policy or principle, 
 because the Corinthians would have demurred 
 to the authority of the Council, or from a 
 characteristic love of going to the bottom of a 
 matter, he discusses the questions of casuistry 
 that thus presented themselves on the ground, 
 not of authority, but of the rights of conscience. 
 Sin lay in the will, and therefore an involuntary 
 act done in ignorance was no transgression ; 
 9* 
 
1 1 6 The Epistle to Pergamos. 
 
 and as the act was in its own nature neutral, 
 the man need not be over-anxious to ask 
 questions the answer to which might involve 
 him in perplexity. Where, on the other hand, 
 the convert was, as it were, openly challenged 
 or tempted to partake of the sacrificial food, 
 he was to abstain, yielding up the abstract 
 right, which St. Paul fully recognised, lest he 
 should wound the conscience of any other less 
 strong-minded than himself, (i Cor. x. 21.) 
 For a like reason the Apostle, while apparently 
 admitting, for the sake of argument, the abstract 
 possibility of a blameless participation in a 
 banquet, even in the idol temple, first earnestly 
 dissuades men from it, on the ground of its 
 perilous consequences to others; and then, on 
 what more truly expressed his own convictions, 
 as involving a formal recognition of the false 
 worship which the Christian had renounced in 
 his baptism, (i Cor. x. 1S-21.) 
 
 I have dwelt at this length on the position 
 occupied by St. Paul in this controversy because 
 it has been maintained by Renan and other 
 recent writers, who see in the different aspects 
 of teaching presented by the writers of the New 
 Testament Epistles not only diversities of gifts, 
 but antagonism of principles, that the strong 
 language of the Apocalypse is intended to be 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos, 1 1 7 
 
 a condemnation of his teaching ; that he is, in 
 fact, the Balaam whom St. John seeks to hold up 
 to the abhorrence of the Churches, just as others 
 have identified him with the Simon Magus 
 who appears as " the hero of the romance 
 of heresy " in the strange controversial novel 
 known as the '' Clementine Recognitions."-^ 
 It can, I believe, be shewn that this theory- 
 is altogether destitute of probability; that the 
 minds of St. Paul and St. John were in this 
 respect in perfect harmony ; that even dealing 
 with the Message as coming from, and not 
 to, the latter Apostle, it is such as the former 
 would have accepted and rejoiced in. 
 
 And (i) I note that those who are condemned 
 by the Message are precisely those whom St« 
 Paul urges, on grounds of a moral expediency 
 so high that it becomes a duty, to refrain from 
 the exercise of the freedom and the right of 
 which they boasted. It was to be expected that 
 some in their self-will would harden themselves 
 against the appeal ; that they might even use 
 St. PauFs name, and boast that they were more 
 
 ^ Comp. Re nan's "St. Paul." "Les chapitres ii. et iii. de 
 r Apocalypse sont un cri de haine centre Paul et ses amis," p. 
 367. So assuming that Balaam is translated into Nicolas, ' ' un 
 seducteur paien, qui eut des visions quoique infidele, un homme 
 qui engageant le peuple a pecher avec filles des paiennes, parut 
 le vrai type de Paul," p. 304. 
 
ii8 The Epistle to Pergmnos. 
 
 consistent with his principles than he was him- 
 self. This, we know, was what Marcion and 
 his followers actually did when they claimed 
 a like liberty for themselves ; and Marcion may 
 well have had forerunners among the Gnostics 
 of the apostolic age. And it would be but 
 natural that those who took this attitude to- 
 wards one of the restrictions imposed by the 
 Council at Jerusalem should act in like manner 
 towards another, and look at the sin of forni- 
 cation from the Heathen, and not from the 
 Jewish or the Christian, point of view, as a 
 thing in itself indifferent ; a sensual pleasure, it 
 was true, but not more worthy of blame than 
 that of eating meat that had been offered in 
 sacrifice to idols, or food which the Jewish 
 law prohibited as unclean. The very grouping 
 of the apostolic decree might seem at first sight 
 to favour the view that the prohibitions were 
 of co-ordinate obligation. The earnestness with 
 which St. Paul warns the Corinthians against 
 falling back into the old vicious habits in which 
 they had once indulged with no consciousness 
 of sin, the passing reference (i Cor. vi. 13) to 
 " meats for the belly and the belly for meats," 
 in connection with those habits, shew how 
 closely the two were connected in his own 
 mind and in the influences that were at work 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos. 1 1 9 
 
 in the Church to which he wrote. The habitual 
 license of the orgies of many Heathen festivals, 
 the prevalence of prostitution in the precincts 
 of many temples, the presence, in that of 
 Aphrodite, of the harlot priestesses who made 
 Corinth infamous, all brought the two evils 
 of which St. Paul wrote into very close com.- 
 bination. 
 
 (2) It must be remembered that the strange 
 prominence given to the name of Balaam in the 
 later writings of the New Testament began, not 
 with the real or supposed anti-Pauline teachers, 
 but with that Apostle himself. It was in his 
 warnings to the Corinthians (i Cor. x. 8) that 
 that dark history of the days when Israel abode 
 in Shittim was first recalled to the memory 
 of the Christian Church: "Neither let us com- 
 mit fornication, as some of them committed, 
 and fell in one day three and twenty thousand." 
 Then, as in later days, the two sins had gone 
 together, and the Israelites had both committed 
 whoredom with the daughters of Moab and 
 joined themselves to Baal-peor, and eaten 
 the sacrifices of their gods (Num. xxv. 1-3). 
 When St. Peter, ^ then, speaks of the false 
 
 ^ I assume the genuineness of the second Epistle that bears 
 the name of Peter ; but it makes no difference in my argument if 
 it is treated as an instance of pseudonymous authorship. 
 
120 The Epistle to Pergamos, 
 
 teachers, who had ''eyes full of adultery" and 
 beguiled unstable souls," as following the way 
 of Balaam the son of Bosor (2 Pet. ii. 14, 15) ; 
 when St. Jude describes those who " corrupt 
 themselves in what they know naturally as 
 brute beasts " as " going greedily after the 
 error of Balaam for reward ; " when St. John 
 records the condemnation of those " that hold 
 the doctrine of Balaam , who taught Balak to 
 cast a stumhling-block before the children of 
 Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols., and 
 to commit fornication,'" they are not glancing 
 obliquely and with the glance of hate at the 
 teaching of St. Paul, but are actually echo- 
 ing it. 
 
 (3) It may be noted, as accounting for the 
 stronger and more vehement language of the 
 Apocalypse, considered even as a simply human 
 book, that the conditions of the case had altered. 
 Christians and Heathens were no longer dwell- 
 ing together, as at Corinth, with comparative 
 slight interruption to their social interco "■ 
 but were divided by a sharp line of demarcs ", 
 The eating of things sacrificed to idols ^*'s l 
 and more a crucial test, involving a*'> aro 
 shrinking from the open confession o"^ a"l vns 
 tian's faith. Disciples who sat at m^at 
 idol's te-mple were making merry v ' 
 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos. 121 
 
 whose hands were red with the blood of their 
 fellow-worshippers and whose lips had uttered 
 blaspheming scaffs against the Holy Name. 
 
 And to this teaching, as to the kindred doc- 
 trine of the Nicolaitanes/ arriving at the same 
 goal by a different path, o'erleaping itself from 
 an overstrained asceticism and falling on the 
 other side, scorning the body, and therefore 
 indifferent to its acts, the Angel of the Chm'ch 
 of Pergamos had offered but a feeble and slack 
 resistance. There was no righteous hatred such 
 as won the praise of his Lord for the Angel 
 of the Church of Ephesus. Tolerance of these 
 debasing forms of evil took its place among the 
 ^^ few things'' for which he was reproved. And 
 a sharp warning both for himself and for the 
 false teachers followed on the reproof: ''Repent, 
 or else I will come to thee quickly, and will fight 
 against them with the sword of my month.'' There 
 is, it will be seen, a marked distinction between 
 ^f' " two clauses. To the chief pastor of the 
 . :^h, in his separate personal responsibility 
 his moral feebleness, the Lord " comes 
 y?;-' ijy!."^ The words are important as shewing 
 ' c ^ J ''^coming quickly" had, in the mind 
 
 ave al^-eady expressed my dissent from the view that the 
 laitane^ Were identical with the followers of Balaam. The 
 «Mv -§l^^^ "' ^^^ ^^^^ seems to me the nearest approximation 
 [^^i^/IPQ^roit to their real relations to each other. 
 
 ; -*^ 
 . -♦- . 
 
 ■my^.:' 
 
122 The Epistle to Pergamos. 
 
 of the Apostle, quite another meaning besides 
 that of the great final Advent. In ways which 
 the man reproved would feel, in the chances 
 and changes of life, in failure and disappoint- 
 ment, in suffering and shame, He would visit 
 the offending pastor who did not repent and 
 rouse himself to a nobler energy from conviction. 
 But with the others he would " make war with 
 the sword of his mouth. There may be in 
 this, as many have thought, a reference to the 
 fact that Balaam the son of Beor was slain with 
 the sword of the children of Israel, which was 
 also the sword of God ; but I agree with Alford 
 in thinking that this reference is, to say the 
 least, remote, and that the words receive a 
 sufficient explanation from the imagery of the 
 immediate context. And if, as we have seen, 
 the sword of the Spirit is here also the Word 
 of God, — that which cometh from the mouth 
 of the Lord,— then we may well adopt the in- 
 terpretation given by Grotius as leading us to 
 the true and spiritual meaning of the passage. 
 In that warfare the weapons would not be carnal. 
 He, the Lord, would raise up faithful and true 
 prophets, and his word should be in their mouths 
 also as a sharp sword, and they would wield that 
 sword effectively and slay the monstrous forms 
 of error that were warring against the truth. 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos. 123 
 
 The promise " to him that overcometh " pre- 
 sents in this case points at once of peculiar 
 difficulty and special interest. The meaning of 
 the ''manna'' appears, perhaps, at first not far 
 to seek. Those who remember with what ful- 
 ness St. John, and he alone, records the teach- 
 ing in which his Master claimed to be the 
 Bread of God, the living bread that came down 
 from heaven, of which, if a man ate, he should 
 live for ever, as contrasted with the manna in 
 the wilderness, which had no power to save 
 from death (John vi. 33, 50), will be ready to 
 admit that the words now before us must have 
 recalled that teaching, and that the manna 
 which was to be the reward of the conqueror 
 was the fruition of the ineffable sweetness of that 
 divine Presence. Those who resisted the temp- 
 tation to join the idol's feast in the idol's temple 
 should be admitted to that heavenly feast in the 
 eternal temple, which was also the palace of the 
 great King. But the epithet ''hidden'' suggests 
 more than this. In the current belief of the 
 Jews the sacred treasures of the Temple, which 
 had disappeared when Jerusalem was laid waste 
 by the army of the Chaldeans, had not been 
 allowed to^ perish. The Prophet Jeremiah had 
 carried them to "the mountain, where Moses 
 climbed up and saw the heritage of God " 
 
124 ^^^^^ Epistle to Pe7^gamos. 
 
 (2 Mace. ii. 4)., i.e. the heights of Pisgah, and 
 there they were kept, no man knowing of the 
 place, " until the time that God shall gather 
 his people again together and shew them his 
 mercy." It was not strange that the imagina- 
 tion of devout Jews should dwell on that legend, 
 and picture to themselves the restoration, not 
 only of the Shekinah and the Urim and the 
 Thummim, and the ark and the tables of stone, 
 but also of the manna that had been thus hidden. 
 This, and the general thought that the hidden 
 and the precious were, for the most part, co- 
 extensive terms (as in Psa. xvii. 14, " Whose 
 bellies thou fiUest with thy hid treasures "), will 
 explain why the word was chosen to heighten all 
 that was conveyed by the promise of the manna. 
 Whatever men had dreamt of blessedness and 
 joy should be surpassed by the taste of that 
 ''hidden manna," the gladness of that life 
 which is ''hid with Christ in God" (Col. iii. 3). 
 The " white stone ^ and the new name written on 
 itf which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth 
 it,'' present difficulties of another kind, chiefly, 
 as by a strange paradox, through the very ease 
 with which they admit of interpretations more 
 or less probable. In the symbolism of colours, 
 which, as having its ultimate root in impres- 
 sions of pain or pleasure made upon the senses, 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos. 125 
 
 might almost be called natural, and is, as a matter 
 of fact, all but universal, white, in its bright- 
 ness and purity, had been associated with joy 
 and gladness, with victory and triumph. So, in 
 a practice which, though originating, it was said, 
 with the half-civilised tribes of Thrace or Scythia, 
 had become general, days of festivity were noted 
 with a white, those of calamity with a black, 
 stone. So, when the vote of an assembly as to 
 the guilt of an accused person was taken by 
 ballot, white stones were the symbol of an 
 acquittal, black of a condemnation. It has, 
 accordingly, been contended, with at least much 
 plausibility, that this is the significance of the 
 "white stone " in the promise now before us. 
 The conqueror in the great strife with evil, 
 whatever opprobrium he might incur in the 
 sight of men, whatever sentence he might re- 
 ceive at the hands of an earthly judge, would 
 be received as justified and acquitted by the 
 Eternal Judge. Yet, on the other hand, it can 
 scarcely be said that the symbol of a mere 
 acquittal would be an adequate expression of 
 the reward promised to him that overcometh. 
 A verdict of " not guilty," which, on this inter- 
 pretation, would exhaust the meaning of the 
 promise, could hardly take its place as co- 
 ordinate with the " crown of life," or with 
 
126 The Epistle to Pergamos. 
 
 ** the tree of life which is in the midst of the 
 paradise of God.^^ 
 
 Partly on the ground of this inadequacy, 
 partly on the general principle that the source 
 of the Apocalyptic imagery must be sought, 
 not in the customs of Heathen antiquity, but in 
 the more venerable symbolism of the Jewish 
 ritual, it has been contended by Archbishop 
 Trench, following a German commentator 
 (Zullig), that the ''white stone," associated as it 
 is with one of the lost treasures of the sanctuary 
 of Israel, must be interpreted as another of those 
 treasures, and be identified accordingly with the 
 Urim and Thummim of the High Priest's vest- 
 ments, on the assumption that they consisted of 
 one or more stones of translucent and colourless 
 purity, of the nature of diamond or rock crystal. 
 There is so much in this view of these ** stones 
 oracular " that commends itself to me, that it 
 is not without reluctance I am brought to the 
 conviction, as I have elsewhere shewn,' that it 
 is not applicable to the passage now before us. 
 Not only were the Urim and Thummim almost 
 or altogether beyond the horizon of the thoughts 
 of the writers of the New Testament, so that 
 throughout its pages there is not a single allu- 
 sion to them, not even where we should have 
 
 ' Dictionary of the Bible, art. " Urim and Thummin." 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos. 127 
 
 most looked for it, in the Epistle to the He- 
 brews, unless it be in this obscure and debate- 
 able passage ; but the word used by St. John 
 is not that which throughout the LXX. and the 
 New Testament is used of precious stones and 
 gems (Xt^o?), but that which describes the 
 secondary and derived use of stones or pebbles 
 in social or political life (a/ttJc^o?). On these 
 grounds it seems to me that there is a strong 
 prima facie presumption against Archbishop 
 Trench's view ; nor can I admit that it is coun- 
 terbalanced by the view (which I have shewn, 
 in dealing with the message to the Church of 
 Smyrna, to be unproven) that all allusions to 
 Heathen usages are outside the circle of Apoca- 
 lyptic symbolism. On the whole, then, with one 
 important modification, I am disposed to adopt 
 Ewald's view, who sees in the stone, or •^r]^o<^ 
 of the promise, the tessera hospitalis, by which, 
 in virtue of form or characters inscribed on it, 
 he who possessed it could claim from the friend 
 who gave it, at any distance of time, a frank 
 and hearty welcome. What I would suggest, 
 as an addition to this, rises out of the proba- 
 bility, almost the certainty, that some such 
 tessera, or ticket — a stone with the name of the 
 guest written on it — was given to those who 
 were invited to partake, within the precincts of 
 
128 The Epistle to Pergamos. 
 
 the temple, of the feast that consisted wholly, 
 or in part, of the meat that had been offered as 
 a sacrifice.^ On this view, the second part of 
 the promise is brought into harmony with the 
 first, and is made more directly appropriate : he 
 who had the courage to refuse that tessera to 
 the feast that defiled should receive another 
 that would admit him to the supper of the 
 Great King. 
 
 This hypothesis gives, it will be seen at once, 
 a fresh vividness to the closing words which 
 speak of the " new name " that was to be 
 written on it. Here we are at once within the 
 circle of familiar prophetic language. The 
 ^' new name'' had been to Isaiah and Jeremiah 
 the formula for expressing the new life of 
 blessedness in store for those to whom it was 
 applied. The land that had been forsaken and 
 abandoned to destruction should be called 
 " Hephzibah," as once more the delight of 
 her Lord. The daughter of Zion, that had 
 sat desolate as a widow, should be " Beulah," 
 as a bride over whom the bridegroom once 
 more rejoiced (Isa. Ixii. 2-4; comp. Ixv. 15). 
 Jerusalem herself was to be known by the 
 
 ^ Some such iessenr, giving the bearer admission to the theatre 
 of Dionysos at Athens, are, if I remember rightly, to be seen 
 among the Greek antiquities of the British Museum. 
 
The Epistle to Pergamos, 129 
 
 mystic name of the " Lord our Righteousness " 
 (Jer. xxxiii. 16). In his own case and that of 
 his brother, as in that of Simon Barjona — in 
 Peter, the '' Rock," and Boanerges, the '' Sons 
 of Thunder " — the Apostle had known a new 
 name given which was the symbol of a higher 
 life and a character idealised in its gifts. And 
 so in this case the inner truth, that lies below 
 the outward imagery, would seem to be that 
 the conqueror, when received at the heavenly 
 feast, should find upon the stone, or tessera, that 
 gave him the right of entrance, a " new name," 
 the token of a character transformed and per- 
 fected, a name the full significance of which 
 should be known only to him who was con- 
 scious of the transformation, just as in the 
 experiences of our human life, '^the heart 
 knoweth his own bitterness, and the stranger 
 doth not intermeddle with his joy " (Prov. 
 xiv. 10). 
 
 The apparent parallelism of the description 
 in chap. xix. of Him who " was called Faithful 
 and True," whose " name was called the Word 
 of God," and who yet had besides *' these a 
 name written that no man knew but he him- 
 self" (xix. 11-13), has led some interpreters to 
 suppose that here also it is the name of the 
 Lord, new, wonderful, mysterious, as expressing 
 
130 The Epistle to Pergamos. 
 
 some relation between Him and his people 
 which the names as yet revealed do not perfectly 
 embody, that is promised to him that over- 
 cometh. A closer study of the parallelism will, 
 however, I believe, confirm the view which has 
 been given above. As the Lord alone knows 
 the name which He bears, so the name written 
 upon the stone given to the conqueror is known 
 only to him that receiveth it. What is this but 
 the expression, in the language of symbolism, of 
 the truth which the writer of the Apocalypse 
 expressed afterwards in language more purely 
 abstract and ideal : " Now are we the sons of 
 God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall 
 be : but we know that, when he shall appear, 
 we shallbe like him : for we shall see him as he 
 is " ? (i John iii. 2.) Only when humanity 
 has become partaker of the Divine nature will 
 it be able to comprehend the mystery of His 
 being who is at once divine and human. And 
 yet in that likeness of all the saved to their 
 common Lord there shall be no mere uniformity. 
 There, also, as the manna in the Jewish 
 legends was said to taste to each man like the 
 food in which he most delighted, each soul 
 shall recognise in the work which Christ has 
 done for it that of which none can know the 
 wonder nor the sweetness but himself. 
 
V. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THYATIRA 
 
 lO^ 
 
THE REVELATION. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 i8 And unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write ; These 
 things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes Hlce unto a flame of 
 fire, and his feet are like fine brass ; 
 
 19 I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy 
 patience, and thy works ; and the last to be more than the first. 
 
 20 Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou 
 sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to 
 teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat 
 things sacrificed unto idols. 
 
 21 And I gave her space to repent of her fornication ; and she 
 repented not. 
 
 22 Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit 
 adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their 
 deeds. 
 
 23 And I will kill her children with death ; and all the churches 
 shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts : and 
 1 will give unto every one of you according to yoiir works. 
 
 24 But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as 
 have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of 
 Satan, as they speak ; I will put upon you none other burden. 
 
 25 But that which ye have already hold fast till I come. 
 
 26 And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, 
 to him will I give power over the nations : 
 
 27 And he shall rule them with a rod of iron ; as the vessels of 
 a potter shall they be broken to shivers : even as I received of my 
 Father. 
 
 28 And I will give him the morning star. 
 
 29 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the 
 churches. 
 
V. 
 
 LITTLE as we know of the general history 
 of this Church in the apostolic age, it 
 has at least one point of contact with the 
 record of the life and labours of St. Paul. The 
 purple-seller of the city of Thyatira, who went 
 with other women to " the place where prayer 
 was wont to be made," to the oratory bythe river- 
 side at Philippi, and ''whose heart the Lord 
 opened that she attended unto the things that 
 were spoken of Paul" (Acts xvi. 14), is among 
 the most familiar figures in St. Luke's history 
 of the mission-work of the Church. The facts 
 that connect themselves with that mention of 
 her name are also so generally known that it 
 will not be necessary to do more than briefly 
 refer to them. 
 
 (i) Thyatira, situated geographically, as it 
 stands in the order of the Messages, between 
 Pergamos and Sardis, owed, if not its origin, yet 
 its importance to the fact of its being one of the 
 Macedonian colonies founded by Alexander the 
 
134 The Epistle to Thyatira. 
 
 I Great after his conquest of the Persian Empire. 
 As such, it was natural, even after the lapse of 
 three centuries, that it should have many links 
 that connected it with the mother country, and 
 of this the presence of Lydia at Philippi may 
 fairly be taken as an instance, (2) Inscriptions, 
 the date of which is referred to the period 
 between Vespasian and Caracalla, shew that the 
 city contained many corporate guilds, which 
 were united together by common pursuits and 
 religious rites, and that of these the guild of 
 
 ^ dyers was one of the most prominent. That 
 art was indeed common to a good many of the 
 Asiatic cities, and the commercial fame of 
 Miletus in particular mainly rested on it; but 
 of all these, Thyatira was the only one that 
 
 >/had any connection with MacedjDnia. When 
 we meet with Lydia at Philippi, she is already 
 *' one that worshipped God," a half-proselyte, 
 i.e. to Judaism ; and we may reasonably infer 
 from this the presence of a Jewish element, 
 more or less influential, among the population 
 of the city from which she came. The in- 
 habitants seem indeed to have presented, from 
 the names that appear on their monuments, 
 a greater mingling of races than was com- 
 
 vmonly to be found, and included Macedonians, 
 Italians, Asiatics (in the narrower sense of that 
 
The Epistle to Thyatira. 135 
 
 word as including the inhabitants of the Pro- 
 consular province of Asia), and Chaldseans. 
 The chief object of their cultus was Apollo, 
 worshipped as the Sun-God, under the Mace- 
 donian name of Tyrinnas. 
 
 It has been suggested by Dean Blakesley 
 here, as before in the case of Smyrna, that the 
 special words by which the Lord of the Churches 
 describes Himself were determined by the 
 character of the worship just referred to. He 
 assumes that there was a statue of Apollo, of 
 gold and ivory, or of wood or marble richly gilt ;. 
 that this shone with a dazzHng brightness, and 
 that the ^^ eyes like aflame of fire and the feet like 
 fine brass " were meant to present the image of 
 the Lord of the Churches as yet more glorious 
 and terrible. Ingenious as the conjecture is, it 
 has, I believe, nothing but its ingenuity to com- 
 mend it. The imagery had been already used 
 without reference to any local colouring, aad 
 a reason for this special application of it may be 
 found in the aspects of stern sovereignty which 
 marks the whole Message. The feet of chalcoli- 
 banus shall crush the enemies of God as though 
 they were the vessels of a potter. 
 
 The special notes of praise assigned to the 
 Church of Thyatira correspond in a very marked 
 degree with those which we find nrominent also 
 
136 The Epistle to Tkyatira. 
 
 in the character of the Philippians. Loving 
 ministrations, patient endurance, warm-hearted 
 faith, the more feminine graces of the perfect 
 Christian character are dominant in both. It 
 has been held by not a few writers (notably by 
 Canon Lightfoot) that this characteristic of the 
 Philippian converts was, in part, owing to the 
 continued influence of the iirst European prose- 
 lyte in that Church.^ If we remember that she 
 came from Thyatira, and not improbably re- 
 turned to it after a season, it is at least 
 interesting to trace there also the same type 
 of character as having been developed possibly 
 under the same influence. And there were no 
 signs of any falling off in this respect. The 
 *' last works " were " more than the first." 
 What was wanted was that these graces should 
 be balanced by others of a more masculine type, • 
 by righteous zeal against evil, by the exercise, 
 when necessary, of the power to judge and to 
 condemn. Here also the prayer of one who 
 knew what the Church needed would have been 
 that their *' love might abound more and more 
 in knowledge and in all judgment " (Phil. i. 9). 
 We cannot enter on the words which follow 
 without noticing the strange reading, not '' that 
 
 ^ See also a Paper on "The Sisterhood at Philippi," hi the 
 present writer's Biblical Studies. 
 
The Epistle to Thyatira, 137 
 
 woman f'' but " thy wife, Jezebel " {jriv yvvalfca 
 (Tov)y which would force upon us the conclusion 
 that the work of the Angel, or Bishop, of the 
 Church of Thyatira was thwarted by one who 
 ought to have been his helpmate in it ; that she 
 had become tainted with the teaching of the 
 followers of Balaam, and claimed as a prophetess 
 an authority that over-ruled her husband's. I 
 cannot set aside that reading on account of the 
 strangeness of the picture thus presented to us, 
 for truth is often stranger than fiction.^ And 
 on the principle, which has become almost an 
 axiom in textual criticism, that the more difficult 
 reading is probably the true one, this, com- 
 
 ^ If we receive this reading, we find (as Dr. Wordsworth has 
 pointed out) a singular parallel in the Epistle of Polycarp to the 
 Philippian Church (c. xi). There also the influence of women, 
 at first, as we have seen, an element for good, had become the 
 source of evil ; and the wife of a presbyter named Valens is 
 mentioned as having encouraged him in his transgressions. 
 Strangely enough, too, the transgression is like in kind to that 
 with which the Message to Thyatira deals. We have indeed 
 only the Latin text of this part of the Epistle, and there we read : 
 ' ' Moneo itaque vos, ut abstineatis ab avaritia et sitis casti, et 
 veraces. ... Si quis non abstinuerit ab avaritia, ab idololatria coin- 
 quinabitur." The "avaritia " of the Latin corresponds, howevei", 
 in all probability, to the Greek TrXeove^ia, and that word, as in 
 I Thess.iv. 5, and probably in i Cor. v. 10, was used in a secondary 
 sense, as implying the lawless lust which was regardless of the 
 rights of others. The union of the " avaritia " with" idololatria " 
 almost forces this meaning upon us, and so presents the two 
 as being in as close an alliance at Philippi as at Thyatira. 
 
138 The Epistle to Thyatira. 
 
 mended as it is by some of the highest MSS., 
 may well claim admission into the text. We 
 can understand the deliberate suppression of a 
 fact so startling. It is hard to understand the 
 deliberate insertion of a word that would create 
 so great a difficulty. On the other hand, it 
 must be remembered that there is hardly any 
 limit to be set to the blunders, pure and simple, 
 of transcribers, and that the pronoun which 
 creates the perplexity is wanting in at least one 
 (the Sinaitic MS.) of the first-class authorities. 
 
 On the whole, then, it seems best to deal with 
 the passage, in any case sufficiently startling, 
 without the additional element of strangeness 
 which this reading gives it. I cannot, how- 
 ever, accept the view taken by Alford and 
 others, that " the woman Jezebel " represents, 
 not a person, but a sect. Everything in the 
 description has, if I mistake not, a distinctly 
 individualising character, and as such it throws 
 light on some interesting social questions con- 
 nected with the history of the Apostolic Church. 
 
 It lay in the nature of the Pentecostal gift 
 that the powers which it conferred were not 
 confined to one sex any more than to one class 
 or race. Daughters as well as sons were to 
 prophesy ; the Spirit was to be poured on the 
 " handmaids " as well as the " servants " of the 
 
The Epistle to Thyatira. 139 
 
 Lord. (Acts ii. 17, 18.) In Palestine, doubtless, 
 the exercise of these gifts would be restricted by 
 what had become, in spite of the older recollec- 
 tions of Deborah and Huldah, the traditional 
 position of women in the religious life. It was 
 not likely that a woman would be bold enough 
 to speak in a synagogue where all of her own 
 sex were screened off from seeing or being seen. 
 In Greek-speaking countries, on the other hand, 
 familiar with the thought of Sibyls and Pythian 
 priestesses and damsels like that at Philippi with 
 a spirit of divination (Acts xvi. 16), the true gift 
 would more readily find a sphere of action, and 
 would be more exposed, on the one hand, to the 
 excitement and ecstasy which were among the 
 incidents of its working; and, on the other, 
 to the rivalry of a counterfeit inspiration, morbid 
 in its nature, presenting phenomena of startling 
 extravagance and easily enlisted in support 
 of the wild imaginings which were the germs 
 of heresy. Traces of that extravagance we 
 meet with in the Church of Corinth. Women 
 had appeared in the public gatherings of the 
 Church, and had " prophesied" with their faces 
 unveiled, casting aside that which, both in the 
 Jewish and Greek code of social ethics, was the 
 symbol of womanly reserve, (i Cor. xi. 5-10.) 
 At first, it would seem, St. Paul had been 
 
140 The Epistle to Tkyatira. 
 
 content to reprove any manifestation of the 
 prophetic power that was accompanied by so 
 flagrant a disregard of the principles which, then 
 as always, were the foundation of the rules 
 of conventional decorum. But second thoughts 
 (I do not think it irreverent to attribute second 
 thoughts even to an apostle) led him to the 
 conclusion that the risks of abuse were so great 
 that it was better to restrain the practice which 
 was so liable to them ; and accordingly, both in 
 a later chapter of the same Epistle (i Cor. xiv. 
 34> 35) and in the injunctions which he left as 
 his last bequest to the Asiatic Churches (i Tim. 
 ii. II, 12), he laid down the rule that women 
 were to be '* silent " in all assembHes of the 
 Church at which men were present, and to con- 
 fine the exercise of their gifts to the work of 
 I teaching their own sex. We know too little of 
 the conditions under which the four daughters 
 of Philip the Evangelist prophesied at Caesarea 
 (Acts xxi. 8) to be able to say whether this was 
 an exception to St. Paul's rule. It is probable 
 enough that it was only in the privacy of their 
 own home, or surrounded by female disciples, 
 that they gave utterance to the words which 
 came from their lips, instinct with a divine 
 power ; it is possible that their character as 
 ''virgins" {i.e. not merely unmarried women, 
 
The Epistle to Thyatira. 141 
 
 but consecrated to a ministerial life) gained for 
 them exceptional privileges ; it is possible, lastly, 
 that the Apostolic Churches were not bound by 
 any uniform code of rules and rubrics, and that 
 that of Csesarea had not as yet adopted the 
 regulation which was binding on the Churches 
 founded by St. Paul. 
 
 What we have to deal with, in any case, in 
 the Church of Thyatira is the assumption, on the 
 part of some conspicuous woman, possibly, as 
 has been said, the wife of the Bishop or Angel 
 of the Church, of the character of a prophetess, 
 supported by the phenomena that simulated 
 inspiration, and that her utterances were used 
 to support the twofold errors of the Nicolaitanes 
 and the followers of Balaam, *' to teach and to 
 seduce " the servants of Christ ** to commit 
 fornication, and to eat things sacrificed to idols. "" 
 The name of Jezebel, the representative of the 
 Zidonian worship which had tainted the life 
 of Israel with its impurities, was used, as 
 that of Balaam had been, to point the sharp- 
 ness of the rebuke, possibly with a special 
 reference to the memorable scene when she, 
 with unveiled face, and the brightness of her 
 eyes heightened with the kohl of Eastern cos- 
 metics, looked out of her palace window to try 
 for the last time her powers of fascination, or, if "^ 
 
142 The Epistle to Tkyatira. 
 
 those failed, of defiance, on the advancing con- 
 queror and avenger (2 Kings ix. 30). It would 
 hardly be at variance with what we know of 
 the workings of the unrestrained orgiastic 
 impulse at other times and in other countries 
 (as, e,g., in the Bacchanalia, of which Livy, 
 xxxix. 8-19, gives so terrible a description) to 
 assume that the words of verse 22 were literally 
 true ; and that here too the Agapse, or love- 
 feasts of the Chistian Church, were stained, as 
 the hints in 2 Peter ii. 13, 14, and Jude, verse 12, 
 not obscurely intimate, with the perpetration 
 of fathomless impurities in which this so-called 
 prophetess was herself a sharer. 
 
 The words of threatening that follow on the 
 statement of the guilt were not less distinctly 
 personal in their character. As the incestuous 
 adulterer at Corinth was delivered to Satan for 
 the destruction of the flesh that the spirit might 
 be saved in the day of the Lord (i Cor. v. 5) ; 
 as those who polluted the Supper of the Lord with 
 riotous excess received not only the just reward, 
 but the natural fruit of their sin, in sickness and 
 in death (i Cor. xi. 30), so it was here. The 
 penal discipline of sickness was needed to wake 
 up the self-blinded prophetess to perceive the 
 real character of the evil into which she had 
 plunged; and she was to be '^ cast into the 
 
The Epistle to Thy at ir a. 143 
 
 bed " of pain and weariness ; and those that 
 were sharers in her guilt into " great tribu- 
 lation," while ^'her children'' were to be "slain 
 with death." The received explanation of the 
 last clause is that the " children " of the false 
 prophetess were her followers and supporters ; 
 and for those who maintain the impersonal 
 character of the woman Jezebel, as representing 
 a wild heretical sect, such an interpretation is, 
 of course, at once natural and inevitable. It is 
 hard, however, to distinguish, on this hypo- 
 thesis, between the "children" and "those that 
 commit fornication with her" in their different 
 degrees of complicity ; and, on the whole, I see 
 no reason for abandoning the literal meaning 
 even here. The writers of the New Testament 
 recognised, as we have seen, in the events of 
 life a divine order, sometimes a divine inter- 
 position ; and as the death of the child of sin 
 had been the appropriate penalty of David's 
 great transgression (2 Sam. xii. 14), so it might 
 be here. The loss of " the desire of her eyes," 
 the death of the children who were the issue of 
 her shameless life, was to be the sharpest pang 
 in the penal discipline that was to come on her; 
 and, stript and bare of all that once made the 
 joy of life, weary and sick, without the smiles 
 of children round her, the false prophetess was 
 
144 ^^^ Epistle to Thyatira. 
 
 to await her end. So should all the Churches 
 know that the Lord was " he which searcheth 
 the hearts and reins,'" discerning all the base- 
 ness and impurity which were clothed with 
 the high-sounding swelling words of know- 
 ledge, wisdom, freedom ; that, though the long- 
 suffering of God may in many cases reserve 
 the execution of his sentence till the term 
 of probation is over, there are yet others in 
 which the sins of men bring on themselves 
 a swift destruction, and that they which sow 
 to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption. 
 
 Another characteristic feature of the false 
 teaching of these early Gnostics appears in the 
 words that follow. They boasted that they 
 alone had the courage and the power to know 
 the " depths of Satan." The peculiar addition, 
 "^5 they say'' indicates that the phrase was 
 one in frequent use among them, and it throws 
 light on the relation in which they stood to the 
 great teachers of the Apostolic Church. Here, 
 as in the matter of eating things sacrificed to 
 idols, they were caricaturing and perverting the 
 language of St. Paul. From him, after he had 
 tracked the mysterious working of the divine 
 love in permitting evil for the sake of a greater 
 good, had burst the rapturous cry, "Oh, the 
 depth of the riches both of the wisdom and 
 
The Epistle to Thyati7^a. 145 
 
 knowledge of God" (Rom. xi. 33). He, in 
 contemplating the glory which eye had not 
 seen, nor ear heard, but which God had revealed 
 by his Spirit, had spoken of that Spirit thus 
 working in man as one that " searcheth all 
 things, even the deep things of God " (i Cor. ii. 
 10). It was, in the nature of things, probable 
 that those who claimed a prophetic inspiration, 
 shewing itself in a higher form of knowledge 
 than that which was given to others, should 
 take up a phrase so congenial to their boastful 
 claims, and talk much of their acquaintance 
 with the " depths of God." If their boasts 
 were limited to that knowledge, we must see in 
 the startling phrase the " depths of Satan,'" 
 the stern irony of condemnation. Their fancied 
 knowledge of the mysteries of the Divine 
 Nature, obtained by a deliberate transgression 
 of every divine commandment, did but bring 
 them nearer to that Satanic nature, in which 
 knowledge without holiness was seen in its 
 highest power. As those who called themselves 
 Jews were of ^' the synagogue of Satan,'" 2l^ 
 those who boasted of their freedom were 
 themselves the servants of corruption, so 
 was it here. Every step they took that 
 led them further into the depths of a mystic 
 impurity did but identify them with that Power 
 II 
 
146 The Epistle to Thyatira. 
 
 of evil which Christ had come to conquer 
 and destroy. It is possible, however, and the 
 position of the words ^^ as they say'' renders 
 it even probable, that their dark imaginings 
 carried them even to the literal utterance of the 
 words which are put, as it were, into their lips. 
 We cannot conquer Satan, they may have 
 said, so long as we are ignorant of any of his 
 devices : we must enlarge the range of our 
 experience till we have fathomed the depths 
 of evil and emerged from them uninjured; 
 we must shew that though the body may be 
 "^sharer in all that men count impure, it may 
 yet leave the spirit with a clear and unclouded 
 vision of the things of God. That form of 
 Antinomianism has too many parallels in the 
 history of human error for us to think it in- 
 credible that it should have appeared in a soil 
 so fruitful in all strange dreams of morbid 
 fancy as that of the Asiatic Churches ; and 
 we need not wonder if a delusion to which the 
 language, though not the life, even of a Luther 
 at times drew perilously near, which has been 
 the leading idea of life to not a few of the 
 world's greatest poets, exercised its horrible 
 fascination when it came from the lips of the 
 false prophetess of Thyatira. 
 
 As the word " depth " gave us the key to the 
 
The Epistle to Thyatira. 147 
 
 meaning of this part of the Message, so does 
 the word " burden " to that of the part which 
 follows : "7 will put upon you none other burden 
 but that which ye have already ; hold fast till 
 I come.'" The Apostle hears from his Lord the 
 echo of that decree to which he had once 
 been a consenting party. " It seemed good 
 to the Holy Ghost and to us to lay upon you 
 no greater burden than these necessary things " 
 (Acts. XV. 28). They might ask, as they 
 heard this reproof of the freedom and the 
 license which they claimed as boasting to be 
 the true representatives of St. Paul's teaching, 
 more Pauline than St. Paul himself, '' Are 
 we then to be brought once again under the 
 yoke of bondage ? Is the Law, with all its 
 restraints and prohibitions, to be once more 
 the code of the Church of Christ ? " To such 
 questions the words which the Seer wrote sup- 
 plied the answer: "No; that which you once 
 welcomed as the great charter of your freedom 
 has not been cancelled. You may have all 
 the liberty which it permits. No other burden 
 is to be imposed upon you — neither circum- 
 cision, nor that which circumcision implies. 
 But that charter contained, in precise terms, 
 the command to abstain from eating things 
 sacrificed to idols, and from fornication ; and 
 II* 
 
148 The Epistle to Thyatira, 
 
 these rules of life are still binding, as in ac- 
 cordance with the mind of Christ ; the first 
 as resting on the duty of witnessing for Christ, 
 and the second as founded on the eternal law 
 of purity. Keep that fast through all trials 
 and temptations till I come, and then he that 
 overcometh shall receive his due reward." 
 
 The nature of that reward in this instance 
 is described in terms of singular grandeur : 
 "i" will give him authority [i^ovala, the might 
 of right, not BuvafjLCf;, the right of might] over 
 the Gentiles, and he shall guide them ^ [ttoc- 
 fiavec, shall do a shepherd's work] with a rod of 
 iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be 
 broken in pieces, even as I have received of my 
 Father.'' The promise is nothing less than 
 that the faithful victor shall be a sharer in the 
 sovereignty of the Anointed King, as described 
 in the great Messianic prophecy of Psa. ii. 9. 
 There is, we cannot but believe, the same 
 special adaptation in this case, as in the 
 others, of the promised reward to the peculiar 
 circumstances of the conflict. That to which 
 
 * The use of the word in the LXX. Version of Psa. ii. seems, 
 in the first instance, to have been merely a mistranslation resting 
 on a false etymology of the word which in the Authorized 
 Version is rendered "shalt break them." Here, however, and 
 in Rev. xii. 5, as in so many other passages, the writer adopts 
 the LXX. Version without any hesitation. 
 
The Epistle to Thyatira. 149 
 
 the disciples were tempted was an undue com- 
 pliance with the customs of the Heathen as 
 such. Their fear of offending them, their re- 
 luctance to confess before them that they were 
 worshippers of the Crucified, was bringing 
 them into bondage. And therefore they were 
 told that he who resisted that temptation 
 should take his true position, as being over 
 those Heathen ; should, in the great mani- 
 festation of the Kingdom, share in his Lord's 
 rule of righteous, and therefore inflexible, 
 severity ; that then all the power and might 
 of the Heathen that continued hostile to the 
 Divine Kingdom should, like vessels of the 
 potter not made to honour, be crushed to 
 pieces.^ 
 
 And, lastly, there was the yet more mys- 
 terious promise, "7 will give unto him the 
 morning star.'' As with the manna, and with 
 the fruit of the tree of life, so also here, that 
 which the Lord holds forth as the supreme 
 and crowning blessing is the gift of Himself, V 
 
 ^ The argument used by Polycarp in dealing with the case 
 already referred to presents a singular agreement with this pas- 
 sage : "Si quis non abstinuerit se ab avaritia [i.e. as above, 
 nXtovt^ia, in its secondary sense of impurity] ab idololatria 
 coinquinabitur et tanquam inter gentes judicabitur. Quis autem 
 ignoret judicium Domini? An nescimus quia sancti mundum 
 judicabunt sicut Paulus docet." — {Epist. ad Phil. c. xi. ) 
 
150 The Epistle to Thyatira. 
 
 / the fruition of His glorious presence. The title 
 of the " bright and morning star " is claimed 
 by Him at the close of the Apocalypse as 
 belonging to Himself as " the root and the 
 offspring of David" (xxii. 16). And when He 
 gives that star He gives Himself. Each 
 symbol represents obviously a special aspect 
 of that Divine presence. And the star had 
 of old been the received emblem of sovereignty. 
 Balaam had seen *' a Star coming out of Jacob, 
 and a Sceptre rising out of Judah " (Num. 
 xxiv. 17); and the Magi of the East, seeing 
 the star, set forth to w^orship Him who was 
 born King of the Jews (Matt. ii. 2). It was 
 the symbol of sovereignty on its brighter and 
 benignant side, and was therefore the fitting 
 and necessary complement of the dread attri- 
 butes that had gone before. The King came 
 not only to judge, and punish, and destroy, but 
 also to illumine and to cheer. He was to be 
 as the day-spring from on high, giving light to 
 those that were in darkness and in the shadow 
 of death (Luke i. 78). All lower gifts of pro- 
 phecy or knowledge were but as one of the lights 
 of earth, as lamp, or torch, or candle, shining 
 in a dark and squalid place where they did but 
 make the darkness visible (2 Pet. i. 19), but 
 when the day-star (^wo-c/xjpo?, Lucifer, the 
 
The Epistle to Thyatira. 151 
 
 light-bringer) should arise in their hearts, men 
 would rejoice in the fulness of its radiance. 
 The gift of the morning star is therefore the 
 gift of that attribute of sovereignty no less than 
 of its judicial and penal majesty. The con- 
 queror in the great strife should receive light 
 in its fulness and transmit that light to others 
 — and so should take his place among those 
 that turn many to righteousness, and '* shall 
 shine as the stars" for ever (Dan. xii. 3). 
 
VI. 
 THE EPISTLE TO SARDIS. 
 
THE REVELATION. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 1 And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write ; These things 
 saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars ; I 
 know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou Uvest, and art 
 dead. 
 
 2 Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are 
 ready to die : for I have not found thy works perfect before God. 
 
 3 Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and 
 hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will 
 eome on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will 
 come upon thee. 
 
 4 Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled 
 their garments ; and they shall walk with me in white : for they are 
 worthy. 
 
 5 He that overcoineth, the same shall be clothed in white 
 raiment ; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, 
 but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his 
 angels. 
 
 6 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto 
 the churches. 
 
VI. 
 
 IF the secular history of an Asiatic city had 
 any legitimate connection with the inter- 
 pretation of these Epistles, few names would 
 offer a field of wider interest to the expositor 
 than that ancient capital of the old Lydian 
 monarchy through whose agora flowed the 
 Pactolus with its golden sands ; which was 
 famed, in its remote past, at once for its manu- 
 factures and its coinage ; whose name recalls 
 the old tales, half mythical, half historical, 
 of Gyges and of Croesus. It preceded Miletus 
 and Thyatira in the fame of its purple dye, and 
 Corinth in that of its bronze, or compound 
 metal known as electrum. Following in the 
 track, however, of the method I have hitherto 
 pursued, I cast but a passing glance at these 
 external facts and seek rather to ascertain, 
 as far as may be, what was its actual state 
 at the time when the Apostle's mind was turned 
 to its perils and its privileges, in his Patmos 
 exile. The one event which then, probably, 
 most influenced its condition was the great 
 
156 The Epistle to Sardis. 
 
 earthquake that had laid it waste in the reign 
 of Tiberius (a.d. 17), and had been followed 
 by a desolating pestilence. From this, how- 
 ever, the population had sufficiently recovered 
 a few years later to be among the candidates 
 for the honour of erecting a temple to the 
 Emperor, who had then come to their aid ; and 
 at the time of the Apocalypse it was probably 
 a fairly flourishing community. Its dominant 
 worship, to judge by the ruins of the stately 
 temple that still remain, was that of the great 
 mother-goddess Cybele ; and that worship, 
 it will be remembered, with its eunuch priest- 
 hood and its orgiastic rites, was one which 
 tended, as much almost as that of Dionysos 
 or Aphrodite, to sins of a foul and dark im- 
 purity. In the midst of such a population, 
 rescued from such a cultus, we have to think 
 of the small community of disciples who were 
 addressed, through their Angel, or Bishop, 
 as the Church of Sardis. 
 
 Here, as before, we may well assume that 
 the name by which the Lord reveals Himself 
 at the opening of this Message — " /f e that 
 hath the seven Spirits of God " — had a special 
 bearing upon the state of the Angel and the 
 Church to whom the Message was to be trans- 
 mitted. The Spirit was thought of, to use the 
 
The Epistle to Sardis, 157 
 
 later terminology of the Nicene Creed, as the 
 *' Giver of Life " (to ^coottolov) and of all its 
 sevenfold gifts ; the seven Spirits of i. 4 and v. 6 
 were but forms of that divine life which He — 
 one, yet manifold — imparted. These He, the 
 Lord of the Churches, possessed and could 
 call his own ; for thus it is that He can 
 " quicken whom he will :" thus He can impart 
 the divine life, in all its marvellous variety, 
 to those who stand in need of it. And He 
 is also, as in the opening vision of the Seer, 
 *^ he that hath the seven stars,'" which repre- 
 sent the guides and teachers of the Church ; 
 He is able, that is, to bring together the gifts 
 of life and the ministry for which those gifts 
 are needed. If those who minister are without 
 the gifts, it is because they have not asked 
 for them. The union of the two attributes 
 is, therefore, one both of encouragement and 
 of warning. If each star shines with its pe- 
 culiar radiancy, it is because it is under the 
 power and influence of the seven-fold Spirit ; 
 if it has no life or light, and ceases to shine, 
 there is the danger of its falling away from 
 its place in that glorious band and becoming 
 as one of the '* wandering stars, to whom is 
 reserved the blackness of darkness for ever" 
 (Jude, verse 13). 
 
15S The Epistle to Sardis. 
 
 And here both the warning and the encour- 
 agement were needed. Of the Angel of the 
 Church at Sardis, and, by impHcation, of the 
 society which he represented, it was said, " Thou 
 hast a name that thou livest,"" — hast the shew and 
 the fame of a spiritual life — and yet thou ^^ art 
 dead.''' The cause of that loss of vitality and 
 strength is to be found, we may believe, in the 
 absence, in this instance, of the " tribulation " 
 and the '^ endurance'' which were so prominent 
 in the judgment passed on the works of other 
 Churches. The members of the Sardian 
 Church had not been tried in the fire of ad- 
 versity ; life had not been braced and strength- 
 ened by the conflict with persecution : men 
 had been content with " works " of a lower and 
 less noble kind, occasional acts of charity, the 
 routine of decent conduct. There had been no 
 open scandals ; Sardis was still recognised 
 by the other Churches as a living and true 
 member of the great family of God, was even, 
 it may be, winning their admiration for its 
 seemingly energetic vitality. And yet the chill 
 and the paralysis which were the forerunners of 
 the end were slowly creeping in upon its life ; 
 death, not life, was already master of the position, 
 the dominant characteristic of the Church as 
 a whole, and of its spiritual ruler in particular. 
 
The Epistle to Sardis, 159 
 
 To the Angel and the Church that was 
 gliding into this state of spiritual torpor and 
 death the command comes, ^^ Be watchful;'' 
 become as one who watches {jlvov ypT^jopcov) ; 
 rouse thyself, and stand as one who seeks to 
 cast off that torpor. The words that follow 
 present a singular diversity of reading — 
 " Strengthen the things that remain, which are 
 ready to die " (a fjiiWei airoOavelv ; or, which 
 were at the point to die (a efjueWov) ; or, lastly, 
 ** which thou wert at the point to lose " {a 
 eyL6eXXe? airo^dXKetv). The meaning is, in all 
 cases, substantially the same, but the best 
 supported reading seems the second. In any 
 case, the question meets us. What are those 
 *' things that are, or were, ready to die ?" Are 
 they those members of the Church in whom there 
 were yet some signs of life, however feeble ? 
 or those elements of life, Christian graces and 
 activities, which were not yet actually extinct ? 
 Both interpretations are, of course, grammati- 
 cally tenable ; but the distinct mention after- 
 wards of persons as such, in the *^few names " 
 that are singled out for special praise, inclines 
 the balance in favour of the latter. The Angel 
 of the Church is called to wake up from his 
 slumbers, and then to strengthen in himself the 
 energy, the zeal, the love, the hope, the faith, 
 
i6o The Epistle to Sardis. 
 
 which were so nearly dying out. In doing this 
 he could not fail to help the persons also in 
 whom this flagging of all spiritual vigour had 
 been most conspicuous, or, in the language 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, to "lift up the 
 hands that hang down and the feeble knees " 
 (xii. 12). 
 
 The reason for this command is then given. 
 *' / have not found thy works perfect " (literally, 
 not filled up to the measure which God requires 
 of thee) *' before God.'" And then, as in the 
 analogous warning to the Angel of the Church 
 of Ephesus (chap. ii. 5), there came other 
 words : " Remember, therefore, how thou hast 
 received and heard.'' Personally it was an 
 admonition to the Bishop of the Sardian Church 
 to go back mentally to the time when he was 
 yet a catechumen in the Christian Church, to 
 recall the steps by which he then came under 
 the oral teaching of apostles, or bishop-elders, 
 how the traditions thus received in doctrine, 
 ethics, discipline, had formed a complete and 
 consistent whole — how, afterwards (here the 
 change of tense, from the perfect to the aorist, 
 points, it may be, to some definite epoch in his 
 life, such as " the laying on of the hands of the 
 presbytery " when he was consecrated to his 
 ministerial office) he heard, in solemn words, 
 
The Epistle to Sardis. i6i 
 
 what was the true pattern and standard of the 
 duties of his office.' The counsel to " heep " all 
 this is identical with that given by St. Paul to 
 Timotheus, to " keep the good thing which had 
 been committed to his charge" (2 Tim. i. 14), 
 to " hold fast the form of sound words " which 
 he had heard from his master " among many 
 witnesses" (2 Tim. i. 13; ii. 2). In doing this, 
 and in this alone, there would be the witness 
 that he was indeed " repenting^''' not mourning 
 with a fruitless regret over opportunities that 
 had been lost and gifts that had been wasted, 
 but entering on a new life with new impulses 
 and new principles of action. 
 
 As in the Message to Pergamos, so here 
 also, the exhortation is followed by a warning : 
 ^^ Except thou watch, therefore, I will come as 
 a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I 
 will come upon thee.'* Here, again, we have the 
 language which we commonly associate with 
 the great second Advent boldly transferred 
 
 ^ It seeins right to mention the deeper meaning which Ewald 
 gives to the words "thou hast received," as implying the recep- 
 tion of the gifts of the Holy Ghost. So taken they would appeal 
 to an inward experience like that to which St. Paul appeals in 
 writing to the Galatians (chap. iii. 2). I do not accept this as 
 excluding the interpretation given above, but it is, perhaps, 
 implied in the words " kozu thou hast received," stress being 
 laid on the manner, the inward as well as outward accompani- 
 ments, of the instruction that had been imparted. 
 
 12 
 
1 62 The Epistle to Sardis. 
 
 to some nearer and more immediate judgment. 
 The very phrase, *' as a thief,'' implies a refer- 
 ence to, and therefore the knowledge of, those 
 '* words of the Lord Jesus" in which, in con- 
 nection with the self-same command to '^waich,'" 
 He had added, *' This know, that if the good 
 man of the house had known what hour the 
 thief would come, he would have watched, and 
 not have suffered his house to be broken 
 through " (Luke xii. 39), and is, in fact, an 
 echo of what, through those words, and the like 
 teaching of St. Paul delivered to the Thessa- 
 lonian and other Churches, had become a pro- 
 verbial form of speech, that " the day of the 
 Lord so cometh as a thief in the night " (i 
 Thess. V. 2). Dependent as this coming was 
 on the state of the Sardian Church and its ruler, 
 liable to be averted on renewed watchfulness 
 and repentance, it must, of necessity, refer to 
 the discipline, at once regulative and reforma- 
 tory, — penal, yet not necessarily inflicting an 
 irremediable penalty, — with which, in unlooked- 
 for ways and at an unexpected season, the Lord 
 would come upon the Church. Persecutions, 
 distress, the open shame of being noted as 
 a dead Church, exclusion from fellowship wdth 
 other Churches, who should no longer recognise 
 even its ^' name'' to live — these should do their 
 
The Epistle to Sardis, 163 
 
 work, teaching all who were yet capable of being 
 taught, warning others by the punishment of the 
 hardened and impenitent. 
 
 In other Messages, as we have seen, first the 
 good that exists in the Church is recognised, 
 and then the evil that had mingled with it is 
 marked out for censure. Here, unhappily, the 
 evil was dominant, and the sharp words of re- 
 buke had therefore to be spoken first. But the 
 Judge of all the earth, then as ever, recognised 
 and singled out for praise even the ten righteous 
 men, if such there were, who had kept their 
 integrity in the midst of a general corruption. 
 *' Thou hast a few names'" (''names" for'* per- 
 sons," as in Acts i. 15, but with, perhaps, the 
 underlying thought that He who speaks is one 
 that *' knows his own sheep by name," and 
 looks on each in his own distinct personality) 
 *^even in Sardis, which have not defiled their gar- 
 ments.''^ The meaning of such an image lies of 
 course on the surface. That which is to the 
 spirit what the garments are to the body is the 
 outward form of life which men behold, which 
 in part expresses and symbolises the character, 
 in part hides from view the nakedness of its 
 personal life. Those, then, who had not defiled 
 their garments were those whose outward lives 
 had been free from impurity, who, in the analo- 
 12* 
 
164 The Epistle to Sa^'dis, 
 
 gous language of St. Jude, had kept that garment 
 from being "spotted by the flesh" (Jude, verse 
 23). The same thought was, it is clear, sym- 
 bolised in the practice of the early Church, 
 possibly even a primitive practice, of clothing 
 those who were baptized in white garments — 
 the *' chrisoms " of old English liturgical usage 
 — as a witness of the purity of life to which 
 their baptism pledged them. The parable of 
 the man that "had not on a wedding garment" 
 must have done something to fix this symbolism 
 in the Apostle's mind, and this implied reference 
 to that parable helps us there also to understand 
 the true meaning of the symbol, and so to 
 eliminate the more fantastic interpretations 
 which see in it either the imputed righteousness 
 of Christ or the outward ordinance of baptism. 
 
 The reward for this purity might seem at 
 first to be the purity itself. They who have 
 not defiled their garments are to " walk " with 
 Christ "zn white,'" for ^Uhcy are worthy.'' Here, 
 however, it would seem, from the vivid pictures 
 in chaps, vi. 11, vii. g, 13, xix. 8, of the white 
 robes given to the martyred saints, of those who 
 were clothed with white robes which they had 
 made white in the "blood of the Lamb," as 
 if more than this were meant. The " white 
 robes " are such " as no fuller on earth could 
 
The Epistle to Sardis. 165 
 
 whiten them," glorious and bright as those 
 which the Apostle had seen on the night of the 
 Transfiguration. In other words, as the reward 
 of the pure in heart is that they shall see God, 
 so that of those who have kept their garments 
 from defilement is like in kind but more glorious 
 in degree — a purity glorified and transfigured, 
 pure even as He, their Lord, is pure (i John 
 iii. 3). Of that reward they are " worthy^'" and 
 no dread of scholastic formulae of " congruity " 
 or " condignity " need hinder us from accepting 
 the word in its natural meaning. There is 
 a worthiness, a meetness, when the life prepares 
 the way for the reward, and the reward is the 
 completion and consummation of the life, which 
 we need not shrink from recognising, as Christ 
 Himself recognised it, and the very essence 
 of which lies, in part, in the absence of any 
 claim or consciousness of merit. 
 
 In this Message, and in this alone, the 
 reward of him that overcometh is thus in part 
 anticipated in what precedes it. If there is 
 any difference, it is perhaps to be found in the 
 use of the word Trepc/SaXetrat — he *^ shall be 
 clothed,'' or *' shall clothe himself,'* as denoting 
 a more solemn investiture than the simple 
 ** walking in white." And looking to the fact 
 of the obvious familiarity of the Evangelist 
 
1 66 The Epistle to Sardis. 
 
 with the prophecy of Zechariah, we can scarcely 
 avoid seeing here a reference to the mysterious 
 vision in which the High Priest Joshua, the 
 son of Jozedek, stood face to face in conflict 
 with Satan, the enemy and accuser, and, having 
 overcome in that trial, had the fair mitre set 
 upon his head, and was clothed in new raiment. 
 (Zech. iii. 4, 5.)' 
 
 The reward, however, goes beyond this : 
 ^^And I will not blot out his name from the book 
 of life,'' The words contain a whole mine of 
 half-latent imagery. First we note the special 
 appropriateness of the promise as given to those 
 who were exceptions to the statement, too true 
 of the greater part of the Church to which they 
 
 " I ought not to pass over, though I cannot altogether accept, 
 Professor Lightfoot's interesting suggestion, in his Commentary 
 on the Epistle to the Colossians (p. 22), that here, and in the 
 parallel passage in the Message to Laodicea, there is a reference 
 to the purple dyes for which both the cities, like Thyatira, were 
 more or less famous. The image seems to me too natural and 
 universal to require the assumption of any such direct reference. 
 When we come to the description of those who had * ' washed 
 their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb " 
 (Rev. vii. 14), the case is, however, stronger. We can imagine 
 the glance of the Apostle falling on one of the great dyeing vats 
 used in the staple trade of the town, and seeing the linen gar- 
 ments steeped in the crimson fluid that looked like blood, and 
 of his being thus led to think of those whose inmost life, steeped 
 in the spirit of sacrifice of which the blood of Christ is the sym- 
 bol, should emerge from that process, not " red like crimson," but, 
 by the strangest of all paradoxes, " white as wool " (Isa. i. 18). 
 
% 
 
 The Epistle to Sardis. 167 
 
 belonged, that ** tlicy had a name thai they 
 livedo and yet were d:ad,'^ whose names there- 
 fore would be blotted out of the book of life, 
 which recorded only those of living members. 
 The symbolism was one of the oldest in the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, and occurring, as it does, 
 for the first time in Exod. xxxii. 32 (" Blot me, 
 I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast 
 written"), probably had its origin in the 
 political life of Egypt. It was a natural ex- 
 pansion of the thought that one who was 
 convicted of treachery or disloyalty to the 
 State of which he was a member, should, as 
 the preliminary step to the execution of the 
 sentence of death or banishment, have his 
 name struck out from the register of its 
 citizens.^ So in the fiery wrath of the 6gth 
 Psalm the extremest malediction is, " Let 
 them be blotted out of the book of the living ;" 
 and this stands parallel with the clause, '' Let 
 them not be written among the righteous " 
 (Psa. Ixix. 28). So in Daniel's vision of the 
 resurrection, those who were delivered out of 
 tribulation included " every one that should 
 
 ^ Students of Greek history will remember the scene in which 
 Critias, as the prelude to the condemnation of Theramenes, struck 
 his name out of the list of the Three Thousand who could not 
 be condemned except by a formal sentence of the Council. 
 
1 68 The Epistle to Sardis. 
 
 be found written in the book " (Dan. xii. i). 
 To this image the Seer returns again and 
 again. All should worship the Beast, except 
 those whose names were written in the book 
 of life of the Lamb (xiii. 3 ; xvii. 8). They 
 only should enter into the holy city, the 
 heavenly Jerusalem (xxi. 27). The words of 
 the Message to the Church of Sardis are valu- 
 able as shewing that to have the name so 
 written does not of itself secure, as by a divine 
 decree, the indefectibility of perseverance. 
 Of not a few it would be true, the very promise 
 implying the warning, that their names, though 
 they had been written in it, would hereafter be 
 blotted out. The close of the Message comes 
 as the natural sequel of this promise : ''/ will 
 confess his name before viy Father and before his 
 angels." Here we have in part the distinct echo 
 of words which the Apostle had once heard from 
 his Master's lips while He was yet on earth : 
 "Whosoever therefore shall confess me before 
 men, him will I confess also before my Father 
 which is in heaven" (Matt. x. 32); or, as in 
 Luke xii. 8, " before the angels of God." In 
 the connection between this promise and the 
 names that were written in the book of life we 
 may trace, I believe, a probable reference to the 
 strange Psalm of the Sons of Korah (Psalm 
 
The Epistle to Sardis. 169 
 
 Ixxxv.), which appears to. have been sung at 
 some enrolment of proselytes from Egypt and 
 Babylon, from Philistia and Tyre and Ethiopia, 
 among the citizens of Zion. There also we 
 read that when the Lord writeth up the people 
 — takes, as it were, the census of the holy city — 
 He shall rehearse, or count, uttering " as He 
 counts" the names of those who were thus regis- 
 tered in what the Prophet Ezekiel, at a some- 
 what later date, calls *' the writing of the house 
 of Israel " (Ezek. xiii. 9). 
 
VII. 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO PHILADELPHIA 
 
THE REVELATION. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 7 And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write ; These 
 things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of 
 David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth ; and shutteth, and no 
 man openeth : 
 
 8 I know thy works : behold, I have set before thee an open door, 
 and no man can shut it : for thou hast a little strength, and hast 
 kept my word, and hast not denied my name. 
 
 9 Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say 
 they are Jews, and are not, but do lie ; behold, I will make them to 
 come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved 
 thee. 
 
 10 Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will 
 keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all 
 the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. 
 
 11 Behold, I come quickly : hold that fast which thou hast, that 
 no man take thy crown. 
 
 12 Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my 
 God, and he shall go no more out : and I will write upon him the 
 name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new 
 Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God : and 
 / will ivrite upon him my new name. 
 
 13 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto 
 the churches. 
 
VII. 
 
 THE city of Philadelphia, situated at the 
 foot of Mount Tmolus, about twenty-eight 
 miles south-east of Sardis, named after Attalus 
 Philadelphus, King of Pergamos, and the centre 
 of the wine trade of the region lying on the 
 frontiers of Lydia and Phrygia, presented, so 
 far as we know^, the same phenomena of reli- 
 gious and social life as its nearest neighbours. 
 There, too, there was a population mainly, of 
 course, Heathen, but including at least three 
 other elements distinct from it and from each 
 other — Jews, Jewish Christians, and converts 
 from Heathenism. What its spiritual con- 
 dition was we gather from the Message, and 
 from that only. Three facts connected with it 
 may, how^ever, be briefly noticed, as having 
 some historical interest, i. That, like Sardis, 
 it had suffered severely from the great Asiatic 
 earthquake in the reign of Tiberius. 2. That 
 of all the Seven Churches it had the longest 
 duration of prosperity as a Christian city, and 
 
174 ^^^^ Epistle to Philadelphia. 
 
 is still a spacious town, with the remains of not 
 less than tw^enty-four churches. 3. That of all 
 the seven its name alone appears in the cata- 
 logue of modern cities. The meaning of the 
 word, — " brotherly love," or ''love of the breth- 
 ren," — perhaps also the special character of the 
 promises connected with it in the Apocal3'ptic 
 Message, commended it to the mind of William 
 Penn as the fittest he could find for the city 
 which he founded on the banks of the Dela- 
 w^are; and so it has won for the name of the 
 old Asiatic city a higher niche of fame than it 
 would otherwise ever have filled in the world's 
 history. 
 
 The name by which the Sender of the 
 Message here describes himself is that of " the 
 holy, the true, he that hath the key of David, he 
 who openeth, and none shall shut ; lie who shutteth, 
 and none shall open.'' Each of these epithets 
 has a special significance and calls for a few 
 words in explanation of it. i. " The holy.'* 
 The word here used is, it must be remembered, 
 djio<;, not ocrio?, and represents the holiness 
 of consecration rather than * that which is 
 ethical and indwelling. As such, in by far the 
 great majority of instances, it is used either 
 of the "saints" as consecrated, in spite of 
 manifold individual weaknesses, to a life 
 
The Epistle to Philadelphia, 175 
 
 of devotion ; or of the Temple and its sanc- 
 tuaries, literal or spiritual, as dedicated to 
 God's service (i Cor. iii. 17 ; Ephes. ii. 21 ; 
 Heb. viii. 2 and passim) ; more prominently 
 still of the Holy Spirit, as sharing that other- 
 wise incommunicable sanctity which belongs 
 to the Divine Essence. Of the person of the 
 Lord Jesus it is used but rarely. It would 
 seem, however, to have been one of the names, 
 more or less accepted as equivalent to that 
 of the Messiah, which were current during His 
 ministry. It came from the lips of the Gada- 
 rene demoniac when he uttered the cry, " I 
 know thee who thou art, the Holy One 
 of God" (Luke iv. 34). But it was not only 
 from those lips that that word had come before 
 in the hearing of the Apostle. If we take the 
 reading of all the great MSS., including the 
 Sinaitic, we find it was the form of the con- 
 fession borne by St. Peter and recorded in 
 John vi. 69 : *' Thou art the Christ," not as 
 in our Version, " the Son of the living God," 
 but, ''the Holy One of God." That name 
 is now recalled to the Disciple's mind in 
 special connection, we may believe, with the 
 memories of that day, but also, and more 
 prominently, with the promises with which this 
 Message ends, every one of which especially 
 
176 The Epistle to Philadelphia. 
 
 brings out the idea of consecration, the ^'pillar 
 in the temple of God,'' the ''name'' and the ''city 
 of God." 
 
 If textual criticism has helped us to trace 
 the first of these great adjectives to its source, 
 so, indirectly, it suggests the subtle links 
 of association by which "the holy" and "the 
 true " were connected. For it was on the self- 
 same day that the beloved Disciple had heard 
 from his Master's lips, for the first time, that 
 word thus applied, when He spoke of Himself 
 as " the tnie bread that came down from 
 heaven." Whatever may have been its equiva- 
 lent in the Aramaic which our Lord spoke, 
 it is a familiar fact that the Greek word 
 which St. John uses {oXtjOlvo^) w^as with him a 
 favourite and characteristic one. It expressed, 
 more than the simpler akr^Orj^, " true with 
 all the fulness of truth," true not only as 
 opposed to false, but as distinguished from all 
 shadows of, and approximations to, the truth. 
 So we have, for example, the " true light " 
 (John i. 9), *' the true worshippers " (John 
 iv. 23), the '' only true God " (John xvii. 3). 
 The last application has raised it almost to 
 the level, not only of a divine attribute, but 
 of a divine Name, and it is as such that it 
 is used here. The Lord who speaks to the 
 
The Epistle to Philadelphia. 177 
 
 Churches claims to be holy as the Father is 
 holy, true as He is true. 
 
 In the words that follow we have a manifest 
 reproduction of a passage in that strange epi- 
 sode in the prophecy of Isaiah (xxii. 15-25) 
 which contrasts the character and the fortunes 
 of Shebna the scribe and Eliakim the son 
 of Hilkiah, that was "over the household" 
 of Hezekiah. While the doom of shame and 
 exile was predicted for the former, for the 
 latter there was honour and advancement. 
 " The key of the house of David will I lay 
 upon his shoulder : so he shall open, and none 
 shall shut ; and he shall shut, and none shall 
 open." His influence in the great crisis that 
 was coming on the kingdom of Judah was to 
 be mighty for good. He was to be " a father 
 to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the 
 house of David." Here, of course, the histori- 
 cal bearing of the words falls entirely into the 
 background. And the words are chosen simply 
 because they described, in terms which the 
 prophecy had made familiar, that aspect of 
 the highest sovereignty which was now most 
 needed. They are not identical, it will be 
 noticed, with those which described the Lord 
 of the Churches as having the " keys of Hades 
 and of Death" (chap. i. ig). There He was 
 
 13 
 
178 The Epistle to Philadelphia. 
 
 manifested as extending his sway into the 
 world that lies behind the veil, the region 
 of the unseen and spiritual, contemplated on 
 its darker side. Here, in closer analog}^ with 
 the promise of the keys of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven to Peter (Matt. xvi. 19), what He 
 claims is sovereignty over " the house of David,'' 
 over the kingly palace of the Son of David, 
 over the Church, as being the house of God. 
 The right of admitting into that palace of the 
 great King is his, and his alone. Others in 
 vain attempt to admit when He excludes, or 
 to exclude when He admits. 
 
 The next clause gives the more immediate 
 application of the claim : *' I know thy works : 
 behold I have set before thee an open door, and 
 no man can shut it.'' As before, I take the 
 words as spoken primarily of the Angel or 
 Bishop of the Church in his personal character ; 
 and, secondly, of the Church so far as it was 
 represented by him. So taken, we cannot 
 doubt that the ''works" which the Lord 
 ** knew " were such as He recognised as being 
 worthy of all praise. And the context at once 
 determines the nature of those works, and adds 
 another link to the chain of evidence which 
 shews that the teaching of the writer of the 
 Apocalypse was, in all essential points, one 
 
The Epistle to Philadelphia, 179 
 
 with the teaching of St. Paul. If there was 
 any phrase which more than another was 
 characteristic of the language of the Apostle 
 of the Gentiles, it was that of the " open 
 door " which we are now considering. At 
 Ephesus a *' great and effectual door" was 
 opened unto him (i Cor. xvi. 19). At Troas 
 a " door was opened unto him of the Lord " 
 (2 Cor. ii. 12). He entreats those to whom 
 he writes, to pray *' that God would open to 
 him a door of utterance to speak the mystery 
 of Christ " (Col. iv. 3). So, in like manner, 
 his friend and fellow-worker, St. Luke, records 
 how that the Lord had *' opened the door 
 of faith unto the Gentiles " (Acts xiv. 27). 
 In all these cases the open door refers to the 
 admission of the Gentile converts into the 
 great house of God, the widening opportunities 
 for the mission work of the Church which 
 the providence of God placed in the preacher's 
 way. That phrase must, in the nature of 
 things, have become current in the Churches 
 which owed their very existence to the labours 
 of St. Paul ; and when it came to the ear and 
 was recorded by the pen of St. John, it could 
 not fail to recall the same thought and to 
 signify the same thing. The words which 
 came to the Angel of the Church of Phila- 
 
i8o The Epistle to Philadelphia. 
 
 delphia were accordingly of the nature of an 
 assurance and a promise. He was encouraged 
 to persevere in the work in which he had 
 already laboured so well by the declaration 
 that in this he was a fellow-worker with his 
 Lord, that no narrowing exclusiveness, no bitter 
 antagonism, should hinder its completion, that 
 the door had been opened wide by Him who 
 had " the key of the house of Davids 
 
 And this promise comes as a reward of faith- 
 fulness in the use of the opportunities that had 
 already been granted: ^^ Because thou hast little 
 power y^ and yet didst keep my word, and didst not 
 deny my name.'' The words point to something 
 in the past history of the Church of Philadelphia 
 and its ruler, the nature of which we can only 
 infer from them and from their context. Some 
 storm of persecution had burst upon him, 
 probably, as at Smyrna, instigated by the Jews 
 or the Judaising section of the Church. They 
 sought to shut the door which he had found 
 open, and would have kept so. They were 
 strong, and he was weak; numbers were 
 against him, and one whose faith was less real 
 and living might have yielded to the pressure. 
 But he, though not winning, like Antipas, the 
 
 * Not '■'a little strength," as in our English Version, which lays 
 an undue stress on the substantive rather than on the adjective. 
 
The Epistle to Philadelphia. i8i 
 
 martyr's crown, had yet displayed the courage 
 of the confessor, had kept the word, the 
 doctrine, the creed, of his Lord, the mystery 
 of the faith, the brotherhood of mankind in 
 Christ, which was, in St. Paul's language, the 
 substance of " the word of God," and had not 
 been tempted to deny His name, the name 
 of that Jesus to whom the Jews in their frenzy 
 said, Anathema (i Cor. xii. 3), through any 
 fear of man. Like the faithful servant in the 
 parable, he had thus been faithful in a very 
 little (Matt. xxv. 23) ; and therefore, as the 
 promise that follows shews, he was to be made 
 " ruler over many things." 
 
 The reappearance of the same description as 
 that which met us in the Epistle to the Church 
 of Smyrna, points, as I have said, to the 
 quarter from which the attack came. Here 
 also we have those who " are of the synagogue 
 of Satan f that say they are Jews, and are not, but 
 do lie.'' So far they seem to have gained the 
 mastery. Though resisted, they are yet the 
 stronger party. But the day of retribution is 
 not far off. "7 will make them to come and 
 worship before thy feet, and to know that I have 
 loved thee.'' Before long, in that " hour of trial 
 which was about to come upon the whole world,'* 
 in the storm of persecution which, springing 
 
1 82 The Epistle to Philadelphia. 
 
 from Heathen panic and suspicion, would 
 involve both Christian and Jew alike, the man 
 who had been faithful in his work would be 
 courted as a protector even by those who had 
 been his bitterest enemies. They would then 
 bow down and do him homage, and would 
 recognise, it may be in the outward events 
 of life, it may be in the very fact that his 
 power to protect them would flow from his 
 influence with those Gentiles against whose 
 admission they had so vehemently protested, 
 that his Lord had " loved him,'' and would love 
 him even to the end. He who had ^^ hept the 
 word of the endurance of Christ,'' the message 
 which bade him endure, even as Christ also 
 had endured the contradiction of sinners against 
 Himself, the word which had passed, we may 
 well believe, into a proverb, "He that endureth 
 to the end, the same shall be saved," should, 
 in his turn, be " kept " from that hour of trial 
 or temptation, the "fiery trial" of i Pet. iv. 12, 
 which was about to spread over the " whole 
 world" of the Roman Empire, to " try those that 
 dwelt upon the earth." 
 
 And now, as before, in reference not only, 
 or chiefly, to the far-off even^ that shall close 
 the world's history, but to a nearer and more 
 individual advent, we have the promise "/ come 
 
The Epistle to Philadelphia. 183 
 
 quickly.'' The trial should not be too long. 
 The issue was not far off. Therefore ^^ hold fast 
 that which thou hast,"" thy zeal, thy faith, thy 
 endurance, thy open door, ^Hhat no man take thy 
 crown'' — that crown of life (Rev. ii. 10) and 
 righteousness (2 Tim. iv. 8) which is reserved 
 for the faithful combatant. The promise to him 
 that overcometh is, however, in this instance, 
 more definite, and, if one may so speak, more 
 appropriate, than the simple crown of the 
 conqueror : "7 will make him a pillar in the 
 temple of my God, and he shall go no more out ; 
 and I will write ttpon him the name of my God, 
 and the name of the city of my God, the new Jeni- 
 salein, which coviieth down out of heaven from my 
 God, and my new name." The circle of imagery 
 into which we are here brought anticipates the 
 more wonderful and glorious visions with 
 which the Apocatypse closes. There also we 
 hear of "the great city, the holy Jerusalem, 
 descending out of heaven from God " (Rev. 
 xxi. 10). But there are differences of detail 
 in the terms of the promise here which call for 
 notice, and are, each of them, singularly 
 suggestive, (i) In the vision of the holy city 
 the Seer beheld 1 temple in it, for " the Lord 
 God Almighty and the Lamb were the temple 
 thereof" (chap. xxi. 22). That which consti- 
 
184 The Epistle to Philadelphia. 
 
 tutes a sanctuary in the highest sense of the 
 word temple iyao^) is the presence felt and, 
 it may be, seen, of the god to whom it is dedi- 
 cated. So our bodies are "temples {yaoi) of the 
 Holy Ghost" (i Cor. vi. 19). So the Lord Jesus 
 spake of the "temple of his body" (John ii. 21). 
 But in that heavenly city (itself, when we 
 analyse it, but the symbol of a reality which 
 as yet we know only in part and through types 
 and shadows) that divine Presence is every- 
 where manifesting itself to the whole company 
 of the blessed according to the capacity of each ; 
 and just as the material universe, in its relation 
 to the creative power and the permanent and 
 immanent energy of the Creator as sustaining 
 it, is the temple of the Lord God Almighty, 
 so, where there is the presence of the Lamb, 
 one with the Logos, revealing the Fatherhood 
 and redeeming love of God, there also is the 
 Temple which is wherever that presence is. 
 Here, however, in the earlier stage of the 
 symbolic apocalypse, the mind of the Seer was 
 not as yet ripe for that thought. It is to come 
 to him when he sees the city. So long as he 
 hears of it only by the hearing of the ear, he is 
 to picture it to himself as having a temple 
 analogous to that of the earthly Jerusalem, 
 with which he was familiar. And in that 
 
The Epistle to Philadelphia. 185 
 
 temple he that overcame was to be made 
 " a pillar:' It will be remembered that that 
 was a title which, in its relation to the Church 
 of God, had been borne by the Apostle himself. 
 He, with Cephas and James, had been among 
 those who seemed to be ''pillars" of the 
 Ecclesia at Jerusalem (Gal. ii. 9), sustaining 
 the fabric of its polity. And now he hears the 
 gracious promise that, as he had been in the 
 earthly Ecclesia, which was the Temple of the 
 living God, so should every one that overcometh 
 be in that heavenly Temple. And that position 
 once gained should never afterwards be forfeited. 
 " He shall go no more outJ" Here on earth there 
 is to the last the possibility of failure. The 
 surest guide may wander from the right path. 
 The pillar may give way, and need removal, 
 that the fabric may remain unshaken.^ But 
 there the victors shall abide for ever, each, 
 under this aspect of the symbol, a column in 
 the Infinite Temple, as each, under another 
 aspect, had been as a " living stone " in the 
 structure of the temple upon earth. He that 
 had the keys of the house of David would close 
 
 * It is just possible that there may here be a local reference to 
 the earthquakes from which Philadelphia had suffered, and which 
 may have so shaken the fabric of many of its temples that some, 
 at least, of their pillars had to be removed and new ones erected 
 in their place. 
 
1 86 The Epistle to Philadelphia. 
 
 the gates upon those who were received into 
 the Holy City, so that there should be no 
 departure. 
 
 *' 1 will write upon him the name of my God.'" ^ 
 So, in chap. xxii. 4, we read of the servants of 
 God in the heavenly city that " his name shall 
 be on their foreheads," and in chap. ix. 4 of 
 those '' who have the seal of God upon their 
 foreheads." We can scarcely fail to see in this 
 promise a reference to the thin plate of gold 
 which was borne upon the forehead of Aaron 
 and his successors in the office of the High 
 Priest, and upon which was to be graven, '* like 
 the engraving of a signet, Holiness to the 
 Lord" (Exod. xxviii. 36). And so the promise 
 takes its place side by side with those which 
 speak of the elect of God as being, like their 
 Lord, sharers in a kingly priesthood. Their 
 life of consecration, their fulfilment of the 
 priestly ideal on earth, will hereafter be recog- 
 nised by the consummation of that life in the 
 heavenly Temple in which they have been made 
 as pillars, not mute and motionless like the 
 
 ' It has been a question whether the " writing upon ///;;/, or it " 
 (the Greek admits, of course, of either rendering), refers to the 
 pillar as such, or to the man as represented by it. Probably the 
 frequent use of human figures in the caryatides of Greek temples 
 suggested the identification of the two. 
 
The Epistle to Philadelphia. 187 
 
 columns in human form of an earthly temple, 
 but living, moving, worshipping. 
 
 ''''And the name of the city of my God, which is 
 New Jerusalem,''' Were the thoughts of the 
 Seer directed here, also, to the prophetic sym- 
 bolism of the past, or does the mystery of the 
 new name belong entirely to the far future, un- 
 revealed to him and therefore hidden from us ? 
 An interpreter may well shrink from speaking 
 over-boldly in answer to that question ; but, on 
 the whole, the analogy of the symbolic imagery 
 of the Apocalypse generally suggests the conclu- 
 sion that the key of the mystery is to be found 
 in that volume of the Prophets which was to 
 St. John so inexhaustible a storehouse. The 
 new name might be that which meets us at the 
 close of the prophecy of Ezekiel, as the name 
 of the renewed and glorified city which he saw 
 in vision, " Jehovah-shammah'' — "the Lord is 
 there" (Ezek. xlviii. 35). More probably, as it 
 seems to me, both because the name itself is of 
 deeper and richer significance and because the 
 Messianic prophecies of Jeremiah, connected 
 as they were with the proclamation of the New 
 Covenant (Jer. xxxi. 31), were more prominent 
 in the thoughts of men than those of Ezekiel, 
 we may think of '' Jehovah-tsidkemi''' — "the 
 Lord our Righteousness " — which was, we read 
 
1 88 The Epistle to Philadelphia. 
 
 in Jer. xxxiii. i6, to be the name of the city in 
 its glorified and transfigured state, no less than 
 of the Anointed King, as in the more familiar 
 words of Jer. xxiii. 6. Every inhabitant of that 
 celestial city would count it his glory to have 
 that name written upon his forehead, the sign of 
 that completed citizenship in heaven (the 
 TTokLTevfJua ev ovpavol^ of Phil. iii. 20) which 
 had been his joy and comfort upon earth. 
 
 Last and greatest in the list of names which 
 the Conqueror is to bear as the insignia of his 
 victory is the '' new name " ' of the Lord Him- 
 self. Here we are reminded of the analogous 
 promise to the Church of Pergamos — the " new 
 name," though not in that instance of the Lord 
 who speaks, but of the disciple who has been 
 faithful to the end. There we saw that the new 
 
 * I am unwilling to pass over without notice a suggestion which 
 I have received from a friend, the Rev. W. Reid, of Edinburgh, 
 as to the " new name " of the Lord Jesus Avhich is here brought 
 into prominence. Adopting a true inductive method of inquiry, 
 he has asked himself whether the Apocalypse itself contains any 
 characteristic name or title that had not been used before or 
 applied to Christ. And he finds the answer in the fact that the 
 Greek word 'Apviov, "the Lamb, "is soused in not less than twenty- 
 eight passages in this Book, and not elsewhere. The name is 
 raised to a co-ordinate rank with that of God (Rev. vii. lo ; xiv. 
 4) ; the Church is the Lamb's bride (Rev. xxi. 9) ; the Twelve are 
 the Apostles of the Lamb (Rev. xxi. 14), So used, the Name 
 gathered up into itself the humiliation and the glory, the sacrifice 
 and the exaltation, the meekness and the gentleness of Christ, 
 and became in very deed a Name which is above every name. 
 
The Epistle to Philadelphia. 189 
 
 name was the symbol of a new and transfigured 
 character, and this may guide us to a right 
 apprehension of the meaning of the promise 
 here. The name is not one that is merely 
 ^^ new'' now, but one that shall be new in the 
 day of the final victory. It is, therefore, more 
 even than those two great names, the " Word of 
 God" and " King of kings and Lord of lords " 
 (chap. xix. 13-16), which the Apostle heard and 
 beheld in one of his later visions. For these 
 his own writings made familiar to the minds of 
 men even during the time of struggle and in- 
 completeness, and there was, besides these — 
 written, it would seem, not, like the latter of 
 those two names, on " the vesture and the 
 thigh," but on the diadems that crowned his 
 brow — another more mysterious name, seen but 
 not understood even by the Seer, a name ^^ which 
 no one knoweth but himself.'' Full and rich as 
 are the names of Jesus now, the Son of God, 
 the Son of Man, the Word, the Christ, the 
 King of kings and Lord of lords, revealing what 
 we can in some measure even now comprehend 
 and realise, there will be in the completed glory 
 of the kingdom a yet fuller revelation of all that 
 He is in Himself, of all that He has been to us. 
 Now "we know in part, but then we shall know 
 even as also we are known ; now we see through 
 
iQO The Epistle to Philadelphia, 
 
 a glass darkly, but then face to face " (i Cor. 
 xiii. 12). We know not what we shall be, but 
 we know that we shall be like Him, for we shall 
 see Him as He is ; and that knowledge will find 
 its adequate expression, as before, in a Name. 
 And that Name written on him that overcometh 
 will mark him not only as a citizen of the 
 heavenly Jerusalem, but as the subject, nay, 
 rather, as the heir of the Eternal King. 
 
VIII. 
 THE EPISTLE TO LAODICEA 
 
THE REVELATION. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 14 And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write ; 
 These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the 
 beginning of the creation of God ; 
 
 15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot : I would 
 thou wert cold or hot. 
 
 16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, 
 I will spue thee out of my mouth. 
 
 17 Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and 
 have need of nothing ; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and 
 miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked : 
 
 18 I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou 
 mayest be rich ; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and 
 that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear ; and anoint thine 
 eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see. 
 
 19 As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten : be zealous therefore 
 and repent. 
 
 20 Behold, I stand at the door, and knock : if any man hear my 
 voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with 
 him, and he with me. 
 
 21 To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my 
 throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in 
 his throne. 
 
 22 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto 
 the churches. 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE position of Laodicea, on the banks of 
 the Lycus, within a short distance of 
 Hierapolis and Colossae, brought the Church of 
 that city within the range, if not of the direct 
 influence of St. Paul's personal teaching, at 
 least of that of those who had been taught by 
 him, and of an Epistle specially addressed to 
 it. If we accept the words of Col. ii. i in their 
 natural meaning, the members of that Church 
 were as dear to his heart and filled him with as 
 profound emotion as any could do who had not 
 " seen his face in the flesh." To them, from his 
 Roman prison, he had sent a letter, probably 
 by the same messenger that carried the Epistle 
 to the Colossians. (Col. iv. i6.) The question 
 whether it was a letter exclusively for them, 
 or that which we know as the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians, considered as an encyclical letter 
 to the Asiatic Churches, and reaching them in 
 due course, is one which we need not now dis- 
 cuss. It will be enough to remember that a 
 
194 T^^ Epistle to Laodicea. 
 
 letter written at the same time as those to the 
 Churches of Ephesus and Colossae would, pro- 
 bably, in the nature of things, treat of the same 
 subjects and be written in the same tone. Those 
 to whom it was addressed would learn to think 
 of Christ as of One in whom dwelt '' the fulness 
 of the Godhead bodily " Col. ii. 9 ; in whom, 
 *' in the fulness of time, all things were to be 
 gathered together, both which are in heaven 
 and which are on earth " (Ephes. i. 12), as the 
 *' head of all principality and power" (Col. ii. 10) 
 The names by which the Message to the 
 Angel of the Church of Laodicea was ushered 
 in were accordingly such as reminded him of 
 the truths that had been thus proclaimed by the 
 great Apostle of the Gentiles : *' These things 
 saith the Amen^ the faithful and true witness, the 
 beginning of the creation of God.'' It need hardly 
 be said that this is the solitary passage in which 
 the word, so familiar as a formula of emphasis 
 even in the Greek version of our Lord'« teaching, 
 so familiar also in the worship of both Jews and 
 Christians, appears as a personal name claimed 
 by the Lord Jesus as His own. It is obvious 
 that as it came to the inner ear of the disciple 
 it must have thrown back his mind, full, as it 
 was to overflowing, of the words of the prophets 
 in their old Hebrew speech, upon the passage 
 
The Epistle to Laodicea. 195 
 
 in which Isaiah had spoken of the new name of 
 Jehovah as the God of Truth (Elohim-Arnen : Isa. 
 Ixv. 16) . But with this there may also have come 
 the recollection of the very syllables in which his 
 beloved Lord had declared Himself to be "the 
 Truth " (John xiv. 6), lingering in his memory as 
 that of "Ephphatha" and "Talitha cumi" did in 
 the memory of those from whose reports St. Mark 
 compiled his Gospel, and leading him to see new 
 meanings in the old familiar words. To him 
 it had now come to be equivalent (as in the 
 LXX. version of the passage in Isaiah) to the 
 word which he elsewhere uses in Gospel and 
 Epistle, for the True (6 aXr]0iv6<;), as standing, 
 not only in conjunction with words such as 
 the true Light, the true Bread, or, as here, the 
 true Witness, but absolutely as in i John v. 20. 
 It is not without interest to remember that the 
 language of the Pauline Epistles had already 
 presented an approximation to a like use, and 
 that in Christ the promises of God were Yea, 
 and in Him Amen (2 Cor. i. 20). 
 
 To some, however, among his readers that 
 new name was likely to be an obscure and 
 hard saying, and for them, therefore, after his 
 manner elsewhere,^ he adds the Greek equiva- 
 
 ^ As in the case of Siloam (John ix. 7) ; Gabbatha (xix. 13) ; 
 Golgotha (xix. 17) ; the Devil and Satan (Rev. xx. 2). 
 14* 
 
196 The Epistle to Laodicea. 
 
 lent of the Hebrew name : ^Hhe faithful mid true 
 witness,'' and thus they were led to the first pro- 
 clamation of that Name, with all that it involved, 
 in the opening words of the Apocalypse (chap, 
 i. 5). Both the words are thus brought together, 
 we may believe, because the Message that was 
 to follow was one of sharp reproof and condem- 
 nation. Men were to remember that Truth 
 had its severer as well as its more gracious 
 aspect, and that He who was the " faithful and 
 true witness " of the everlasting love of the 
 Father would cease to be faithful unless He 
 also testified against the sins of men, against 
 the lukewarmness and indifference which were 
 shutting out that love. And to this there is 
 added the higher and more mysterious title, 
 " the beginning of the Creation of God,'" Here we 
 find another striking instance of that to which 
 I have endeavoured throughout this volume to 
 give its due prominence, — the identity, in its 
 great broad outlines, of the teaching of St. John 
 and of St. Paul. For not only does the name 
 express the self-same truth as the " first-born 
 of every creature " in Col. i. 18, but the very 
 name, the Beginning if] apxh)^ appears in the 
 best MSS. as thus applied in Col. i. 18 in con- 
 nection with *' the first-born from the dead ; '* 
 and we can hardly doubt, from its use here, that 
 
The Epistle to Laodicea. 197 
 
 it had passed into the liturgical and devotional 
 phraseology of the Asiatic Churches of the valley 
 of the Lycus. The stress laid in the Epistle to 
 the Colossians on the inferiority of those to 
 whom the self-same name of apyaX was given 
 in the other sense, of all ^^principalities and 
 powers " (Col. i. 16, ii. 15), to the One who was 
 the true Beginning, or, if we might venture on 
 an unfamiliar use of a familiar word, the true 
 Frincipality of God's creation, may account for 
 the prominence which the name had gained, 
 and therefore, for its use here in a Message 
 addressed to a Church exposed, like that of 
 Colossae, to the risks of angelolatry, of the sub- 
 stitution of lower principalities and created 
 mediators for Him who was the Head over all 
 things to his Church. 
 
 In the absence of other information we can 
 only gather the state, outward or inward, of the 
 Church of Laodicea from the words that follow. 
 It is probable from what we know of the city in 
 which the Church was found, that it was ex- 
 posed, more than most other Churches, to the 
 temptations that come from wealth. The trade 
 of the town, mainiy that of dyeing, which it 
 shared with Thyatira and with Sardis, was pros- 
 perous ; and almost alone of the Asiatic cities 
 it was able, without any subvention from the 
 
198 The Epistle to Laodicea. 
 
 Imperial treasury, to recover from the effects 
 
 of an earthquake which, in a.d. 60 (according 
 
 / to the view I have taken, but a few years before 
 
 the date of the Message sent to it), had laid 
 
 many of its buildings low. We can well believe 
 
 that not a few of the converts to the faith of 
 
 Christ belonged to the wealthier class, even as 
 
 we find at Ephesus that there were those who 
 
 were " rich in this world '* (i Tim. vi. 17). And 
 
 the temptation which then, as ever, riches 
 
 brought with them was to take things easily, 
 
 to enjoy life and the pleasures which wealth 
 
 can buy ; to act practically on the rule, " Siir- 
 
 tout, point de zele,'' when that zeal brought with 
 
 it the necessity for self-denial or exertion. The 
 
 love that had once been warm or glowing was 
 
 waxing cold, though it had not as yet passed 
 
 into open apostasy and antagonism. The Angel, 
 
 or representative leader of the Church, had 
 
 shared in this general declension, and to him, 
 
 therefore, the rebuke is primarily addressed : 
 
 '^/ know thy works,, that thou art neither cold nor 
 
 hot.'* The meaning of the latter word (the 
 
 Greek of which occurs here only in the New 
 
 Testament) lies, of course, on the surface. It 
 
 denotes the temper of fervent love, a love that 
 
 warms and animates the whole life, the temper, 
 
 we must remember, specially characteristic of 
 
The Epistle to Lao die ea. 199 
 
 the Apostle who records the Message. In him 
 there had been, at first, the fiery zeal that 
 marked him out as one of the Sons of Thunder, 
 and made him seek to call down fire from 
 heaven to consume the village of the Samari- 
 tans ; and this, though it had been purified, had 
 not lost its old intensity, and equally in the 
 actual language of the Epistles (2 John, verses 
 10, 11; 3 John, verses 9, 10), and in the tra- 
 dition of his fleeing from the presence of Cerin- 
 thus,^ we trace the ardent spirit that alike loves 
 strongly and strongly hates. The precise spiri- 
 tual state described as " cold," is, we may well 
 believe, the exact opposite of this. It is not an 
 equal fervour on the side of falsehood and of 
 evil, not an open hostility to the truth, the 
 fanaticism of the heathen and the heretic. The 
 temper of St. Paul was not " cold " when he 
 led the persecution against Stephen. It is simply 
 the entire absence of any love to Christ and his 
 cause, of even the least enthusiasm for any 
 
 ^ The tradition referred to is given by Irenseus (iii. 3) as re- 
 ceived by him from Polycarp, and is to the effect that the Apostle, 
 in his old age, entered the public bath at Ephesus, and found 
 there Cerinthus, the leader of those who denied that the Son of 
 God had come in the flesh. On seeing him he rushed out of the 
 building, before taking his bath, and said to those who were with 
 him, " Let us flee from this place, lest the building fall upon us, 
 for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is there within its walls." — 
 (Euseb. H. E., iii, 28). 
 
200 The Epistle to Laodicea. 
 
 person and any cause, an absence which, in the 
 former case, may be the result of simple igno- 
 rance, or, as in Matt. xxiv. 12, of the presence 
 of an abounding iniquity. The condemnation 
 of that state is expressed in terms which startle 
 us by the naked boldness of the imagery emj 
 ployed : " / would thou wert cold or hot : so, 
 because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor 
 cold, I am about to spue thee out of my mouth.''' 
 
 That " tepid " temperature (not of cold passing 
 into heat, but of heat passing into cold) was 
 that which has as its physical effect (in the case 
 e.g. of water) the sickening sense of nausea, and 
 which in its moral aspect causes in most earnest 
 minds a loathing that is not roused by the state 
 described as " cold." That feeling has, in not a 
 few cases, found its analogues in human utter- 
 ances. Men prefer an entire stranger to the 
 *' candid friend." The profession of a dispas- 
 sionate attachment to institutions, ecclesiastical 
 or political, is often felt to be but the prelude 
 to desertion or betrayal. The language of the 
 great poet of mediaeval Christendom singles 
 out for sharpest reprobation those who were — 
 
 ' ' A Dio spiacenti ed a' nemici suoi. " ' 
 
 * It may be worth while to give the whole passage. I quote 
 from an unpublished translation : — 
 
 "Speech, many-tongued, and words of dire lament, 
 Language of sorrow, accents of despair, 
 
The Epistle to Laodicea. 201 
 
 And the reason lies, it is clear, in the tenden- 
 cies of such a state to self-satisfaction and, 
 therefore, self-deceit. The man who has no 
 religious feeling at all may be roused to peni- 
 tence — conscience may be awakened, and the 
 work of conversion may begin. But the " luke- 
 warm " state is for the most part that which 
 is blind to its own shortcomings. It is unreal, 
 and sickly, and yet thinks that it is in a true and 
 healthy state. As Mr. Carlyle has somewhere 
 put it, in one of those epigrams that haunt 
 one's memory, "it is the hypocrisy which does 
 
 Deep voices hoarse, and hands in anguish bent, 
 
 These made a discord through the dusky air 
 Which ever floats eternally the same, 
 
 As whirls the sandstorm driven here or there. 
 And I, upon whose brain strange wonderings came. 
 
 Said, ' Master, what is this that now I hear, 
 And who that race whom torment so doth tame ? ' 
 
 Then he to me : ' This wretched doom they bear. 
 The sorrow-smitten souls of those whose life 
 
 Nor foul reproach nor glorious praise did share : 
 Mingled they are with those who in the strife 
 
 Of angels were nor rebels found nor true, — 
 Apart withdrawn when wars in Heaven were rife. 
 
 Heaven, fearing loss of beauty, spurned that crew ; 
 Nor were they ordered to the depths of Hell, 
 
 Lest to the damned some glory should accrue. ' 
 
 At once I understood and saw full clear, 
 
 These were the souls of all the caitiff host 
 Whom neither God nor yet His foes could bear." 
 
 Dante, '■'■ Inferno.'''' 
 
 / 
 
202 The Epistle to Laodicea. 
 
 not know itself to be hypocritical." And it 
 needs therefore words of sharp warning and 
 rebuke from Him who searcheth the hearts 
 and reins, or from any who, having the mind 
 of Christ, can speak, as He would have spoken, 
 of this inner baseness. It may be noted, as 
 tending to confirm the assumption that the 
 Gospel of St. John and the Apocalypse were 
 the work of the same writer, that this is the 
 fault which in the former, again and again, he 
 notes for special condemnation. Those who could 
 not believe are less the object of his censure 
 than those who, believing, feared to confess 
 the Christ " lest they should be put out of the 
 synagogue, for they loved the praise of men 
 more than the praise of God " (John xii. 42, 43). 
 Something of the same feeling is seen in the 
 language of the Epistle to the Hebrews, as 
 to those who '* forsake the assembling of them- 
 selves together," who need therefore to be 
 *' provoked to love and to good works," lest 
 there should remain for them only " a certain 
 fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indig- 
 nation " (Heb. X. 24, 27). 
 
 The underlying grounds of the condemnation, 
 the secret working of this tepidity of the soul, 
 are brought before us in the words that follow : 
 " Because thou say est, I am rich, and have become 
 
The Epistle to Lao die ea, 203 
 
 wealthy, and I have need of nothing, and know est 
 not that thou " (the pronoun is emphatic in the 
 Greek, as is also the article) " art the wretched 
 and the pitiable one, and poor, and blind, and 
 naked.'" It is clear that the imagined wealth \. 
 here is that of spiritual, not temporal, riches. / 
 In regard to the latter the boast would pro- 
 bably have been true, and would have called 
 for no such stern contrast. And yet it is not 
 the less true that it was the possession of the 
 riches of this world that made the Laodicean 
 Angel and his Church so satisfied that they 
 had the riches of the other. They took the 1/ 
 *' unrighteous mammon," not only as a sub- 
 stitute for the '' true riches," but almost as 
 a proof that they possessed them. Outward 
 ease and comJort took the place of inward 
 peace ; prosperity was thought a sure sign 
 of Divine approval. We cannot read the 
 history of the Church of Christ, or look 
 around us, or retrace our own experience, with- 
 out feeling that it has often been so, both 
 with churches and individual men. Lethargy 
 creeps over them ; love is no longer active : 
 material success, multiplied endowments, the 
 power of giving money as the one embodiment 
 of love to God or man, — these have been the 
 precursors of decline and of decay. On the 
 
204 The Epistle to Laodicea, 
 
 larger scale it has been found hard to rouse 
 to energetic spiritual action a Church that was 
 threatened with no dangers, resting on an arm 
 of flesh, secure in the State's support. On the 
 smaller it is equally hard to convince a re- 
 spectable and well-to-do Christian that he 
 can be wanting in the true wealth of love when 
 he is ready, on occasion, to draw a cheque 
 for a charitable institution. 
 
 The state described was bad, but it was not 
 hopeless. The great Healer has a word of 
 advice even here, and the advice, though not 
 without a touch of irony, would not have been 
 given in the mere scorn of indignation: "" 1 
 counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire ^ that 
 thou mayest he rich : and white garments, that thou 
 mayest he clothed, and that the shame of thy 7taked- 
 ness he not made manifest : and anoint thine eyes with 
 eye-salve, that thou mayest see^ The tone of irony, 
 of which I have just spoken, will be felt, I think, 
 in that advice to " buy," given to one who has 
 just been pronounced a beggar where he fancied 
 himself rich. Where can he find the price for 
 these inestimable treasures ? The answer to 
 that question is to be found in the words of 
 Isaiah, which this counsel at once calls to our 
 remembrance, *' Ho, every one that thirsteth, 
 come ye to the waters, and he that hath no 
 
The Epistle to Laodicea. 205 
 
 money ; come ye, buy, and eat ; yea, come, buy 
 wine and milk without money and without 
 price " (Isa. Iv. i). And yet the irony contains 
 in both instances the truest and most gracious 
 tenderness. The wine and the milk, the gold 
 and the white garments, are beyond all price, 
 as measured by earthly standards, and there- 
 fore they are given freely. And yet, on the 
 other hand, they have, in some sense, their 
 price. The man forsakes his earthly treasure 
 that he may have treasure in heaven. St. Paul 
 counts the things that had been as his '* gain," 
 his fancied spiritual riches, as " loss " for the 
 excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his 
 Lord (Phil. iii. 7, 8). Lastly, besides this 
 renunciation of unreal wealth in both its 
 aspects, there is a price which even the beggar 
 can pay, when he has found that it will be 
 accepted by the Lord who is so ready to sell. 
 He can give himself — can yield his body, soul, 
 and spirit, to be dealt with as his Lord shall see 
 fit, if only he may receive the priceless treasure 
 which he needs. To accept that discipline is 
 the counsel now given, and it is implied that 
 it will not be without a sharp severity. The 
 *' gold " which Christ will thus " sell " to 
 him who seeks it, the treasure of holiness and 
 peace and joy, is that which has been " tried in 
 
2o6 The Epistle to Laodicea. 
 
 the fire ;''' and this, as in all like cases, implies 
 chastisement and suffering. The " white 
 garments'' that hide the shame of nakedness, 
 the true holiness of life which alone prevents 
 the exposure of that *' inner vileness " of which 
 even the saints of God are ever painfully con- 
 scious, are those which have been made white 
 in the blood of Christ, which symbolises 
 suffering. The eye-salve, which gives clear- 
 ness of vision, does so (one may refer, if such 
 a reference be needed, to the history of Tobit's 
 recovery from his blindness — Tobit x. 8-12) not 
 without the pricking smart that clears away 
 the blinding or beclouding humours. 
 
 Of the three forms of discipline thus indi- 
 cated, the first scarcely needs any discussion 
 here ; the second has been dealt with in speak- 
 ing of the Message to the Church of Sardis ; 
 the third is new, and stands almost, if^not 
 altogether, alone in the imagery of ScriJ^ture, 
 and calls therefore for a few brief notes. I 
 know not whether the suggestion which I am 
 about to make has been made by any other 
 interpreter, but most readers will, I think, 
 answer in the affirmative, if asked whether they 
 remember anything in St. John's Gospel of 
 which these words remind them. They will 
 recollect how, in one instance at least, our 
 
The Epistle to Lao die ea, 207 
 
 Lord gave sight to the blind, not by word or 
 touch only, but by the use of an eye-salve, or 
 collyrium, how " he spat on the ground, and 
 made clay of the spittle, and anointed the eyes 
 of the blind man with the clay " (John ix. 6), 
 and they will not think it strange to assume 
 that these words must have recalled to the 
 mind of the Seer what he had thus himself 
 witnessed in one, if not many, instances (comp. 
 Mark viii. 23). The very state of the Laodicean 
 Church had indeed been described in words 
 recorded in connection with that very narrative : 
 " If ye were blind, ye should have no sin : but 
 now ye say. We see ; therefore your sin re- 
 maineth " (John ix. 41). As in those cases, 
 sight came through that which derived its 
 power to heal from the lips of Christ, so here 
 that which would remove the spiritual blindness 
 was the Power of that Divine Word which would 
 make the man's inward eye see himself as God 
 sees him, and wath the smart of that knowledge 
 draw forth tears of penitence which, as they 
 flowed, would cleanse. 
 
 The end of the Message stands out in striking 
 contrast with the beginning. No other opens 
 with such sharp unsparing severity ; no other 
 closes with such yearning tenderness and a 
 promise so exceeding glorious. Something 
 
2o8 The Epistle to Laodicea, 
 
 there was, we know, in the character of the 
 beloved Disciple, as seen in his Epistles and the 
 traditions connected with his name, which cor- 
 responded to that combination of qualities 
 that seemed at first hardly compatible. But 
 that something was but the reflection of the 
 union of the two in the Lord and Master, into 
 whose likeness he had grown. Where the 
 highest love is, there must also be severity, and 
 the severity is a proof of love, yearning, pitying, 
 and seeking to restore. And so, after piercing 
 as with the sharp two-edged sword to the 
 dividing asunder of soul and spirit, of the joints 
 and marrow, He, the Lord of the Churches, in 
 the gracious words that follow, pours in the oil 
 and the wine that are to cleanse and heal : 
 *'^s many as I love I rebuke " {i.e. rebuke so as to 
 convict),^ ^' and chasten. Be zealous, therefore^and 
 repent.'' There is in the Original a force which it 
 is not easy to reproduce in a translation. The 
 **/" stands first, and has the special emphasis 
 which always attaches to the presence of the 
 Greek pronoun. It is as though he suggested 
 a contrast between himself and others. " Human 
 friends may seek simply to please and soothe, 
 to speak sm.ooth things and prophesy deceits ; 
 
 ^ The word is the same as that which describes the office of 
 the Comforter (John xvi. 8). 
 
The Epistle to Laodicea. 209 
 
 but not so with Me. I give a far other proof 
 of love, and so deal w^ith those who are dear to 
 Me as to make them conscious of the evil that 
 mars their peace and keeps them from their true 
 blessedness ; and when that conscioasness has 
 been roused, I bring them under the loving, 
 though it may be sharp, discipline of chastise- 
 ment." The comm.and, ''^ Be zealous^ therefore^ 
 and repent^'' may seem at first to invert the 
 natural order of the soul's recovery. Must not 
 " repentance," the turning from evil, precede the 
 righteous zeal which is to animate the true life ? 
 In some cases, perhaps in most, that is, doubt- 
 less, the natural order. But the inward life of 
 the soul, in all its subtle workings, cannot 
 always be brought under these sharply-defined 
 formulae ; and here we can, I think, recognise 
 a special adaptation to the exigencies of the 
 case with which the great Healer was dealing. 
 The root-evil of the Laodicean Church and its 
 representative was their lukewarm indifference, 
 the absence of any zeal, of any earnestness. 
 And the first step, therefore, to higher things 
 was to pass into a state in which those elements 
 of life should no longer be conspicuous by their 
 absence. "B^ zealous;'' let that be (so the 
 tense of the Greek verb indicates) the true 
 and abiding state ; and then (the tense 
 
2IO The Epistle to Laodicea. 
 
 changing to that which indicates a thing done 
 once for all) let the first act of that new state 
 be to throw itself with all its force on the side 
 of God, to repent of the evil of the past, and 
 to enter on a new course of action for the 
 future. 
 
 And then we come to that which Christian 
 art and poetry have alike made familiar to us — 
 the promise that speaks of the love which re- 
 bukes and chastens, the love of the divine 
 Friend in all its infinite tenderness : " Behold^ I 
 stand at the door and knock : if any man hear my 
 voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and 
 will sup with him, and he with me.'* 
 
 The words of the promise that thus come as 
 the sequel to the rebuke are referred by most 
 commentators to the imagery of the Song of 
 Solomon, and are claimed accordingly as 
 sanctioning the mystical interpretation of that 
 Book. There the bride tells her tale of ex- 
 pectancy and joy, " I sleep, but my heart 
 waketh ; it is the voice of my beloved that 
 knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my 
 love, my dove, my undefiled " (Song Sol. v. 2) ; 
 and the frequent recurrence of that image in 
 the visions of the Apocalypse — the " marriage 
 supper of the Lamb;" the "New Jerusalem 
 coming down as a bride adorned for her hus- 
 
The Epistle to Laodicea. 211 
 
 band" (Rev. xxi. 2), the "bride, the Lamb's 
 wife " (xxi. 9) — seems at first to give a high 
 degree of plausibihty to the view that it is to 
 be found here. I am constrained, however, by 
 w^hat seems to me a true method of interpreta- 
 tion, to reject that view and to seek for another 
 meaning. It cannot be too strongly impressed 
 on our minds that wherever that image of the 
 Bride and the Bridegroom occurs, either in the 
 Old or the New Testament, it shadows forth 
 the relation of Jehovah to His people as a 
 collective unity, of Christ to his Church. The 
 wider the induction the more convincing will be 
 the proof that, however largely the other idea 
 may have prevailed in the writings of Christian 
 or other Mystics, this, and not the relation of 
 the individual soul to its Maker or Redeemer, is 
 throughout Scripture the truth shadowed forth 
 in all bridal and nuptial parables. But here the 
 promise is distinctly personal, and describes, 
 under whatever figure, that which belongs to the 
 living individual experience of a joy with which 
 a stranger doth not intermeddle. There is no 
 picture here of the bride tarrying for her spouse. 
 That which is brought so vividly before us is 
 the arrival of a guest at night, of a guest who 
 comes to cheer and guide and comfort. And 
 if so, is it altogether an idle dream to imagine 
 
212 The Epistle to Laodicea. 
 
 that St. John may have had other sources of 
 imagery open to him than those which he found 
 in books, however sacred ; that the memory of 
 his own early years may have been brought 
 back to him by the words that he now heard, as 
 supplying the fullest expression of his Lord's 
 communion with the loving and trusting soul ? 
 Remember how his discipleship had begun by 
 his tarrying where the divine Friend was for the 
 time dwelling, invited by the words, '* Come 
 and see," and there listening during the long 
 hours, till day passed on into evening and 
 evening into night (John i. 39). Remember 
 how, in all likelihood, he was sharing in the 
 same high blessedness in the lodging at Jeru- 
 salem, when Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, 
 and so was able to record that marvellous 
 teaching as to the nev/ birth which he alone re- 
 ports, and reports with such a vivid fulness as to 
 make it hardly possible to doubt that he himself 
 had heard it (John iii. 2-13). Think of the three 
 years of companionship growing into ever 
 closer and closer friendship, so that he became 
 known to all men as " the disciple whom Jesus 
 loved/* of the long-continued intimacy implied 
 in the words which led that disciple to take to 
 his own house the sorrowing mother of his 
 Lord, and then ask whether such a scene as 
 
The Epistle to Laodicect. i2i3 
 
 that which this verse brings before us may not 
 often have presented itself in his own actual 
 experience ? Think of the day's work over, the 
 sick healed and the poor taught, and then the 
 Master, after His manner, leaves the shouts of 
 the crowd and the stir of the town, and with- 
 draws into some solitary place to hold com- 
 munion with His Father ; and the scholar 
 remains in his lonely chamber in the cottage at 
 Bethsaida, or the lodging at Capernaum, watch- 
 ing, not sleeping, waiting for the return of Him 
 in whose presence he found life, postponing till 
 then the simple meal with which the day 
 habitually closed. And then, as he watches, 
 there is the distant sound of footfall, and then 
 He, the expected Friend, stands at the door 
 and knocks, and then the voice, so familiar in 
 its gentle sweetness, though capable also of the 
 tones of stern rebuke, tells him who it is, and then 
 he rises, and the door is opened, and the Friend 
 enters. The Son of Man, who had not where to 
 lay His head, finds shelter under His disciple's 
 roof : He comes, first, as a guest, and sits down 
 to sup with the scholar, who thus, as a host, 
 receives Him ; but soon the places are changed, 
 and He takes, as it were, the place that of right 
 belongs to Him. He blesses and breaks the 
 bread and gives thanks over the cup of wine. 
 i6 
 
214 ^^^ Epistle to Lao diced. 
 
 He is now guest no longer, but the host. The 
 disciple " sups with him." ^ 
 
 This I take to be the outward framework of 
 the parable of this verse, at once probable in 
 itself, and a more adequate representation of the 
 spiritual truths shadowed forth than any bridal 
 imagery. What men want is the consciousness 
 of the presence of a friend that " sticketh closer 
 than a brother.'* It is better (the very devo- 
 tional utterances which express the opposite 
 feeling being themselves the strongest proof of 
 it) even for women, in their individual person- 
 ality, to think of Christ as the friend and the 
 brother, rather than as the bridegroom and lover 
 of their souls. And now the promise that this 
 blessedness shall belong to any one who will but 
 claim it — even to one who had been "wretched, 
 and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked " 
 — is given in all its fulness. There is something, 
 we cannot doubt, in the inner life of every one 
 who is zealous and repents which answers to 
 the several stages of the experience that was 
 thus brought home to St. John's memory — 
 Christ ''stands at the door and knocks." Warn- 
 ings come that either rouse us from our slumbers, 
 or fall on the expectant ear and make us feel 
 
 ' The words rjmind us also of a like figurative promise in 
 Luke xii. 37. 
 
The Epistle to Laodicea. 215 
 
 that the Judge who rebukes and chastens is not 
 far off. Suffering in one or other of its many 
 forms, unexpected judgments, or unlooked-for 
 mercies, these tell us that He is asking for 
 admission. If we listen in the attitude of reve- 
 rence and faith we " hear the voice," become 
 more distinctly conscious of that Presence, not 
 as the Judge only, but as the Friend who comes 
 to plead with us and for us, and so to be our 
 Advocate and Comforter. Well for us if then 
 we open the door of our hearts to Him, even 
 though it may have been long barred against 
 Him, and the weeds that creep over it may 
 shew Him how little we have been prepared to 
 give Him entrance. For then it shall be true 
 of us also, that while we receive Him, He, on 
 His side, is receiving us. If we invite Him to 
 share what we have to offer Him of that which 
 has been indeed His own gift to us, He, in His 
 turn, will call us to His own heavenly feast, and 
 so even the poor chamber of our hearts will 
 become thus honoured and glorified by His 
 presence, as one of the " many mansions " in 
 *' the house of his Father." 
 
 These thoughts serve at least to prepare the 
 way for the glorious words with which the 
 Message to Laodicea closes : '''He that over- 
 comcth, to him ivill I give to sit with me in my 
 
2i6 The Epistle to Laodicea, 
 
 throne, even as I also overcame and am sat down with 
 my Father in his throned It is, as I have said, 
 the highest and most glorious of all the promises 
 with which the Seven Messages end. It speaks 
 of nothing less, if we may use a familiar word 
 in a new sense, than the apotheosis of the con- 
 queror. So, when on earth, the prayer of Jesus 
 for His disciples had been for nothing less than 
 this, *'As thou, Father, art in me, and I in 
 thee, that they also may b# one in us ; " and 
 He had said of them, *' The glory which thou 
 gavest me I have given them," and therefore 
 He could pray, " Father, I will that they also, 
 whom thou hast given me, be with me where 
 I am " (John xvii. 21-24). The conquerors in 
 the strife with evil share *'the throne of God 
 and of the Lamb," the throne which is the great 
 centre of all the visions of the wider future that 
 from this point begin to unfold themselves to 
 the prophet's gaze (Rev. iv. 2; xxii. i, and 
 passim). They are, in some sense which we 
 cannot as yet fathom, made " partakers of the 
 Divine Nature" (2 Pet. i. 4), sharers in the 
 holiness, the wisdom, and the love, and there- 
 fore in the glory and the majesty which have 
 been from everlasting. 
 
The Epistle to Laodicea. 217 
 
 And so the Messages to the Seven Churches 
 close. I have not attempted in dealing with 
 them to dwell at any length on the history 
 of these Asiatic cities in the past, or on their 
 present state, in some instances of decay and 
 desolation, in others of an outward prosperity, 
 under the yoke of their Mahometan conquerors. 
 Whatever interest may attach to such descrip- 
 tions they contribute little or nothing, I believe, 
 to a true interpretation. Still more absolutely 
 have I thought it right to exclude what has 
 been called the '' prophetic " interpretation, 
 which sees in the Seven Churches, as in the 
 seven trumpets and the seven seals, the sym- 
 bolism of an historical sequence, and connects 
 each with some one period, more or less clearly 
 marked, in the history of the Universal Church, 
 beginning with the apostolic age and ending 
 with that which followed on the Reformation. 
 I entirely agree with Archbishop Trench in 
 looking on such a method of interpretation as 
 grasping at the shadow and losing the substance, 
 as leading to fantastic and arbitrary applications 
 of divine words, and robbing them, in so doing, 
 of all their interest and life. But it remains 
 true, as I trust these notes have not failed to 
 shew, that however directly historical and per- 
 sonal in the first instance, these Messages 
 
2i8 The Epistle to Lao die ea, 
 
 have, for that very reason, a wider range. Any 
 Church, at any time, may look into these pictures 
 of spiritual excellence or decay as into a mirror, 
 and see in one or other of them its own likeness. 
 The soul of each individual disciple may learn 
 to behold in them his own besetting temptations, 
 the rebuke or the encouragement which he him- 
 self most needs, the rewards to which even he 
 may rightly and reverently aspire. A 
 
 THE END. 
 
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