edonia, from which they had
suffered so much, and which they then hoped speedily to put
beneath their feet. The slain Lamb, standing amidst the throne of
God, with seven eyes and seven horns; Death, on a pale horse, with
Hell following him; the woman, clothed with the sun, and the moon
under her feet; the great red dragon, whose tail casts to the
earth the third part of the stars of heaven; the worm wood star,
that falls as a blazing lamp, and turns a third of the waters of
the earth into bitterness; the seven thunders, seven seals, seven
vials, seven spirits before the throne, seven candlesticks, seven
angels, seven trumpets, seven epistles to the seven churches,
seven horns, seven headed beast, all these things must, perforce,
be taken as free poetic imagery; it would require a lunatic or an
utterly unthinking verbalist to interpret them literally. Why,
then, shall we select from the mass of metaphors a few of the most
violent, and insist on rendering these as veritable statements of
fact? If the rest is symbolism, so are the pictures of the
avenging armies of angels, the reeking gulf of sulphur, and the
golden streets of the city.

The entire scheme of thought, as it still stands in the mind of
the Orthodox believer, is to be rejected as spurious, because it
rests on a process of imaginative accumulation and transference
which is absolutely illegitimate; namely, the association and
universalizing of political and military images, which are then
hardened from emblems into facts, and cast over upon the mutual
relations of God and mankind. We ought to break open the
metaphors, extract their significance, and throw the shells aside.
But ignorant bibliolatary and ecclesiasticism insist on
worshipping the shells, with no insight of their contents.

There is one all important fact which should convince of their
error those who hold the current view of a general judgment at the
end of the world as having been revealed from God through Christ.
We refer to the fact that the system of ideas in which a final
resurrection and judgment of the dead are logical parts, existed
in the Zoroastrian theology five or six centuries before the birth
of Christ. It was adopted thence by the Jews, and afterwards
adopted from the Jews by the Christians. If, therefore, this
doctrine be a revelation from God, it was revealed by him to the
Persians in a dark and credulous antiquity. In that case it is
Zoroaster and not Christ to whom we are in