ision of the experience of
the faithful Christian disciple. We are thus brought to the third
and, as we think, the correct mode of considering this remarkable
work. It is an outburst from the commingled and seething mass of
opinions, persecutions, hopes, general experience, and expectation
of the time when it was written. This is the view which would
naturally arise in the mind of an impartial student from the
nature of the case, and from contemplating the fervid faith,
suffering, lowering elements, and thick coming events of the
apostolic age. It also strikingly corresponds with numerous
express statements and with the whole obvious spirit and plan of
the work; for its descriptions and appeals have the vivid colors,
the thrilling tones, the significantly detailed allusions to
experiences and opinions and anticipations notoriously existing at
the time, which belong to present or immediately impending scenes.
This way of considering the Apocalypse likewise enables one who is
acquainted with the early Jewish Christian doctrines, legends, and
hopes, to explain clearly a large number of passages in it whose
obscurity has puzzled many a commentator. We should be glad to
give various illustrations of this, if our limits did not confine
us strictly to the one class of texts belonging to the doctrine of
a future life. Furthermore, nearly all the most gifted critics,
such as Ewald, Bleek, Lucke, De Wette, those whose words on such
matters as these are weightiest, now agree in concluding that the
Revelation of John was a product springing out of the intense
Jewish Christian belief and experience of the age, and referring,
in its dramatic scenery and predictions, to occurrences supposed
to be then transpiring or very close at hand. Finally, this view
in regard to the Apocalypse is strongly confirmed by a comparison
of that production with the several other works similar to it in
character and nearly contemporaneous in origin. These apocryphal
productions were written or compiled according to the pretty
general agreement of the great scholars who have criticized them
somewhere between the beginning of the first century before, and
the middle of the second century after, Christ. We merely propose
here, in the briefest manner, to indicate the doctrine of a future
life contained in them, as an introduction to an exposition of
that contained in the New Testament Apocalypse.

In the TESTAMENT OF THE TWELVE PATRIARCHS it is written th