down
to the earth with Christ to the judgment never to return to their
native seats? Were they permanently to transfer their deathless
citizenship from the sky to Judea? Were the constitution of human
nature and the essence of human society to be abrogated, and the
members of the human family to cease enlarging, lest they should
overflow the borders of the world? Was God himself literally to
desert his ancient abode, and, with the celestial city and all its
angelic hierarchy, float from the desolated firmament to Mount
Zion, there to set up the central eternity of his throne. We
cannot believe that such is the meaning, which the seer of the
Apocalypse wished to convey by his symbolic visions and pictures,
any more than we can believe that he means literally to say that
he saw "a woman in heaven clothed with the sun, and the moon under
her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars," or that
there were actually "armies in heaven, seated on white horses
and clothed in fine linen, white and clean, which is the
righteousness of saints." Our conviction is that he expected
the Savior would ascend with his angels and the redeemed
into heaven, the glorious habitation of God above the sky. He
speaks in one place of the "temple of God in heaven, into which no
man could enter until the seven plagues were fulfilled," and in
another place says that the "great multitude of the redeemed are
before the throne of God in heaven, and serve him day and night in
his temple;" and in still another place he describes two prophets,
messengers of God, who had been slain, as coming to life, "and
hearing a great voice from heaven saying to them, 'Come up
hither;' and they ascended up to heaven in a cloud, and their
enemies beheld them." De Wette writes, "It is certain that an
abstract conception of heavenly blessedness with God duskily
hovers over the New Testament eschatology." We think this is true
of the Book of Revelation.

It was a Persian Jewish idea that the original destination of man,
had he not sinned, was heaven. The apostles thought it was a part
of the mission of Christ to restore that lost privilege. We think
the writer of the Apocalypse shared in that belief. His allusions
to a new heaven and a new earth, and to the descent of a New
Jerusalem from heaven, and other related particulars, are symbols
neither novel nor violent to Jewish minds, but both familiar and
expressive, to denote a purifying glorification of the world, th