Apocalyptic literature

“ In many districts, the mass of the population were terror-struck, and the more enlightened were awed at contemplating so vivid a picture of the Apocalyptic image—that of the stars of heaven falling to the earth, even as a fig-tree casting her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. ”

“ One feels as it were a veil of darkness weighing upon the senses. There comes to you an impression of apocalyptic cities, of clouds heavy with blood, of suspended maledictions; a conception of gigantic horrors, of chaotic destructions, of the end of the world. ”

“ It was this that made the outlook of Apocalyptic essentially eschatological. Beginning with the history of the past veiled under the form of prophecy, the apocalyptist rushes on to predict the future, for there he finds the victory. The End! The End! is his cry,—the End that victory may come—for God is to be vindicated only by the consummation of all things, and history can only be read aright in the light of its finality. The answer of the End is the key that Apocalyptic offers to the mystery of all that “which was and is and is to come” ”

“ At the end of life there may be no definite vista of a Heaven glowing with the light of apocalyptic imagination, but neither will there be the unutterable horror of a Purgatory or a Hell lurid with flames for the helpless victims of an unjust but omnipotent Creator. ”

“ To him, in this retreat, the awful tidings had come of the scourge that had fallen on the land of his fathers; added to this, the conflagration at Rome, the Neronian persecution, all the horrors of the past decade were fresh in his memory. May we not say that the time was ripe for an apocalyptic message?
It is in these events, then, that we must find the explanation of much of this symbolical language. Such is the law of the apocalypse, and this apocalypse may be expected to conform to the law. St. ”

“ And there was no kind of message so well suited to meet such a crisis as the form of Apocalyptic, which grew out of similar conditions, and had a tone and temper peculiarly adapted to infuse a triumphant hope in the midst of growing religious despair.49 But let us not fail to perceive that though the Apocalypse was specially designed to meet a great crisis in the life of the early church, its effectiveness does not end there. ”

“ The book of the Apocalypse is unlike any other book of the New Testament—and is full of consolation and instruction to all who read its inspired and prophetic words. It lifts the soul up to the beauty and grandeur of Heaven—shows us in all their glory the joys and triumphs of those who were once like ourselves—but who are now changed and happy with those "who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." ”

“ Apocalypse which excited and fostered them was a popular volume: but as years passed away and the general longing of Christians, eagerly marking the signs of the times, was again and again disappointed, and the hope of a Millennium began either to be abandoned or indefinitely postponed, the Apocalypse proportionately lost favour, or was regarded as an incomprehensible book misleading the world by illusory promises. ”

“ A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one, to this false withered artificial time; testifying once more that Nature is preternatural; if not divine, then diabolic; that Semblance is not reality; that it has to become reality, or the world will take-fire under it,—burn it into what it is, namely Nothing! ”

“ This was a fundamental weakness of the Apocalyptic point of view, which found the proper design of the world in its speedy ending and not in its longer continuance, a mistake that unfortunately has been perpetuated in Christian thought as though it were fundamental to it, whereas the victory and the End may well be as far apart as the creation from the victory. The Apocalypse sounds the note of the End without hesitancy or discussion. ”

“ The Apocalypse is one of the most sublime and wonderful dramatic exhibitions presented for human contemplation. Internal evidence concurs with authentic history, in demonstrating to the devout and intelligent reader, its divine origin. God, angels and men, are the principal actors. ”

“ Lord have thrown much light on the nature and laws of symbols, by unfolding the principles in accordance with which they are used. The evolving of these has removed from many passages the obscurity which had before caused them to be regarded as enigmatical. There are, doubtless, many portions of the Apocalypse, the meaning of which is as yet only dimly perceived, and which will be more clearly unfolded by the transpiring of future events ”

“ From rifts and rents in nature's worn disguise,
The sackcloth vesture that God's splendour drapes
Crumbles to ashes, and before our eyes
The earth takes fire with beauty and its shapes
Glow in apocalypse that gains the skies. ”

“ Nevertheless, even then I was greatly, though vaguely, impressed by the mysterious imagery, the cloudy grandeurs, of the Apocalypse. Deeply uncomprehended, it was, of course, the pageantry of an appalling dream; insurgent darkness, with wild lights flashing through it; terrible phantasms, insupportably revealed against profound light, and in a moment no more; on the earth hurryings to and fro, like insects of the earth at a sudden candle ”

“ This is the great apocalypse, life’s cryptic mystery-manual, whose seven seals the poet-prophet of this new culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, has broken.
What is yet to be? What will a day, a year, bring forth? If the eye is far-seeing and far-seeking, what will the next century bring forth? The darkness tenting like thick clouds upon the mountains of the future mystifies, and the days, the times, the years, the centuries, coerce man under the burden of all their darknesses until he is a-weary even before he has taken up his pilgrimage into the untrodden. ”

“ Then like gnats flitting into fire they vanished into the opalescence.
The others turned back. The whole world freezing shuddered in horror. A great vampire was brooding over the earth. The greatness that man had attained to was nothing. Civilization was tottering in a day. We were hopeless.
Then came the last revelation; the truth and verity of the disaster and the threatened climax. ”

“ Every reader of the Apocalypse notices with joy, if not rapture, that when the book that was sealed with seven seals, which no man in heaven, nor earth, was able to reveal, nor open, nor even look upon, was finally opened by the Lamb, and its marvelous panoramas, charades, and symbolic significances had to be carefully explained to John, the man best able of any to understand them--we observe with rapture that the regular inhabitants of that hitherto unseen world understood all at once, and broke into shouts like the sound of these many waters in a storm. ”

“ Thus he refuses to recognize Nero in the beast and its number. But apart from its extravagances, his theory has undoubted elements of truth . It is true that tradition largely nxes the form of figures and symbols in apocalyptic. Yet each new apocalypse is to some extent a reinterpretation of traditional material, which the writer uses not wholly freely but with reverence from the conviction that they contained the key to the mysteries of the present and the past. From this standpoint it may be argued that every apocalypse is in a certain sense pseudonymous ”

“ That the seven spirits of the Apocalypse have direct relation to the seven occult powers in nature, appears incomprehensible and absurd to their feeble intellects; and the bare thought of a magician claiming to work wonders through certain kabalistic rites convulses them with laughter. ”

“ Poor Humanity, crazed with fear, was fleeing in all directions on hearing the thundering pace of the Plague, War, Hunger and Death. Men and women, young and old, were knocking each other down and falling to the ground overwhelmed by terror, astonishment and desperation. ”

“ The answer lies around, written in all colours and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-coloured visions flit round our sense ”

“ Only now and then a lurking stillness, as if invisible hands were uplifting the holy monstrance above the whole nation and the whole globe, but only for an instant,—once more a pall of deadly anguish heaves across the whole sky, the air thrills with shrieks of the slain and the murdered, and above the city pillars of fire blaze high up in a tornado, burst in the middle, writhe along the ground, and with greedy tongues of flame lick up pools of blood. ”

“ The hideous and devouring earthquake; the heaving and overflowing volcano, burying whole cities beneath its deep and merciless waves of running fire; the roaring and furious tornado, destroying hundreds of dwellings, and dooming the inmates to a terrible death; and the swift-sped lightning, which, with no note of warning, strikes down hundreds of people every year,—all these violent operations of nature are the manifestation of evil, and a proof that imperfection exists everywhere. And man is the last and least manifestation of this multifarious destructive outburst of nature ”

“ The apocalyptic conception is so far from being a spiritualisation of the future expectations, that it represents on the contrary the last desperate eifort of a strongly eudaemonistic popular religion to raise to heaven the earthly goods from which it cannot make up its mind to part. ”

“ The people knew not What manner of man was passing by their doors, Until he passed no more; but in his vision He saw the torments and beatitudes Of souls condemned or pardoned, and hath left Behind him this sublime Apocalypse. ”

“ Few persons now, as they walk the streets and fields, are much disturbed by the thought that, not far below, the vivid lake of fire and brimstone, greedily roaring for new food, heaves its tortured surges convulsed and featured with souls. Few persons now shudder at a volcanic eruption as a premonishing message freshly belched from hell.16 In fact, the old belief in a local physical hell within the earth has almost gone from the public mind of to day. ”

“ Learned men, however, are not devoid of fancy. Of this fact those who are historically designated Millenarians have given many illustrations from the primitive ages down to our own time. The Doctor's rendering of the name of this book discloses the predominant idea conceived in his imagination and cherished there, that Christ is to appear upon earth in glorified humanity at the beginning of the millennium, and that the Apocalypse is intended chiefly to apprize the church and the world of this momentous event. ”

“ I often wonder whose was the mind that conceived the visions of the Apocalypse; [Pg 124] if we can trust tradition, it was a confined and exiled Christian in a lonely island, whose spirit reached out beyond the little crags and the beating seas of his prison, and in the seeming silent heaven detected the gathering of monsters, the war of relentless forces—and beyond it all the radiant energies of saints, glad to be together and unanimous, in a place where light and beauty at last could reign triumphant. ”

“ Both these writers assign the Apocalypse to the reign of Domitian.
The labours of these scholars, though to the superficial student they seem to prove that everything is possible and nothing certain, have certainly thrown great light on the literary character of the Apocalypse. Though differing in detail, they tend to show that, while the book is the production of one author, all its parts are not of the same date, nor are they one and all his first-hand creation. ”

“ Second, the Apocalypse is poetry, in the highest and justest sense of the word. All prophecy is poetry. The sublimity of such thoughts can not be expressed in the plain unbroken detail of a prose narrative; and even when the events of past history are combined in one harmonious series with wide views of the future, they too rise from the dull unpictured record of a mere narrator, and share in the elevation of the mighty whole. The spirit of the writer, replete, not with mere particulars, but with vivid images, seeks language that paints, “thoughts that breathe, and words that burn;” ”

“ In the darkness of the night, amid the yawning chasms and the wild echoes of the mountain gorge, under the blaze of the comet or the solemn gloom of the eclipse, when famine has blasted his land, when the earthquake and the pestilence have slaughtered their thousands, in every form of disease which refracts and' distorts the reason, in all that is strange, portentous, and deadly, he feels and cowers before the supernatural. ”

“ No one ever plunged the mind of man into more horrible abysses, or led it into darker, gloomier wildernesses. None have ever inspired such horror with storm, tempest, the phosphorescence of decay, the lightning-flashes in the dead of night, the sighs and moans losing themselves in the darkness, the grip of fleshless hands amid the mystery of graves and ruins. ”

“ Any one may see that the Apocalypse could no how be explained but by the Lord alone, since every word of it contains arcana, which never could be known without some special illumination, and consequent revelation ”

“ Lights up the impenetrable horror of gloom,
Chilling the very soul, like an impending doom.
Is this the lone region of death and fell despair?
And is hell with all its fury lurking there?
Do Satan and Apollyon roam those deadly deeps,
Gloating o’er the suffering of the damned that ne’er sleeps?
Was’t there the rebellious hosts of heaven found their doom,
To shriek in nameless torture in so dread a tomb?
Hist! hist! did ye hear it? that shuddering roll
Of frenzied anguish, creeping up from damnation’s goal?
O relentless Time! Let’s flee away from this dread sphere ”