THE REVELATION: WITH A SHORT, PLAIN, CONTINUOUS EXPOSITION, BY S. SMITH VICAR OF LOIS WEEDON AND RURAL DEAN.. And the angel saith unto me, Seal not up the words of the LONDON: JAMES RIDGWAY, 169, PICCADILLY. 1861. 100. b. 72. PREFACE. Ir is due to the reader of this Exposition to be assured that the author has not, to a certain extent, come to his office of Expositor, unprepared. In order to obtain a clear unbiassed view of the design of God's Word, from the first page of Genesis to the last of the Revelation, the whole Bible was closely read over and over again, without note or comment. But, as frequent doubts had to be removed, many difficulties to be solved, and much information to be acquired, he went through the whole once more with the best commentaries, taking for his guide throughout the leading authors suggested, as a course, by Bishop Lloyd. One thing, however, after this was wanting still : a connected, continuous history of the Church of Christ, from the fall in Paradise to its triumph in heaven, so exact and so impressed upon the mind, as to secure its features in detail, and its form as a B whole, from the possibility of obliteration. This exactness could only be acquired by writing; and the method adopted was this: Taking the words of the authorized version for the staple of the narrative and of the argument, the author wrote them down chapter after chapter, only changing such as, in his view, were inadequate to convey the intended meaning; and enlarging only so far in his exposition as to give (to himself) a clear sense of what was obscure. Besides this, it was necessary to disentangle certain parts of the history, such as those of the Kings and the Chronicles, by cutting off repetitions, joining the ends and thus making the thread of the narrative continuous and unbroken. tween the canon of the Old Testament and the New : it required to be filled up by authentic but uninspired matter, till the time of the first Gospel, and the actual appearing of Christ upon earth. Then came the Acts of the Apostles, and their letters; which, with the help of contemporary records, brought down the history of the Church to the Revelation imparted to St. John while in banishment in the Isle of Patmos. And so with the interval be In this way the whole of the Bible, with little more than one important exception, was reduced to writ iii ing; and its meaning and object throughout became stereotyped and clear, in most willing and assured agreement with the teaching of the Church of England. The one important exception was the marvellous Book of Revelation, which completes the history of the Church of Christ. This Book, indited by the Spirit of God, differs besides from all other narratives written by unassisted man, in this: that while they have only power to give account of events up to the writer's time, this history begins with the time of the writer, and taking up the narrative of the Church where it had been dropped, carries it on prophetically to the consummation of all things, the entrance of God's people into the everlasting blessedness of heaven. The plan pursued in the first, unpublished, portion of the Word of God, has been followed in that which is now before the reader. Wherever the text spoke with a clear intelligible voice, it was left to tell its own tale without interruption. Where an interpreter appeared to be wanting, there a brief exposition was |