less perplexing, but he warns him that this is his method of writing: he stirs him up to the exercise of wisdom, chs. viii. 18, xvii. 9, to find out his real meaning, while, moreover, a blessing is specially attached to "him that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book," ch. xxii. 9, which, from the professedly enigmatical character, may reasonably be held to have reference chiefly to the keeping of them before the mind for contemplation, meditation, and solution.

But the reduplication of the prophecy is evidently a condition in the representation which stands in open. hostility with this design of his. The natural and necessary effect of reduplication is not at all to deepen and increase the enigma, but on the contrary, to resolve it. Let an enigma, no matter how profound and dark it may be, be only constructed in two different forms; let it be repeated with a change, it will plainly run by this duplication a much more than double risk of discovery and detection. By adopting reduplication then the prophet obviously imperils the secrecy of his prophecy. Reduplication is, however, the authoritative sign and pledge of a divine revelation of the future (Gen. xli. 32) in that symbolical language in which the prophet writes, and it accordingly behooves him not to withhold from his prophetic work the recognized and formal sign of its divine origin. This is one reason which may be regarded as imposing upon him the absolute necessity of reduplication. But at the same time that this feature endangers the secrecy it heightens in a pro

portional degree the definiteness and the ultimate security of the meaning. This is an object of no small moment. These are two important purposes accomplished by it, which may be regarded as sufficiently powerful inducements to determine the prophet to reduplicate, no matter how hazardous it may be. We make no account here of the fact that reduplication is a law of his art. But there is need, more especially in a work of the length of his, of the utmost circumspection in the method of performing it.

We have already observed how his design has been veiled even in the first short version, by the change of imagery which he employs. The design nevertheless unfolds itself in symmetry. This exhibition of design he has made in the first versionwe mean design in respect to the arrangement of his materials. It is accordingly sufficient for his whole work. If he has given the arrangement of his subject matter once, it is all that is requisite-perhaps more than can be demanded. This he has done. He has risked the discovery of the contents by boldly prefixing to his prophecy a Table of Contents, in which light the first version is to be viewed. And this risk he has run quite successfully, for his Table of Contents has not been discovered during the long and prying search of 1800 years. Indeed the very boldness of the design has been the pledge of success, for who would think of looking into one of the symbolic prophecies of Scripture, dark and enigmatical as they are, for that element of perspicuity and plainness, a table of contents! His very audaci

ty has here saved him. But having provided his prophecy with this instrument of order, he is enabled to relax his order in his second version. Here he employs a departure from order to veil his design. He veils by it the design of reduplication; and he veils by it his whole design. He involves and perplexes the arrangement in such a manner as effectually to conceal the fact that reduplication exists. His first version is short and general, for it is simply a Table of Contents; his second version is long and full of matter: there is therefore no correspondence between the two copies in size. There is here then a cause at once of mystery and of plainness; of mystery, that the two versions are disproportionate; of plainness, that the one is an Index. He has thus made his prophecy mysterious by delivering it in two versions so disproportionately formed, that they appear as one; he has made it plain by prefixing to it a Table of Contents. He has thus eminently fulfilled the conditions of symbolic writing, which is designed to be at once excessively dark and excessively clear. There is a profound wisdom in this.

But, although the prophet has discarded design, in respect of the arrangement of his materials in the second version he has not rejected it to any such degree that it should form a complete medley and a chaos. Order still prevails in it, and may be said to be predominant in it. The Fourfold Group are not at the beginning indeed, and in their natural position, as in the first version; but they still occupy the central position in the piece, and they appear in the same

order and succession as in the first version. The judgments, which are in the sixth and last seal of the first version, are placed at the beginning of the second, which is an inversion of order; but these trumpets of judgment are blown in a regular succession, which is uninterrupted except by what may be regarded simply as the episode of ch. x.-xi. 14. The remainder of the second version contains nothing more than a recapitulation of the two final seals of the first version. The first four seals then are found in the centre of the second version; a portion of the sixth seal begins it, and the remainder of what is contained in the fifth and sixth seals is redelivered in that portion of the prophecy which follows ch. xiii. There is thus, after all, no great departure from the unity of arrangement.

But let it be supposed there was not a vestige of uniformity of arrangement discoverable between the first and second versions. If the analysis of the contents showed that the subject in both was the same, this in itself would justly be held to be conclusive evidence of the fact of reduplication. But when we analyze the multifarious materials of the second version, it is found that they resolve themselves into that which, in a less developed and more elementary form, is contained in the first.

Let us, as the prophet has done, depart from the order of arrangement, and begin the analysis with the Fourfold Group, which is introduced by the Four Living creatures, stands at the head of the first version, occupies the centre of the second, and which evi

dently is the main and grand constituent of the whole prophecy. This group we perceive in chs. vii. and xiii. in the figures of the Woman, the Dragon, the Tenhorned and the Two-horned Beasts,-symbols correspondent in signification in the first sense they bear, and answering in order to the Four Horsemen of the first four seals. In the crown on the head of the Woman we recognize the crown of the Conqueror of the first seal: in her persecution and flight into the wilderness for 1260 days we perceive the reduplication of the representation made under the fifth seal, when the Conqueror sustains a temporary defeat. Her marriage, which is announced at the end of the book, ch. xxi. 2, 9, is but an exhibition under a new image of the victory of the combating and conquering Horseman, for a glorious marriage is to the pure and chaste Woman what victory is to the warlike and combating Horseman. Her blissful wedlock-state represented by the glory of the New Jerusalem, where the symbol, a woman, passes into the synonymous one of a city, is in every respect correspondent with the representation of the state of triumph and felicity in the dominions of the Conqueror described in ch. vii. 9-17. Tracing the history of the Woman, then, we find nothing but the Conqueror under another form. The same design is pursued, and the same idea is developed under both the symbols. But the identification may be still more closely made, through the medium of a symbol, which is combined with the Woman. This is her son. Here we again observe, that total disregard of the naturalness and the congruity of the repre