These Lectures are not argumentative or scholarly. They do not require the reader to know anything about the various theories about the Apocalypse that have been held in the past or the present, in England or elsewhere. If you have already adopted one of those theories, I hope my words may help you test it against the actual text and the overall aim of the book it came from. If you have been wavering among several of these theories, I hope my Lectures may help you do them all justice, take useful hints from all of them, and find the words of the Prophet more satisfying and more understandable than any of them.
Nor do I ask the reader to bring an extensive knowledge of ancient or modern history — the kind you would need to evaluate most modern commentaries on Prophecy. The more familiar you are with the facts of history, and the more honestly you have sought that knowledge from writers least inclined to argue in favor of the Christian Church — even from writers wholly skeptical about its value — the more, I believe, the Revelation of St. John will help explain those facts and bring your own thoughts about God’s government of the world into harmony. But my plan keeps me from trying to find precise matches between particular sentences of the book and particular events that have happened or are yet to happen in one period or another. The main historical references in these Lectures concern the condition of the Roman world in the years just before the fall of Jerusalem. I would like the reader to check these against the Histories of Tacitus, just as he will naturally turn to Josephus for the record of the crimes and disasters of the Jewish people.
The method I have adopted is, I believe, very simple. But I do not therefore claim I discovered it myself. The first hint of it came from a revered friend, a clergyman of the school of Cecil and Venn, who had devoted much of his life to the study of Prophecy, and who, more than twenty years ago, was allowed to leave the school in which he had been learning for the home where his spirit had long dwelt. He is not responsible for any of the particular conclusions I have reached. But I can never be grateful enough that, through his teaching, I arrived at the conviction that the words “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” were used by the Evangelists in their strictest sense; that the Apostles were not mistaken in believing the end of an age was approaching; that they had no exaggerated expectations about the age that would follow it; and that if we accepted their statements plainly, we would understand far better what condition we are living in, what our responsibilities are, what our sins are, and what we have a right to hope for.
I have called these discourses Lectures, because they are not lessons drawn out of separate texts. But they were delivered from the pulpit, like ordinary sermons. They were aimed at what I thought were the needs of a congregation I had been connected with for fourteen years, and to which, throughout all those years, I had often spoken on the subject of Prophecy. I have not had the heart to remove from them references to current events and the days on which they were delivered. I have even taken the liberty of giving them a more pastoral and personal character by adding a sermon on the last verse of the Apocalypse — one written less as an explanation of that verse than as an expression of my wishes for a community I was about to leave. I would not have included it if I had not thought it illustrated the subject of these Lectures, as well as gave me a chance to declare my continued regard and affection for those to whom I preached them.
London, December, 1860.