These Lectures are not controversial or learned. They do not demand of the reader any acquaintance with the theories respecting the Apocalypse which have prevailed in earlier times or in later times, in England or elsewhere. If he has adopted any one of those theories, I trust my words may give him some help in testing it by the letter and the general purpose of the book from which it has been derived. If he has been hovering between a number of these theories, I trust my Lectures may enable him to do them all justice, to gain hints from them all, and to find the words of the Prophet more satisfactory and more intelligible than all.
Neither do I ask that the reader should bring with him that extensive knowledge of ancient or modern history which he ought to possess if he is to judge of most modern commentaries on Prophecy. The more acquaintance he has with the facts of history—the more honestly he has sought for that acquaintance from the writers who have least desired to make out a case for the Christian Church, even from those who have been utterly sceptical about its worth—the more, I believe, will the Revelations of St. John assist in explaining those facts, and in harmonizing his own thoughts respecting the government of God in the world. But my plan precludes me from the attempt to detect any minute parallels between particular sentences in the book and particular events that have happened or that are hereafter to happen in one period or another. The principal historical allusions in these Lectures are to the state of the Roman world during the years preceding the fall of Jerusalem. These, I should like my reader to test by the Histories of Tacitus; as he will, of course, turn to Josephus for the records of the crimes and calamities of the Jewish people.
The method which I have adopted is, I believe, a very simple one. But I do not therefore pretend that I discovered it for myself. The first hint of it was given me by 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 permitted to leave the school in which he had been learning, for the home in which his spirit had long dwelt. He is not answerable for any of the special conclusions to which I have been led. But I can never be thankful enough for having arrived, through his teaching, at the conviction that the words, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” were used by the Evangelists in the strictest sense; that the Apostles were not wrong in believing that the end of an age was approaching; that they had no exaggerated anticipations respecting the age which was to succeed it; that if we accepted their statements simply, we should understand far better in what state we are living; what are our responsibilities; what are our sins; what we have a right to hope for.
I have called these discourses Lectures, because they are not lessons deduced from separate texts. But they were delivered from the pulpit, like ordinary sermons. They were addressed to what I thought were the wants of a congregation with which I had been connected for fourteen years, and to which, during all those years, I had been speaking often on the subject of Prophecy. I have had no heart to remove from them allusions to passing events, and the days on which they were delivered. I have even ventured to give them a more pastoral and personal character by adding to them a sermon on the last verse in the Apocalypse, which was written less as an exposition of it, than as the expression of my wishes for a society from which I was about to part. I should not have introduced it if I had not thought that it illustrated the subject of these Lectures, as well as gave me an opportunity of testifying my continued regard and affection for those to whom I preached them.
London December, 1860.