I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty.
APPENDIX I
ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
It is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of mind in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more easily if we look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It has been well said that the mediæval man looked upwards and downwards—to Hell and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a vertical plane; the modern man has a horizontal view, looking to the past and future—the past as it has existed, and the future as it shall exist, in the history of human society upon this earth. We need if possible to combine these two, but it is a very difficult achievement. With our point of view we inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a literal history of the future written before the event; but this is not its primary significance. The religious consciousness from which it springs was highly indifferent to the lapse of time: very likely the seer expected the speedy realisation of his vision so far as he thought about things in that way at all, but this was not his primary concern. Let us take a parallel, as was suggested a moment ago, from another field. The socialistic movement in its early days seemed committed to an immediate expectation of the millennium following upon a catastrophic change in the structure of human society. The arrival of the millennium now seems postponed indefinitely and evolution has taken the place of revolution as a method, and yet a socialist who is really in the movement does not feel any breach of continuity; he knows that he is one in spirit with the earlier writers and that they were never mainly concerned either with the date at which the millennium would come or the means by which they imagined it brought about, but precisely with the contrast between the ideal as they conceived it and the actual as they saw it.
We may take another instance from a slightly different department of thought. Dante imagined that the Mount of Purgatory was the immediate antipodes of the Hill of Zion, but if some traveller had gone round the world and assured him that the Mount of Purgatory was not there, it would not in the smallest degree have affected his doctrine of Purgatory. So it is with the apocalyptists; there is an immense amount of machinery provided by which this world is to be abruptly changed into the Kingdom of God, and because that Kingdom is so present to the consciousness of the writer, he can speak of it as even now about to appear upon the earth. But this is not what chiefly interests him: his point of view is vertical, not horizontal; all time-spans are foreshortened into a moment, because his whole interest is in the contrast between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world; we therefore do him wrong in supposing that the postponement of his hope is any grievous disappointment, or any proof of real error. The date of its fulfilment was never a matter of much concern to him.
So we may, I think, reverently believe that our Lord Himself passes through the experience of the apocalyptists at moments of great exultation, as, for example, when the seventy return and say that the devils are made subject to them, or when He realises the imminence of the fall of Jerusalem, and therefore the removal of the chief barrier to His Kingdom's progress. All time is foreshortened; Satan falls from Heaven and the Son of Man appears in glory; but this is no forecast of history as we understand history. One evangelist tells us of a parable which He uttered precisely because of His perception that the disciples erroneously supposed "that the Kingdom of God was immediately to appear." All His insistence upon the coming Kingdom is focussed in the Passion, as has been shown in the text. When the revelation of God's inmost nature was completed in the completion of His own self-sacrifice, this brought with it the power that could change the kingdoms of this world into the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. From then onwards "He cometh with the clouds"; but the completion of His Kingdom when "every eye shall see Him, and they which pierced Him," lies still in the future. The contrast of tenses in this passage can hardly be accidental; from the moment when He was lifted up from the earth in the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension (which are the revelation in successive phases of the one unchanging glory of God) His coming is a present fact; but our perception of His coming is something still growing as His Spirit guides us into all the truth, until at last we know even as we are known.
APPENDIX II
ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY
It may be objected that the Church should never in any circumstances employ force—at any rate, physical force. But I believe the objection is due, partly to a latent Manichæism which holds that matter is always evil, or at least "unspiritual," and partly to a very just fear that force may be wrongly used if its use is permitted at all. Yet there are some cases where the Church would plainly be not only at liberty, but morally bound, to use force.
Suppose a clergyman begins to give teaching that is absolutely at variance with the doctrine of the Church, the Church may appeal to his better feelings and ask him to resign; but if he will not, the Church must assuredly have the right to turn him out, and that, if necessary, by force.