knows to be right.

The best expression of his attitude towards his correspondents is contained in a sentence which he

addresses to the Romans, in which he contrasts his relation to them with the authority that belonged to the

Apostles: "I do not give orders to you, as Peter and Paul did: they were Apostles, I am a convict: they were

free, but I am a slave to this very hour."

But John writes in an utterly different spirit, with the tone of absolute authority. He carries this tone to an

extreme far beyond that even of the other Apostles, Paul and Peter, in writing to the Asian Churches. Paul

writes as their father and teacher: authority is stamped on every sentence of his letters. Peter reviews their

circumstances points out the proper line of conduct in various situations and relations, addresses them in

classes --the officials and the general congregation--in a tone of authority and responsibility throughout: he

writes because he feels bound to prepare them in view of coming trials.

St. John expresses the Divine voice with absolute authority of spiritual life and death in the present and the

future. Such a tone cannot be, and probably hardly ever has been, certainly is not now by any scholar,

regarded as the result of mere assumption and pretence. Who can imagine as a possibility of human nature

that one who can think the thoughts expressed in these letters could pretend to such authority either as a

fanciful dreamer deluding himself or as an actual impostor? Such suggestions would be unreal and

It is a psychological impossibility that these Letters to the Asian Churches could have been written except

by one who felt himself, and had the right to feel himself, charged with the superintendence and oversight of

all those Churches, invested with Divinely given and absolute authority over them, gifted by long

knowledge and sympathy with insight unto their nature and circumstances, able to understand the line on

which each was developing, and finally bringing to a focus in one moment of supreme inspiration--whose

manner none but himself could understand or imagine--all the powers he possessed of knowledge, of

intellect, of intensest love, of gravest responsibility of sympathy with the Divine life, of commission from his

Divine Teacher.

Moreover, when we consider how sternly St. Paul denounced and resented any interference from any

quarter, however influential, with the conduct of his Churches, and how carefully he explained and

apologised for his own intention of visiting Rome, that he might not seem to "build on another's

foundation," and again when we take into consideration the constructive capacity of the early Church and

all that is implied therein, we must conclude that St. John's authority was necessarily connected with his

publicly recognised position as the head of those Asian Churches, and did not arise merely from his general

commission as an Apostle.

In a word, we must recognise the authoritative succession in the Asian Churches of those three writers: first

and earliest him who speaks in the Pauline letters; secondly, him who wrote "to the Elect who are sojourners

of the Dispersion in...Asia" and the other Provinces; lastly, the author of the Seven Letters.