efforts of literary power; but at a certain point his sympathy stops dead; beyond that point it was fatal to go.

He saw the whole of life, and not merely one side o f it; and he was not misled by indiscriminate opposition

to the enemy, however strongly he hated them. He would have weakened the Church permanently, if he had

made the mistake, too common in the history of religion, of condemning everything that the other side

championed. He took from it all that could be taken safely, gave all that it could give to train the religious

feeling to the highest, and did everything better than his enemy could.

In studying St. Paul we find ourselves forced to recognise the essential agreement of his views on this

question with St. John's; and in studying St. John we find ourselves forced to the same judgment. With

superficial differences they both take the same calm, sane view of the situation as a whole, and legislate for

the young Church on the same lines. Up to a certain point the converted pagan should develop the

imperfect, but not wholly false, religious ideas and gropings after truth of his earlier years into a Christian

character; but there was much that was absolutely false and fundamentally perverted in those ideas; the

pagan religions had been degraded from an originally better form by the willful sin and error of men, and all

that part of them must be inexorably eradicated and destroyed. The determining criterion lay in the

idolatrous element: where that was a necessary part of pagan custom or opinion, there was no justification

for clinging to it: unsparing condemnation and rejection was the only course open to a true Christian.

Hence arose the one striking contrast in outward appearance between the views of the two Apostles. St.

Paul clung to the hope and belief that the Church might develop within the Empire, and find protection from

the Imperial government. St. John regarded the Imperial government as Antichrist, the inevitable enemy of

Christianity. But in the interval between the two lay the precise formulation of the Imperial policy, which

imposed on the Christians as a test of loyalty the performance of religious ritual in the worship of the

Emperors. The Empire armed itself with the harness of idolatry; and the principle that St. Paul himself had

laid down in the sharpest and clearest terms at once put an end to any hope that he had entertained of

reconciliation and amity between the Church and the existing State.

Again, the Seven Letters repeatedly, in the most pointed way, express and emphasis the continuity of

history, in the city and the local Church. The Church is not simply regarded as a separate fact, apart from the

city in which it has its temporary abode; such a point of view was impossible and such a thought was

inconceivable for the ordinary ancient mind. We have so grown in the lapse of centuries and the greater

refinement of thought as to be able to hold apart in our minds the two conceptions; but the ancients

regarded the State or the city and its religion as two aspects of one thing. So again, to the ancients every

association of human beings had its religious side, and could not exist if that side were destroyed.

The literary form which beyond all others is loved by the writer of the Seven Letters is comparison and

contrast. Throughout them all he is constantly striking a balance between the power which the Divine

Author wields, the gifts that he gives, the promises and prospects which he holds forth to his own, and the

achievements of all enemies, the Empire, the pagan cities, the Jews, and the Nicolaitans. The modern reader

has almost everywhere to add one side of the comparison, for the writer only expresses one side and leaves

the other to the intuition of his readers. He selects a characteristic by which the enemy prominent in his

mind was, or ought to be, distinguished, and describes it in terms in which his readers could not fail to read

a reference to that enemy; but he attributes it to the Divine Author or the true Church or the true Christian.

Thus he describes the irresistible might that shall be given to the Thyatiran victor in terms which could not

fail to rouse in every reader the thought of the great Empire and its tremendous military s trength.

Examples of this rhetorical form will be pointed out in every letter; and yet it is probable that many more were

apparent to the Asian readers than we can now detect. The thought that is everywhere present in the

writer's mind is how much better the true Church does everything than any of its foes, open or secret.

One example may be given. The simple promise made by the Author to the Smyrnaeans, I will give you the

crown of life, when compared with the address which Apollonius made to them, is seen to contain implicit