thing or another.

This common plan on which all the Seven Letters are framed would alone furnish a sufficient proof that they

are not true letters, but literary compositions which are cast in the form of letters, because that form had

already established itself in usage. Now the writer certainly did not select this form merely because it was

recognised in the pagan literature. He selected it because it had already become recognised as the

characteristic and the best form of expression for Christian didactic literature. A philosophic exposition of

truth was apt to become abstract and unreal; the dialogue form, which the Greeks loved and some of the

Christian writers adopted, was apt to degenerate into looseness and mere literary display; but the letter, as

already elaborated by great thinkers and artists who were his predecessors, was determined for him as the

best medium of expression. In this form (as has been shown in chapter 3) literature, statesmanship, ethics,

and religion met, and placed the simple letter on the highest level of practical power. Due regard to the

practical needs of the congregation which he addressed prevented the writer of a letter from losing hold on

the hard facts and serious realities of life. The spirit of the lawgiver raised him above all danger of sinking

into the commonplace and the trivial. Great principles must be expressed in the Christian letter. And finally it

must have literary form as a permanent monument of teaching and legislation.

It was a correct literary instinct that led St. John to express the message to the Seven Churches in letters,

even though he had to work these letters into an apocalypse of the Hebraic style, a much less fortunate

choice on pure literary grounds, though (as we have seen in chapter 8) it was practically inevitable in the

position in which the writer was placed. In each letter, though it was only a literary Epistle addressed to a

representative Church, the writer was obliged to call up before his mind the actual Church as he knew it; and

thus he has given us seven varied and individualised pictures of different congregations.

Probably the opposition and criticism which he was sure to experience from the Nicolaitans stimulated the

writer to reach the high standard of literary quality which characterises the Seven Letters in spite of the

neglect of traditional rules of expression. He uses the language of common life, not the stereotyped forms of

the historian or the philosophers. As Dante had the choice between the accepted language of education,

Latin, and the vulgar tongue, the popular Italian, so St. John had to choose between a more artificial kind of

Greek, as perpetuated from past teaching, and the common vulgar speech, often emancipated from strict

grammatical rules, but nervous and vigorous, a true living speech. He chose the latter.

While one must speak about and admire the literary power of the Seven Letters, the writer did not aim at

literary form. He stated his thought in the simplest way; he had pondered over the letters during the only

years in Patmos, until they expressed themselves in the briefest and most direct form that great thoughts can

assume; but therein lies the greatest power that the letter can attain. He reached the highest level in point of

epistolary quality, because he had no thought of form, but only of effect on his reader's life.