Page:Commentary on the Revelation of St. John (Bruce).djvu/6

vi it that men who are supposed to be acquainted with the figurative language of Scripture, and who know that similar predictions had been previously fulfilled, have understood and continue to understand all this literally ? It is because their minds were blinded ; for until this day there remaineth the veil untaken away in the reading of the New Testament. This veil is done away in Christ — ; at His Second Coming. The event has given the interpretation. Its previous con- cealmeitf was the Lord's permission. NT o prophecy can be clearly under- stood before the time of its fulfilment. No church can look stead- fastly to its own end. This is no cause of reproach. It is as necessary as it is natural. The Lord works out His own wise and beneficent ends in ways that are known only to Himself ; and which we would only interfere with by knowing. The true interpretation of the book is now known, because the Second Coming of the Lord has already taken place. The event has explained the prediction, and thus revealed the mystery. The Second Coming of the Lord, as will be shown in the explanation of the book, is not a personal appearance in the clouds of our atmosphere, but a spiritual event, effected by the revelation of the spiritual sense of the Word, in which the Lord has made Himself visible to the minds of men, in the power and great glory of His own Divine Humanity. He comes to establish anew His kingdom upon earth. The first Christian dispensation is meant by the earth and the heaven that fled away from the face of Him that sat upon the throne ; and the second Christian dispensation is meant by the new heaven and the new earth that John afterwards beheld. The New Jerusalem, which he saw coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, is the appropriate Scripture emblem of the New Church, as a dispensation of truth and love. Commentators having been in error respecting the leading events of the prophecy; they could not but be mistaken regarding the nature of its subordinate parts. The Revelation has been generally supposed to give a continuous history of the church from its beginning. This, however, is a mistake. It describes the state of the church at the time of its end. But it described the state of the church, as it appeared, not in the natural, but in the spiritual world. That part of the spiritual world in which the manifestations of its state took place is the middle region, or world of spirits, into which all souls enter, and where they remain, some for a shorter, some for a longer period, before they pass into heaven or hell. There, also, all judgment takes place. There, and not in the natural world, was set a great white throne ; and there