shadows cast upon the foreground of the future, depict in outline great fundamental truths or pervasive principles of the divine government that are, and are to be, manifested in multiple facts in the progress of the ages. It is not the purpose of the visions to disclose the facts themselves, for that belongs to the development of history, but rather to furnish the means for interpreting the facts, when once they appear, by the exalted standard of the divine ideals. There are, indeed, a few cardinal facts of the future that are kept well in the foreground, such as the second coming of Christ, the triumph of God’s kingdom, and the end of the present world; but these belong to the content of previous revelation as well, and are not new or peculiar to this book. The content of the visions is generic and not specific, and whenever we depart from broad generalization and attempt to enter into detail in our interpretation, we destroy the beauty and force of the lesson conveyed, and wander into the field of speculation concerning things that were never intended to be revealed, if the analogy of all other prophecy can be relied upon as a guide.(5) For though the Apocalypse undoubtedly contains an element of predictive prophecy, yet such prophecy is not history written before its time, but a divinely inspired and profoundly discriminative pre‐view of certain dominant issues in the future that belong to the purpose of God, and are the resultant of well established principles of the divine government—issues that stand out to the prophet’s illumined eye in bold relief against the sky‐line like the headlands of a continent amid the surrounding mists which envelop them.