The increased impetus given to Biblical study by advanced scholarship in late years has created a demand for a class of works that give the results attained by the masters of exegesis and critical research, without attempting to give the various steps by which these results have been reached. And it is one primary aim of this work, while attempting to give a fresh statement of the teachings of the book, and to present such thoughts as have come to the Author in the course of extended study, at the same time to give due consideration to the varying opinions of others, and for the most part to reproduce in the form which these have taken in his own mind the best and most satisfactory explanations of the many difficulties in the book which have hitherto been given by leading scholars and commentators. For the book has proved a fertile field for expositors that has been widely even if not always well worked in the past, while in the last half‐century really substantial progress has been made toward the general interpretation; and it may be confidently assumed that any one who ignores these results has almost certainly nothing to contribute to the solution of the real difficulties that confront us. In response to extended popular inquiry some excellent commentaries and expository works on the Revelation have been prepared in late years for the general reader. And it is in order to further meet this requirement of intelligent Bible study, and to contribute in some measure to what is believed to be one of the most common needs of the general student of Scripture, _a comprehensive view of each book_, that the publication of the present Studies in the Book of Revelation has been undertaken. It is necessarily true that a work so largely poetical in its thought as the Apocalypse, and appealing so much to the imagination, does not lend itself easily to logical analysis. Every such division, if exhaustive, must be in a measure arbitrary. The main purpose in attempting it is to present the principal ideas of the book in what is conceived to be their proper relation. And in this we need not assume that the particular outline which we adopt was formally in the mind of the writer. It is quite enough if we can be assured that the formative ideas were conceived of in somewhat the same relation, and that the analysis we accept at least measurably represents the author’s point of view. This form of statement enables us to grasp the contents of the book in their entirety and to retain them in memory.