It is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of mind in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more easily if we look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It has been well said that the mediæval man looked upwards and downwards—to Hell and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a vertical plane; the modern man has a horizontal view, looking to the past and future—the past as it has existed, and the future as it shall exist, in the history of human society upon this earth. We need if possible to combine these two, but it is a very difficult achievement. With our point of view we inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a literal history of the future written before the event; but this is not its primary significance. The religious consciousness from which it springs was highly indifferent to the lapse of time: very likely the seer expected the speedy realisation of his vision so far as he thought about things in that way at all, but this was not his primary concern. Let us take a parallel, as was suggested a moment ago, from another field. The socialistic movement in its early days seemed committed to an immediate expectation of the millennium following upon a catastrophic change in the structure of human society. The arrival of the millennium now seems postponed indefinitely and evolution has taken the place of revolution as a method, and yet a socialist who is really in the movement does not feel any breach of continuity; he knows that he is one in spirit with the earlier writers and that they were never mainly concerned either with the date at which the millennium would come or the means by which they imagined it brought about, but precisely with the contrast between the ideal as they conceived it and the actual as they saw it. We may take another instance from a slightly different department of thought. Dante imagined that the Mount of Purgatory was the immediate antipodes of the Hill of Zion, but if some traveller had gone round the world and assured him that the Mount of Purgatory was not there, it would not in the smallest degree have affected his doctrine of Purgatory. So it is with the apocalyptists; there is an immense amount of machinery provided by which this world is to be abruptly changed into the Kingdom of God, and because that Kingdom is so present to the consciousness of the writer, he can speak of it as even now about to appear upon the earth. But this is not what chiefly interests him: his point of view is vertical, not horizontal; all time-spans are foreshortened into a moment, because his whole interest is in the contrast between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world; we therefore do him wrong in supposing that the postponement of his hope is any grievous disappointment, or any proof of real error. The date of its fulfilment was never a matter of much concern to him.