The shorter exposition Swedenborg himself published at Amsterdam, in 1766, under the title of the Apocalypse Revealed. As was his custom, he distributed copies of the work widely, sending it to the universities and superior clergy, and to many eminent persons in England, Holland, Germany, France, and Sweden. We will now make a few notes on some of the most remarkable features of Swedenborg’s exposition of that strange and mysterious book, the Apocalypse. CHAPTER XX. _The Apocalypse Revealed._ Every one who is acquainted with theological literature, knows that innumerable volumes of speculation have been written in attempted explanation of the Apocalypse. He is aware that expositors have differed about it from the earliest times; that Protestants have found Catholicism the subject of all its denunciations, and that Catholics have discovered that Paganism and Protestant heresy were in reality the matters alluded to; that sceptics have proved that it refers to none of these creeds, but is a worthless astrological treatise; and that many good Christians, vexed and wearied with this endless contest of opinion, have wished the book expunged from the canon of Scripture, as altogether incomprehensible, and a mere breeder of strife. And still the controversy goes on. The press swarms with volumes and pamphlets, all professing to have found the key to the mystery, informing the world of the future destiny of Europe, of the result of its wars and battles, the precise month of the fall of the Papacy, and the time of the descent of the New Jerusalem, the Second Advent, and the restoration of the Jews to Canaan, and, so far as the political arrangement of the kingdoms of the earth is concerned, almost superseding the necessity of newspapers to the credulous believer. Wise men generally now turn a deaf ear to these soothsayings, convinced by long and repeated experience of their utter futility, and thinking shrewdly enough that had the Divine Providence intended that man should know the future, the foreknowledge would have been communicated intelligibly and not through the medium of mysteries interpreted by men more conspicuous for temerity than for any endowment of wisdom or common sense above their fellows. “It is a part of this prophecy,” as Sir Isaac Newton remarks,—and the same principle is applicable to all prophecies,—“that it should not be understood before the last age of the world; and therefore it makes for the credit of the prophecy that it is not yet [about 1710] understood. The folly of interpreters has been, to foretell times and things by this prophecy, as if God designed to make them prophets. By this rashness, they have not only exposed themselves, but brought the prophecy also into contempt. The design of God was much otherwise. He gave this, and other prophecies of the Old Testament, not to gratify men’s curiosity by enabling them to foreknow things, but that, after they were fulfilled, they might be