“And He will help them all, And light shall appear unto them, And He will make peace with them.” (1 Enoch i. 8). In all the books belonging to this literature which have come down to us this hope is expressed more or less vividly; nor is the dark background wanting, with prophecies of coming wrath. It will, therefore, be realized that the Apocalyptic Literature is almost wholly concerned with the future; it is true that again and again the Apocalyptist glances at the contemporary history of the world around him, to which many a cryptic reference is made—a fact which necessitates some knowledge of the history of this period (_circa_ 200 B.C.-A.D. 100) for a full understanding of the books in question—but these references are only made with a view to comforting the oppressed and afflicted with the thought that even the most mighty of earthly powers are shortly to be overthrown by the advent of the new and glorious era when every injustice and all the incongruities of life will be done away with. So that every reference to the present is merely a position taken up from which to point to the future. Now, since, as we have seen, the Apocalyptists despair of any bettering of the present world, and therefore contemplate its destruction as the preliminary of the new order of things, they look _away_ from this world in their visions of the future; they conceive of other-worldly forces coming into play in the reconstitution of things, and of society generally; and since these _are_ other-worldly forces the supernatural plays a great part in the Apocalyptic Literature. This supernatural colouring will often strike the reader of this literature as fantastic, and at times _bizarre_; but this should not be permitted to obscure the reality which often lies behind these weird shadows. Mental visions are not always easily expressed in words; the seer who in a vision has received a message in some fantastic guise necessarily has the impress upon his mind of what he has seen when giving his message; and when he describes his vision the picture he presents is, in the nature of the case, more fantastic to the ear of the hearer than to the eye of him who saw it. Allowance should be made for this; especially by us Westerns who are so lacking in the rich imaginativeness of the Oriental. Our love of literalness hinders the play of the imagination because we are so apt to “materialize” a mental picture presented by another. The Apocalypses were written by and for Orientals, and we cannot do justice to them unless we remember this; but it would be best if we could get into the Oriental mind and look at things from that point of view.