- ward became the great storehouse of scriptural abuse of the Pope,
to all who happened to quarrel with him. This continued the fashion, down to the time of the Reformation; but the bold Luther and his coadjutors, scorned the thought of a scurrilous aid, drawn from such a source, and with a noble honesty not only refused to adopt this construction, but even did much to throw suspicion on the character of the book itself. Luther however, had not the genius suited to minute historical and critical observations; and his condemnation of it therefore, though showing his own honest confidence in his mighty cause, to be too high to allow him to use a dishonest aid, yet does not affect the results to which a more deliberate examination has led those who were as honest as he, and much better critics. This however, was the state in which the early reformers left the interpretation of the Apocalypse. But in later times, a set of spitefully zealous Protestants, headed by Napier, Mede, and bishop Newton, took up the Revelation of John, as a complete anticipative history of the triumphs, the cruelties and the coming ruin of the Papal tyranny. These were followed by a servile herd of commentators and sermonizers, who went on with all the elaborate details of this interpretation, even to the precise meaning of the teeth and tails of the prophetical locusts. These views were occasionally varied by others tracing the whole history of the world in these few chapters, and finding the conquests of the Huns, the Saracens, the Turks, &c. all delineated with most amazing particularity.
But while these idle fancies were amusing the heads of men, who showed more sense in other things, the great current of Biblical knowledge had been flowing on very uniformly in the old course of rational interpretation, and the genius of modern criticism had already been doing much to perfect the explanation of passages on which the wisdom of the Fathers had never pretended to throw light. Of all critics who ever took up the Apocalypse in a rational way, none ever saw so clearly its real force and application as Hugo Grotius; and to him belongs the praise of having been the first of the moderns to apprehend and expose the truth of this sublimest of apostolic records. This mighty champion of Protestant evangelical theology, with that genius which was so resplendent in all his illustrations of Divine things as well as of human law, distinctly pointed out the three grand divisions of the prophetical plan of the work. "The visions as far as to the end of the eleventh chapter, describe the affairs of the Jews;
