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The obvious thing to do, since, good or bad, the country is emptying its population into the cities, since we cannot go back through the gates of Eden into the garden paradise of Genesis, is to go toward the city of the Apocalypses, not, to be sure, as the Oriental mind of John saw it, paved and walled with precious stones and gold, but made as beautiful as the Occidental taste and architectural skill will permit, as comfortable as Occidental standards demand, and as sanitary as the mortal desire for immortality can with finite wisdom make it.
There seems, however, no parallel to such a use of "angel," and it is doubtful whether the monarchical government of churches was fully developed when the Apocalypse was written. Later Jewish and Christian speculation followed on the lines of the angelology of the earlier apocalypses; and angels play an important part in Gnostic systems and in the Jewish Midrashim and the Kabbala.
In general, apocalypses were written in times of great distress for God's people, and represented the deliverance which should usher in God's kingdom as near at hand. One feature of them is a complete lack of perspective in the picture of the future. It may be that this fact will in part account for one great perplexity in the apocalyptic sayings of Jesus.
The purpose which actuated the writer was therefore in certain respects the same as that which led Paul to write his letter to the persecuted church of Thessalonica, although the form in which that purpose was realized was fundamentally different. Many other apocalypses were written by the early Christians.
The psalms of the Devout were the kind of literature to pass rapidly from heart to heart, until all who sympathized with their hope and faith had heard or seen them. The case was different with the apocalypses. They are more elaborate and enigmatical, and may have been only slightly known.
The three distinct groups of writings found in the New, namely, the Gospels and Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse, correspond exactly to the three types of prophetic literature found in the Old: the historico-prophetical writings, direct written prophecies, and apocalypses.
Forests are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a tiny soul produces a sound of agony beneath their monstrous vault. Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more terrible even than terror; she shivered.
The so-called apocalyptic type of literature was a characteristic product of later Judaism. Although in the age of scribism the voice of the prophets was regarded as silent, and the only authority recognized was that of the past, the popular Messianic hopes of the people continued to find expression anonymously in the form of apocalypses.
The development of the doctrine of an organized hierarchy of angels belongs to the Jewish literature of the period 200 B.C. to A.D. 100. In Jewish apocalypses especially, the imagination ran riot on the rank, classes and names of angels; and such works as the various books of Enoch and the Ascension of Isaiah supply much information on this subject.
We have six or seven books of this kind, which are written mainly from the standpoint of the old dispensation, part of which appeared just before and part shortly after the beginning of our era; and there are nearly a dozen volumes of Christian apocalypses, all of which employ similar forms of expression, and are directed towards similar ends.
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