Revelation and Revolution

Abstract

From the world-historical calculations of Isaac Newton to the evidences of Bishop Hurd, eighteenth-century English readers of the Apocalypse turned to its baffling words for an assurance that was scientific as well as moral and religious. Given a correct understanding of their ‘hieroglyphics’, those words would provide a reasonable description of events past or future, in accord with the findings of natural religion. Certainly, as we have seen, among those who retained a belief in original sin there was a sense — sometimes unacknowledged — of darkness and mystery: the awareness of Swift and Butler and Law that meaning and reference in the biblical text were not as obvious as the Christian rationalists might wish. With the evangelical revival too there came a readiness to apply the symbols of Revelation in a looser and more emotional way to individual experience of conversion or expectation of heaven, while in Germany Herder began a systematic interpretation of the text in this vein. Yet such people still moved within a culture where light and clarity were the supreme intellectual values. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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